The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

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

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? John Archibald Wheeler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 480 (1986)

I do not know which is more awesome: the phenomena themselves or the fact that we know so much about them.

‘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.

What misleads us are only the false interpretations that we place on appearances.

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

is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.’

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

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.

Knowledge that is both familiar and uncontroversial is background knowledge.

Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have the conflict.

I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children… Realism and the Aim of Science (1983)

‘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.

criterion for reality – namely that we should conclude that a particular thing is real if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something.

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.

Science would be impossible if it were not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of false theories can be rejected out of hand without any experiment, simply for being bad explanations.

if you find an explanation anywhere in the universe, you know that there must have been an intelligent being.

The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource.

an error in experimental science is a mistake about the cause of something.

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 universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’

‘there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.’

‘My pencil and I are more clever than I.’

Everything needed for the open-ended creation of knowledge is here in abundance, in the Earth’s biosphere.

I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars. Daily Telegraph, 16 October 2001

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

We shall always be at the beginning of infinity.

the designer of any adaptation must by definition have had the intention that the adaptation be as it is.

when people are trying to understand an idea that they hear from others, they typically understand it to mean what makes most sense to them, or what they are most expecting to hear, or what they fear to hear, and so on.

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 – at an extremely low and ever-decreasing density. If it had been slightly lower, the universe would have recollapsed soon after the Big Bang.

prediction changes radically if there are several constants to explain. For although any one constant is unlikely to be near the edge of its range, the more constants there are, the more likely it is that at least one of them will be.

Einstein remarked, ‘There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.’

Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.

pass his test, an AI program together with all its data would require no more than about 100 megabytes of memory, that the computer would need to be no faster than computers were at the time (about ten thousand operations per second), and that by the year 2000 ‘one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.’

if it can already be programmed, it has nothing to do with intelligence in Turing’s sense.

if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.

may be that all those previous genetic codes were only capable of coding for a small number of organisms that were all rather similar. And that the overwhelmingly rich biosphere that we see around us, created by randomly varying genes while leaving the language unchanged, is something that became possible only after that jump. We do not even know what kind of universality was created there. So why should we expect our artificial evolution to work without it?

when we do understand them, artificially implementing evolution and intelligence and its constellation of associated attributes will then be no great effort.

Computations, as understood in Turing’s theory, are essentially the same thing as proofs: every valid proof can be converted to a computation that computes the conclusion from the premises, and every correctly executed computation is a proof that the output is the outcome of the given operations on the input.

Problems are conflicts between ideas.

we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects.

if unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be.

The harm that can flow from any innovation that does not destroy the growth of knowledge is always finite; the good can be unlimited.

And the next such object to strike us is already out there at this moment, speeding towards us with nothing to stop it except human knowledge.

And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’

The knowledge that you seek – objective knowledge – is hard to come by, but attainable. That mental state that you do not seek – justified belief – is sought by many people, especially priests and philosophers. But, in truth, beliefs cannot be justified, except in relation to other beliefs, and even then only fallibly. So the quest for their justification can lead only to an infinite regress – each step of which would itself be subject to error.

all knowledge originates from the same source as dreams? Which is within ourselves?