The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

But failure need not be permanent in a world in which all evils are due to lack of knowledge.

Anything that says ‘Because I say so’ or ‘It never did me any harm,’ anything that says ‘Let us suppress criticism of our idea because it is true,’ suggests static-society thinking.

The Enlightenment is the moment at which explanatory knowledge is beginning to assume its soon-to-be-normal role as the most important determinant of physical events.

Biological evolution was merely a finite preface to the main story of evolution, the unbounded evolution of memes.

The holders of memes typically do not know why they are enacting them: we enact the rules of grammar, for instance, much more accurately than we are able to state them.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, primitive societies are unimaginably unpleasant to live in. Either they are static, and survive only by extinguishing their members’ creativity and breaking their spirits, or they quickly lose their knowledge and disintegrate, and violence takes over.

Of all the countless biological adaptations that have evolved on our planet, creativity is the only one that can produce scientific or mathematical knowledge, art or philosophy.

Human choice – itself a product of creativity – determines which other species to exclude and which to tolerate or cultivate, which rivers to divert, which hills to level, and which wildernesses to preserve.

Es esto moralmente correcto?

Today, the creativity that humans use to improve ideas is what pre-eminently sets us apart from other species. Yet for most of the time that humans have existed it was not noticeably in use.

It is believed that some members of the species Homo erectus living 500,000 years ago knew how to make camp fires.

That there were thousands of years between noticeable changes presumably means that in most generations even the most creative individuals in the population would not have been making any innovations.

So he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees.

theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.

Por esto fallo Wikilife

The real situation is that people need inexplicit knowledge to understand laws and other explicit statements, not vice versa. Philosophers and psychologists work hard to discover, and to make explicit, the assumptions that our culture tacitly makes about social institutions, human nature, right and wrong, time and space, intention, causality, freedom, necessity and so on. But we do not acquire those assumptions by reading the results of such research: it is entirely the other way round.

But a human student might well be unable to copy it with the accent. In fact a student might well acquire a complex meme at a lecture without being able to repeat a single sentence spoken by the lecturer, even immediately afterwards. In such a case the student has replicated the meaning – which is the whole content – of the meme without imitating any actions at all. As I said, imitation is not at the heart of human meme replication.

In this chapter I have presented two puzzles. The first is why human creativity was evolutionarily advantageous at a time when there was almost no innovation. The second is how human memes can possibly be replicated, given that they have content that the recipient never observes. I think that both those puzzles have the same solution: what replicates human memes is creativity; and creativity was used, while it was evolving, to replicate memes.

The transmission of human-type memes – memes whose meaning is not mostly predefined within the receiver – cannot be other than a creative activity on the part of the receiver.

They are created afresh by the recipient.

Meme evolution took place, and, like all evolution, this was always in the direction of greater faithfulness. This meant becoming ever more anti-rational.

And that is how primitive, static societies, which contained pitifully little knowledge and existed only by suppressing innovation, constituted environments that strongly favoured the evolution of an ever-greater ability to innovate.

Nevertheless, Blackmore’s ‘meme machine’ idea, that human brains evolved in order to replicate memes, must be true. The reason it must be true is that, whatever had set off the evolution of any of those attributes, creativity would have had to evolve as well. For no human-level mental achievements would be possible without human-type (explanatory) memes, and the laws of epistemology dictate that no such memes are possible without creativity.

what humans are today, namely people: creative, universal explainers.

The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity.

The horror of static societies, which I described in the previous chapter, can now be seen as a hideous practical joke that the universe played on the human species.

The reassignment of creativity from its original function of preserving memes faithfully, to the function of creating new knowledge.

replicating memes unchanged is the function for which creativity evolved. And that is why our species exists.

in 1972 Jacob Bronowski made his way to Easter Island to film part of his magnificent television series The Ascent of Man.

But the broader interpretation, that survival depends on good resource management, has almost no content: any physical object can be deemed a ‘resource’. And, since problems are soluble, all disasters are caused by ‘poor resource management’.

In other words, progress is sustainable, indefinitely.

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how.

knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between.

Quite generally, mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape.

Usually, if there are human beings left alive to think, there are ways of thinking that can improve their situation, and then improve it further.

The sustained creation of knowledge depends also on the presence of certain kinds of idea, particularly optimism, and an associated tradition of criticism.

‘What if we solve [one of the problems that Ehrlich had described] within the next few years? Wouldn’t that affect your conclusion?’ Ehrlich’s reply was brisk. How could we possibly solve it? (She did not know.) And, even if we did, how could that do more than briefly delay the catastrophe? And what would we do then?

‘If we stop solving problems, we are doomed,’

In the pessimistic conception, they are wasters: they take precious resources and madly convert them into useless coloured pictures.

In the optimistic conception – the one that was unforeseeably vindicated by events – people are problem-solvers: creators of the unsustainable solution and hence also of the next problem.

In the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.

A solution may be problem-free for a period, and in a parochial application, but there is no way of identifying in advance which problems will have such a solution.

So there is no resource-management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories.

The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes:

But almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic.

Everything physically possible will eventually be revealed: watches that came into existence spontaneously; asteroids that happen to be good likenesses of William Paley; everything. According to the prevailing theory, all those things exist today, but many times too far away for light to have reached us from them – yet.

El Aleph

Illness and old age are going to be cured soon – certainly within the next few lifetimes

So there can be only one outcome: effective immortality for the whole human population,

On the other hand, I see no reason to single out AI as a mould-breaking technology: we already have billions of humans.

Since humans are already universal explainers and constructors, they can already transcend their parochial origins, so there can be no such thing as a superhuman mind as such.

humans and AIs will never be other than equal.

Hence I think that the concept of the Singularity as a sort of discontinuity is a mistake. Knowledge will continue to grow exponentially or even faster, and that is astounding enough.