The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in the history of our species. It began at approximately the time of the scientific revolution, and is still under way.

As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus remarked, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.’

relativism, the doctrine that statements in a given field cannot be objectively true or false: at most they can be judged so relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard.

whenever it is easy to vary an explanation without changing its predictions, one could just as easily vary it to make different predictions if they were needed.

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.

What I had taken to be the largest object I had ever seen, and the most distant in space and time, was in reality just a speck barely visible without a microscope, within arm’s reach. How easily, and how thoroughly, one can be misled.

Changing our genes in order to improve our lives and to facilitate further improvements is no different in this regard from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes.

Similar champagne bottles are stored in other laboratories. The popping of each such cork signals a discovery about something significant in the cosmic scheme of things. Thus the study of the behaviour of champagne corks and other proxies for what people do is logically equivalent to the study of everything significant. It follows that humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.

The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’