The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in the history of our species.

In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.

Each of these beginnings is ‘the beginning of infinity’ as viewed from the perspective of that field. Many seem, superficially, to be unconnected. But they are all facets of a single attribute of reality, which I call the beginning of infinity.

Some types of transmutation happen spontaneously on Earth, in the decay of radioactive elements.

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe.

Yet we owe our existence to supernovae: they are the source, through transmutation, of most of the elements of which our bodies, and our planet, are composed.

Scientific theories are explanations: assertions about what is out there and how it behaves.

Either way, the discoverer of knowledge is its passive recipient, not its creator.

Most of that has never been observed: no one has experienced a billion years, or a light year; no one could have been present at the Big Bang; no one will ever touch a law of physics – except in their minds, through theory.

The second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and that ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on.

As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus remarked, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.’

So much for inductivism. And since inductivism is false, empiricism must be as well. For if one cannot derive predictions from experience, one certainly cannot derive explanations. Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.

But the real key to science is that our explanatory theories – which include those interpretations – can be improved, through conjecture, criticism and testing.

The opposing position – namely the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying ideas as being true or probable – is called fallibilism.

So it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity.

So we perceive nothing as what it really is. It is all theoretical interpretation: conjecture.

They even conjectured links between the two, such as myths, which they found compelling enough to dominate their lives – yet which still bore no resemblance to the truth. In short, they wanted to create knowledge, in order to make progress, but they did not know how.

Its emergence is known as the scientific revolution, because it succeeded almost immediately in creating knowledge at a noticeable rate, which has increased ever since.

But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions.

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism.

Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

Thus the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge: by trying ...

Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science.

The reason that testability is not enough is that prediction is not, and cannot be, the purpose of science.

Instrumentalism is one of many ways of denying realism, the commonsense, and true, doctrine that the physical world really exists, and is accessible to rational inquiry.

That is relativism, the doctrine that statements in a given field cannot be objectively true or false: at most they can be judged so relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard.

Knowledge that is both familiar and uncontroversial is background knowledge.

The essence of experimental testing is that there are at least two apparently viable theories known about the issue in question, making conflicting predictions that can be distinguished by the experiment.

conflicting ideas in a broader sense are the occasion for all rational thought and inquiry.

if we are simply curious about something, it means that we believe that our existing ideas do not ade...

Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.

Nor is a person capable of making progress merely by virtue of being willing to drop a theory when it is refuted: one must also be seeking a better explanation of the relevant phenomena. That is the scientific frame of mind.

As the physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.’

The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally.

Although the pioneers of the Enlightenment and of the scientific revolution did not put it this way, seeking good explanations was (and remains) the spirit of the age.

An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.

That is what makes good explanations essential to science: it is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable.

This has given rise to a misconception known as ‘Occam’s razor’ (named after the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Occam, but dating back to antiquity), namely that one should always seek the ‘simplest explanation’. One statement of it is ‘Do not multiply assumptions beyond necessity.’

As I have suggested, historically, virtually all human attempts to explain experience in terms of a wider reality have indeed been fiction, in the form of myths, dogma and mistaken common sense – and the rule of testability is an insufficient check on such mistakes.

That is what a good explanation will do for you: it makes it harder for you to fool yourself.

The theory reaches out, as it were, from its finite origins inside one brain that has been affected only by scraps of patchy evidence from a small part of one hemisphere of one planet – to infinity.

The better an explanation is, the more rigidly its reach is determined – because the harder it is to vary an explanation, the harder it is in particular to construct a variant with a different reach, whether larger or smaller, that is still an explanation.

Always, it is explanatory theories that tell us which (usually few) aspects of one situation can be ‘extrapolated’ to others.

Old ways of thought, which did not seek good explanations, permitted no process such as science for correcting errors and misconceptions. Improvements happened so rarely that most people never experienced one. Ideas were static for long periods.

Fallibilism The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.

MEANINGS OF ‘THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY’ ENCOUNTERED IN THIS CHAPTER – The fact that some explanations have reach. – The universal reach of some explanations. – The Enlightenment. – A tradition of criticism. – Conjecture: the origin of all knowledge. – The discovery of how to make progress: science, the scientific revolution, seeking good explanations, and the political principles of the West. – Fallibilism.

For most of the history of our species, we had almost no success in creating such knowledge. Where does it come from? Empiricism said that we derive it from sensory experience. This is false. The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism. We create theories by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them.

That was a rebellion against authority which, unlike most such rebellions, tried not to seek authoritative justifications for theories, but instead set up a tradition of criticism.

What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.’