The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Explanatory theories tell us how to build and operate instruments in exactly the right way to work this miracle. Like conjuring tricks in reverse, such instruments fool our senses into seeing what is really there.

Knowledge is a significant phenomenon in the universe, because to make almost any prediction about astrophysics one must take a position about what types of knowledge will or will not be present near the phenomena in question. So all explanations of what is out there in the physical world mention knowledge and people, if only implicitly.

Before a discovery is made, no predictive process could reveal the content or the consequences of that discovery. For if it could, it would be that discovery. So scientific discovery is profoundly unpredictable, despite the fact that it is determined by the laws of physics.

Reminds me of efficient markets nd unpredictability of price. If you *could* predict the price you'd buy or sell until you couldnt predict, and so on.

perhaps he doubted that the resulting numerals would refer to anything about which one could validly reason.

Seems to make no sense. If i can reason about say, x, surely i xan reason about x+1. think of primality or divisibility or even simple cpmparison...if i know x is 5 morr than y, i can reason about x+1 and conclude it is 6 more than y...

Others tried to derive moral maxims from universal moral explanations rather than merely to postulate them dogmatically.

Think of Leibnizs idea of reducing all argument to calculation and later Godel etc showing the limits of logic and computation . could godel and turings work be viewed as anti enlightenment or showimg a limit to enlightenment ideas or attitudes?

Babbage eventually realized that this programming phase could itself be automated: the settings could be prepared on punched cards like Jacquard’s, and transferred mechanically into the cogs. This would not only remove the main remaining source of error, but also increase the machine’s repertoire. Babbage then realized that if the machine could also punch new cards for its own later use, and could control which punched card it would read next

Code that writes code ! Also this sounds very much like a turing machine . How close was babbage ?

The process of copying a genome is called a living organism.

A chicken is an eggs way of making more eggs...

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

Knuth...science is what we can explain to a computer, art is everything else

The analogue of evolutionary change in a species is creative thought in a person.

And the intuitive fact to which he was appealing was that although such hardness is always a negative factor when choosing among means to pursue an objective, when choosing the objective itself it can be a positive one, because we want to engage with projects that will involve creating new knowledge.

what I experience as reality is never more than a waking dream, composed of conjectures originating from within myself?

Reminds me iof Surfing Uncertainty

knowledge can aim itself at a target, travel vast distances having scarcely any effect, and then utterly transform the destination.

Remind me of David Brin's Existence

It is a fact – often mentioned but seldom explained – that deep truth is often beautiful. Mathematicians and theoretical scientists call this form of beauty ‘elegance’. Elegance is the beauty in explanations.