The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

When we hear something being said, we guess what it means, without realizing what we are doing. That is beginning to make sense to me. Except – guesswork isn’t knowledge!

he mainly did this by asking me questions, and inviting me to think about certain things. It seems an effective technique

What is the point of writing down things that are going to be endlessly tinkered with and improved? Rather than make a permanent record of all my misconceptions as they are at a particular instant, I would rather offer them to others in two-way debate. That way I benefit from criticism and may even make improvements myself. Whatever is valuable will survive such debates and be passed on without any effort from me. Whatever is not valuable would only make me look a fool to future generations.

Objective knowledge, though attainable, is hard to attain.

The way to converge with each other is to converge upon the truth.

imagination may baulk, reason does not.

These are computers in which the information-carrying variables have been protected by a variety of means from becoming entangled with their surroundings. This allows a new mode of computation in which the flow of information is not confined to a single history. In one type of quantum computation, enormous numbers of different computations, taking place simultaneously, can affect each other and hence contribute to the output of a computation. This is known as quantum parallelism.

First, each qubit has a variable that can take one of two discrete values, and, second, special measures are taken to protect the qubits from entanglement – such as cooling them to temperatures close to absolute zero.

Error is the normal state of our knowledge, and is no disgrace.

behaving in ‘happy’ ways is a remedy for unhappiness,

Happiness is a state of continually solving one’s problems, they conjecture. Unhappiness is caused by being chronically baulked in one’s attempts to do that.

Bad philosophy is philosophy that denies the possibility, desirability or existence of progress.

social-choice theory.

the model refers only to the perspiration phase, without realizing that decision-making is problem-solving, and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between.

every evil is due to lack of knowledge’),

Elegance is the beauty in explanations.

we live in a society in which people can spend their days conscientiously using laser technology to count cells in blood samples, and their evenings sitting cross-legged and chanting to draw supernatural energy out of the Earth.

Innovation remained imperceptibly slow, even as the capacity for it was increasing rapidly.

your way of life leads you to invent a more efficient method of farming, and to cure a disease that has been killing many children, that is unsustainable.

almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic.

I believe that it would be worth trying to learn something about the world even if in trying to do so we should merely learn that we do not know much…It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal. Conjectures and Refutations (1963)

Knowledge will continue to grow exponentially