The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.

Wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that there is something better to wish for.

We have already encountered it. It is the basic condition for a political system to be capable of making sustained progress: Popper’s criterion that the system facilitate the removal of bad policies and bad governments without violence.

They are, both individually and collectively, seeking the truth – or should be, if they are rational. And there is an objective truth of the matter. Problems are soluble. Society is not a zero-sum game: the civilization of the Enlightenment did not get where it is today by cleverly sharing out the wealth, votes or anything else that was in dispute when it began.

Proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies. But compromises – amalgams of the policies of the contributors – have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies.

That gives all parties the incentive to find better explanations, or at least to convince more people of their existing ones, for if they fail they will be relegated to powerlessness at the next election.

What is the point of giving the party with the most votes the most seats, if the party with the third-largest number of seats can then put the second-largest party in power regardless – there to enact a compromise platform that absolutely no one voted for?

But in the advanced political cultures of the Enlightenment tradition the creation of knowledge can and should be paramount, and the idea that representative government depends on proportionate representation in the legislature is unequivocally a mistake.

In science, we do not consider it surprising that a community of scientists with different initial hopes and expectations, continually in dispute about their rival theories, gradually come into near-unanimous agreement over a steady stream of issues

Throughout the West, a great deal of philosophical knowledge that is nowadays taken for granted by almost everyone – say, that slavery is an abomination, or that women should be free to go out to work, or that autopsies should be legal, or that promotion in the armed forces should not depend on skin colour – was highly controversial only a matter of decades ago, and originally the opposite positions were taken for granted.

And the best of them succeed as well as they do because they have, often unintentionally, implemented solutions with enormous reach.

The growth of the body of knowledge about which there is unanimous agreement does not entail a dying-down of controversy: on the contrary, human beings will never disagree any less than they do now, and that is a very good thing. If those institutions do, as they seem to, fulfil the hope that it is possible for changes to be for the better, on balance, then human life can improve without limit as we advance from misconception to ever better misconception.

Popper’s criterion Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.

Just as rational thinking does not consist of weighing the justifications of rival theories, but of using conjecture and criticism to seek the best explanation, so coalition governments are not a desirable objective of electoral systems.

Scientific theories are hard to vary because they correspond closely with an objective truth, which is independent of our culture, our personal preferences and our biological make-up.

deep truth is often beautiful.

But if beauty is objective, then a new work of art, like a newly discovered law of nature or mathematical theorem, adds something irreducibly new to the world.

It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individual. The other is unrelated to any of those: it is universal, and as objective as the laws of physics.

At one level the answer is simply that we are universal explainers and can create knowledge about anything.

the amount of information in a human mind is more than that in the genome of any species, and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information unique to one person.

The states of mind involved in that sort of science and that sort of art are fundamentally the same. Both are seeking universal, objective truth.

This, too, is not as different from science and mathematics as it looks: poetry and mathematics or physics share the property that they develop a language different from ordinary language in order to state things efficiently that it would be very inefficient to state in ordinary language. And both do this by constructing variants of ordinary language: one has to understand the latter first in order to understand explanations of, and in, the former.

A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour.

But in fact the competition in biological evolution is not between different species, but between variants of genes within a species –

Arguments by analogy are fallacies. Almost any analogy between any two things contains some grain of truth, but one cannot tell what that is until one has an independent explanation for what is analogous to what, and why.

Genes and memes are about as different as can be at the level of mechanisms, and of outcomes; they are similar only at the lowest level of explanation, where they are both replicators that embody knowledge

Although we do not know exactly how creativity works, we do know that it is itself an evolutionary process within individual brains. For it depends on conjecture (which is variation) and criticism (for the purpose of selecting ideas).

In such a case, we are in the counter-intuitive (but common) position of having been mistaken about the reason for our own behaviour.

In other words, meme replication itself involves evolution, within individual brains.

Hence the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life on Earth, in which human civilization occupies only the final ‘second’ of the ‘day’ during which life has so far existed, is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun.

But, for the same reason, on the face of it meme replication is inherently less reliable than gene replication.

shall call such societies ‘static societies’: societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants.

A static society forms when there is no escape from this effect: all significant behaviour, all relationships between people, and all thoughts are subordinated to causing faithful replication of the memes. In all areas controlled by the memes, no critical faculties are exercised.

A static society is indeed in constant danger of being harmed or destroyed by a newly arising dysfunctional meme.

Static societies do tend to settle issues by violence, and they do tend to sacrifice the welfare of individuals for the ‘good’ of (that is to say, for the prevention of changes in) society.

oppression is what it takes to keep a society static; oppression of a given kind will not last long unless the society is static.

(Ironically, creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire, and static societies, however primitive, ‘unnaturally’ suppress it.)

But what sort of idea is best suited to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable objectives? A true idea is a good candidate.

And the best way to seem useful to diverse people under diverse, unpredictable circumstances is to be useful.

An anti-rational meme’s natural home is a static society – not any static society, but preferably the one in which it evolved – for all the converse reasons.

In any case, following Newton, there was no way of missing the fact that rapid progress was under way. (Some philosophers, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, did try – but only by arguing that reason was harmful, civilization bad and primitive life happy.)

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Nations beyond the West today are also changing rapidly, sometimes through the exigencies of warfare with their neighbours, but more often and even more powerfully by the peaceful transmission of Western memes.

If their thoughts ever wander in the forbidden directions, they feel uneasiness and embarrassment, and the same sort of fear and loss of centredness as religious people have felt since time immemorial at the thought of betraying their gods.

This rational self-image is itself a recent development of our society, many of whose memes explicitly promote, and implicitly give effect to, values such as reason, freedom of thought, and the inherent value of individual human beings. We naturally try to explain ourselves in terms of meeting those values.

Creating that knowledge, starting with only the means available in a static society – namely small amounts of creativity and knowledge, many misconceptions, the blind evolution of memes, and trial and error – must necessarily take time.

Present-day methods of education still have a lot in common with their static-society predecessors.

And so we live in a society in which people can spend their days conscientiously using laser technology to count cells in blood samples, and their evenings sitting cross-legged and chanting to draw supernatural energy out of the Earth.

We are fallible, but through conjecture, criticism and seeking good explanations we may correct some of our errors.

If we then find ourselves explaining our own behaviour with bad explanations, we should become still more suspicious.