The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Only through a sophisticated chain of theoretical interpretation could she ‘see’, by looking at that shaky line of ink on paper, a powerful, pulsating object in deep space, and recognize that it was of a hitherto unknown type.

The better we come to understand phenomena remote from our everyday experience, the longer those chains of interpretation become, and every additional link necessitates more theory.

This is what we can achieve when, as Feynman said, we keep learning more about how not to fool ourselves.

Perhaps it is the mistaken empiricist ideal of ‘pure’, theory-free observation that makes it seem odd that truly accurate observation is always so hugely indirect.

Physically, all that has happened is that human beings, on Earth, have dug up raw materials such as iron ore and sand, and have rearranged them – still on Earth – into complex objects such as radio telescopes, computers and display screens, and now, instead of looking at the sky, they look at those objects. They are focusing their eyes on human artefacts that are close enough to touch. But their minds are focused on alien entities and processes, light years away.

It may seem strange that scientific instruments bring us closer to reality when in purely physical terms they only ever separate us further from it. But we observe nothing directly anyway. All observation is theory-laden. Likewise, whenever we make an error, it is an error in the explanation of something. That is why appearances can be deceptive, and it is also why we, and our instruments, can correct for that deceptiveness.

Most ancient accounts of the reality beyond our everyday experience were not only false, they had a radically different character from modern ones: they were anthropocentric

fruitful has this abandonment of anthropocentric theories been, and so important in the broader history of ideas, that anti-anthropocentrism has increasingly been elevated to the status of a universal principle, sometimes called the ‘Principle of Mediocrity’: there is nothing significant about humans (in the cosmic scheme of things).

As the physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are ‘just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that’s in orbit round a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy’.

We do not usually think of ourselves as glowing, but that is another parochial misconception, due to the limitations of our senses: we emit radiant heat, which is infrared light, and also light in the visible range, too faint for our eyes to detect.

The universe is pervaded with microwave radiation – the afterglow of the Big Bang. Its temperature is about 2.7 kelvin, which means 2.7 degrees above the coldest possible temperature, absolute zero, or about 270 degrees Celsius colder than the freezing point of water.

The resulting ‘non-glowing ordinary matter’ on our planet is an exceedingly exotic substance in the universe at large.

And it is empty: the density of atoms out there is below one per cubic metre.

The biosphere only ever achieves stability – and only temporarily at that – by continually neglecting, harming, disabling and killing individuals.

But in fact, even with the benefit of their cultural knowledge, our ancestors continually faced desperate problems, such as where the next meal was coming from, and typically they barely solved these problems or they died. There are very few fossils of old people.

At root, the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth metaphor overlap in a claim about reach: they both claim that the reach of the distinctively human way of being – that is to say, the way of problem-solving, knowledge-creating and adapting the world around us – is bounded.

But by the time our species had evolved, our fully human ancestors were achieving much the same thing thousands of times faster, by evolving their cultural knowledge instead.

Since the Enlightenment, technological progress has depended specifically on the creation of explanatory knowledge.

This increasingly intimate connection between explaining the world and controlling it is no accident, but is part of the deep structure of the world.

The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws.

A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment.

In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.

In the unique case of humans, the difference between a hospitable environment and a deathtrap depends on what knowledge they have created.

Using knowledge to cause automated physical transformations is, in itself, not unique to humans. It is the basic method by which all organisms keep themselves alive: every cell is a chemical factory.

The only uniquely significant thing about humans (whether in the cosmic scheme of things or according to any rational human criterion) is our ability to create new explanations, and we have that in common with all people.

As Einstein remarked, ‘My pencil and I are more clever than I.’

So human reach is essentially the same as the reach of explanatory knowledge itself.

In addition to matter and energy, there is one other essential requirement, namely evidence: the information needed to test scientific theories.

Though any particular problem is a transient factor, the condition of having to solve problems in order to survive and continue to create knowledge is permanent.

For instance, at present during any given century there is about one chance in a thousand that the Earth will be struck by a comet or asteroid large enough to kill at least a substantial proportion of all human beings.

Setting up self-sufficient colonies on the moon and elsewhere in the solar system – and eventually in other solar systems – will be a good hedge against the extinction of our species or the destruction of civilization, and is a highly desirable goal for that reason among others.

Nor will we ever run out of problems. The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates.

It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up.

By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them. It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible to us.

That progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the Enlightenment.

The Continental Enlightenment was impatient for the perfected state – which led to intellectual dogmatism, political violence and new forms of tyranny.

While the Earth is inundated with matter, energy and evidence, out there in intergalactic space all three are at their lowest possible supply.

So a typical location in the universe is amenable to the open-ended creation of knowledge.

Our history and politics, our science, art and philosophy, our aspirations and moral values – all these are tiny side effects of a supernova explosion a few billion years ago, which could be extinguished tomorrow by another such explosion.

Knowledge is a significant phenomenon in the universe, because to make almost any prediction about astrophysics one must take a position about what types of knowledge will or will not be present near the phenomena in question. So all explanations of what is out there in the physical world mention knowledge and people, if only implicitly.

Thus the study of the behaviour of champagne corks and other proxies for what people do is logically equivalent to the study of everything significant.

Principle of Mediocrity ‘There is nothing significant about humans.’

Spaceship Earth ‘The biosphere is a life-support system for humans.’

The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’

From the least parochial perspectives available to us, people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not ‘supported’ by their environments, but support themselves by creating knowledge. Once they have suitable knowledge (essentially, the knowledge of the Enlightenment), they are capable of sparking unlimited further progress.

The knowledge in human brains and the knowledge in biological adaptations are both created by evolution in the broad sense: the variation of existing information, alternating with selection.

In the case of human knowledge, the variation is by conjecture, and the selection is by criticism and experiment.

Human brains and DNA molecules each have many functions, but among other things they are general-purpose information-storage media: they are in principle capable of storing any kind of information.

Creationism is the idea that some supernatural being or beings designed and created all biological adaptations. In other words, ‘the gods did it.’

As Charles Darwin put it in The Origin of Species, ‘On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility…should so frequently occur.’