The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Anthropocentric misconceptions have also been overturned in every other fundamental area of science: our knowledge of physics is now expressed entirely in terms of entities that are as impersonal as Euclid’s points and lines, such as elementary particles, forces and spacetime – a four-dimensional continuum with three dimensions of space and one of time. Their effects on each other are explained not in terms of feelings and intentions, but through mathematical equations expressing laws of nature. In biology, it was once thought that living things must have been designed by a supernatural person, and that they must contain some special ingredient, a ‘vital principle’, to make them behave with apparent purposefulness. But biological science discovered new modes of explanation through such impersonal things as chemical reactions, genes and evolution. So we now know that living things, including humans, all consist of the same ingredients as rocks and stars, and obey the same laws, and that they were not designed by anyone. Modern science, far from explaining physical phenomena in terms of the thoughts and intentions of unseen people, considers our own thoughts and intentions to be aggregates of unseen (though not unseeable) microscopic physical processes in our brains.