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. It began at approximately the time of the scientific revolution, and is still under way. It has included improvements not only in scientific understanding, but also in technology, political institutions, moral values, art, and every aspect of human welfare.

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.

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.

One of the most remarkable things about science is the contrast between the enormous reach and power of our best theories and the precarious, local means by which we create them.

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

Nevertheless, the question that sceptics (friendly and unfriendly) raised from the outset always remained: how can knowledge of what has not been experienced possibly be ‘derived’ from what has?

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.’

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

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.

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

realism, the commonsense, and true, doctrine that the physical world really exists, and is accessible to rational inquiry.

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.

There is always an explanation, whether we know it or not, for why a rule of thumb works. Denying that some regularity in nature has an explanation is effectively the same as believing in the supernatural

there is always an explanation when a rule of thumb fails, for rules of thumb are always parochial: they hold only in a narrow range of familiar circumstances.

By adopting easily variable explanations, the gambler and prophet are ensuring that they will be able to continue fooling themselves no matter what happens. Just as thoroughly as if they had adopted untestable theories, they are insulating themselves from facing evidence that they are mistaken about what is really there in the physical world.

Explanation Statement about what is there, what it does, and how and why.

Creativity The capacity to create new explanations.

Theory-laden There is no such thing as ‘raw’ experience. All our experience of the world comes through layers of conscious and unconscious interpretation.

Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard.

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

The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.

Rational Attempting to solve problems by seeking good explanations; actively pursuing error-correction by creating criticisms of both existing ideas and new proposals.

The West The political, moral, economic and intellectual culture that has been growing around the Enlightenment values of science, reason and freedom.

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.

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.

Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.

The same is true of every feature of the telescope, and of all other scientific instruments: each layer of indirectness, through its associated theory, corrects errors, illusions, misleading perspectives and gaps. 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. But the fact is that progress requires the application of ever more knowledge in advance of our observations.

all cases, to say that we have genuinely observed any given thing is to say that we have accurately attributed our evidence (ultimately always evidence inside our own brains) to that thing. Scientific truth consists of such correspondence between theories and physical reality.

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. The growth of knowledge consists of correcting misconceptions in our theories.

anthropocentric. That is to say, they centred on human beings, and more broadly on people – entities with intentions and human-like thoughts – which included powerful, supernatural people such as spirits and gods.

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’. The proviso ‘in the cosmic scheme of things’ is necessary because the chemical scum evidently does have a special significance according to values that it applies to itself, such as moral values. But the Principle says that all such values are themselves anthropocentric: they explain only the behaviour of the scum, which is itself insignificant.

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. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.

an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.

Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark.

Anthropocentric Centred on humans, or on persons.

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

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

MEANINGS OF ‘THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY’ ENCOUNTERED IN THIS CHAPTER – The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’

The fact that new explanations create new problems.

SUMMARY Both the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth idea are, contrary to their motivations, irreparably parochial and mistaken. 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.

Neo-Darwinism The central idea of neo-Darwinism is that evolution favours the genes that spread best through the population.

Ideas can be replicators too. For example, a good joke is a replicator: when lodged in a person’s mind, it has a tendency to cause that person to tell it to other people, thus copying it into their minds. Dawkins coined the term memes (rhymes with ‘dreams’) for ideas that are replicators.

It is only in the universes that contain astrophysicists that anyone ever wonders why the constants seem fine-tuned. This type of explanation is known as ‘anthropic reasoning’.

Meme An idea that is a replicator.

Anthropic explanation ‘It is only in universes that contain intelligent observers that anyone wonders why the phenomenon in question happens.’

SUMMARY The evolution of biological adaptations and the creation of human knowledge share deep similarities, but also some important differences. The main similarities: genes and ideas are both replicators; knowledge and adaptations are both hard to vary. The main difference: human knowledge can be explanatory and can have great reach; adaptations are never explanatory and rarely have much reach beyond the situations in which they evolved.

So there is no avoiding what-to-do-next problems, and, since the distinction between right and wrong appears in our best explanations that address such problems, we must regard that distinction as real. In other words, there is an objective difference between right and wrong: those are real attributes of objectives and behaviours.

Levels of emergence Sets of phenomena that can be explained well in terms of each other without analysing them into their constituent entities such as atoms.

Moral philosophy Addresses the problem of what sort of life to want.