The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

SUMMARY

What is a typical place in the universe like?

Almost all the atoms in intergalactic space are hydrogen or helium, so there is no chemistry. No life could have evolved there, nor any intelligence.

Cold, dark and empty. That unimaginably desolate environment is typical of the universe – and is another measure of how untypical the Earth and its chemical scum are, in a straightforward physical sense.

In addition to being notoriously cruel to individuals, evolution involves continual extinctions of entire species.

The rate at which species have come into existence has on balance only slightly exceeded the extinction rate, and the net effect is that the overwhelming majority of species that have ever existed on Earth (perhaps 99.9 per cent of them) are now extinct.

Today, almost the entire capacity of the Earth’s ‘life-support system for humans’ has been provided not for us but by us, using our ability to create new knowledge.

Earth did provide the raw materials for our survival – just as the sun has provided the energy, and supernovae provided the elements, and so on. But a heap of raw materials is not the same thing as a life-support system. It takes knowledge to convert the one into the other, and biological evolution never provided us with enough knowledge to survive, let alone to thrive.

there is no reason to expect our brains to be any different from our eyes in this regard: they evolved to cope with the narrow class of phenomena that commonly occur in the biosphere, on approximately human scales of size, time, energy and so on.

John Haldane, who expected that ‘the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’

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

every putative physical transformation, to be performed in a given time with given resources or under any other conditions, is either – impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or – achievable, given the right knowledge.

We are accustomed to thinking of the Earth as hospitable and the moon as a bleak, faraway deathtrap. But that is how our ancestors would have regarded Oxfordshire, and, ironically, it is how I, today, would regard the primeval Great Rift Valley.

human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors’.

The opportunities provided by the laws of nature for transforming resources are universal, and all entities with universal reach necessarily have the same reach.

In some environments in the universe, the most efficient way for humans to thrive might be to alter their own genes.

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

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

As far as we know, all the fundamental constants of nature can be measured here, and every fundamental law can be tested here. Everything needed for the open-ended creation of knowledge is here in abundance, in the Earth’s biosphere.

because humans are universal constructors, every problem of finding or transforming resources can be no more than a transient factor limiting the creation of knowledge in a given environment.

matter, energy and evidence are the only requirements that an environment needs to have in order to be a venue for open-ended knowledge creation.

since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier.

problems are soluble.

All people in the universe, once they have understood enough to free themselves from parochial obstacles, face essentially the same opportunities. This is an underlying unity in the physical world more significant than all the dissimilarities

the fundamental laws of nature are so uniform, and evidence about them so ubiquitous, and the connections between understanding and control so intimate, that, whether we are on our parochial home planet or a hundred million light years away in the intergalactic plasma, we can do the same science and make the same progress.

astrophysics is incomplete without a theory of people, just as it is incomplete without a theory of gravity or nuclear reactions.

‘proxy’: a physical variable which can be measured as a way of measuring another variable. (All scientific measurements involve chains of proxies.)

Non-explanatory systems cannot cross the conceptual gap that an explanatory conjecture crosses, to engage with unexperienced evidence or non-existent phenomena.

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.

TERMINOLOGY Person An entity that can create explanatory knowledge.

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.’

new explanations create new problems.

good adaptations, like good explanations, are distinguished by being hard to vary while still fulfilling their functions.

biological knowledge is non-explanatory, and therefore has limited reach; explanatory human knowledge can have broad or even unlimited reach.

mutations are random, while conjectures can be constructed intentionally for a purpose.

Lamarckism. Its key idea is that improvements acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be inherited by its offspring.

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

although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress.

Organisms are the slaves, or tools, that genes use to achieve their ‘purpose’ of spreading themselves through the population.

Genes gain advantages over each other in part by keeping their slaves alive and healthy, just as human slave owners did. Slave owners were not working for the benefit of their workforces, nor for the benefit of individual slaves: it was solely to achieve their own objectives that they fed and housed their slaves, and indeed forced them to reproduce. Genes do much the same thing.

both human knowledge and biological adaptations are abstract replicators: forms of information which, once they are embodied in a suitable physical system, tend to remain so while most variants of them do not.

if the initial expansion rate of the universe at the Big Bang had been slightly higher, no stars would have formed and there would be nothing in the universe but hydrogen

it seems that if they had been slightly different, there would have been no possibility for life to exist.

problems are inevitable – there are always unsolved problems. But they get solved.

The physicist Robert Forward wrote a superb science-fiction story, Dragon’s Egg,

The older civilizations have had plenty of time to explore the galaxy – or at least to send robot space probes or signals. Fermi’s problem is that we do not see any such civilizations, probes or signals.

SUMMARY

the behaviour of that whole class of high-level phenomena is quasi-autonomous – almost self-contained. This resolution into explicability at a higher, quasi-autonomous level is known as emergence.

The reach of ideas into the world of abstractions is a property of the knowledge that they contain, not of the brain in which they may happen to be instantiated. A theory can have infinite reach even if the person who originated it is unaware that it does. However, a person is an abstraction too. And there is a kind of infinite reach that is unique to people: the reach of the ability to understand explanations. And this ability is itself an instance of the wider phenomenon of universality

SUMMARY