The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

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

‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.’

Explanation Statement about what is there, what it does, and how and why. Reach The ability of some explanations to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve. Creativity The capacity to create new explanations. Empiricism The misconception that we ‘derive’ all our knowledge from sensory experience.

But the biosphere no more provides humans with a life-support system than it provides us with radio telescopes.

Dawkins would prefer it to be otherwise. As he wrote: I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic. Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)

And the more advanced technology becomes, the shorter is the gap between inspiration and automation.

Using knowledge to cause automated physical transformations is, in itself, not unique to humans. It is the basic method by which all organisms keep themselves alive: every cell is a chemical factory. The difference between humans and other species is in what kind of knowledge they can use (explanatory instead of rule-of-thumb) and in how they create it (conjecture and criticism of ideas, rather than the variation and selection of genes).

(See, for instance, the historian Jenny Uglow’s book Lunar Men.)

‘Fermi’s problem’, named after the physicist Enrico Fermi, who is said to have asked, ‘Where are they?’ Where are the extraterrestrial civilizations?

the psychologist Susan Blackmore, in her book The Meme Machine,

Rational meme An idea that relies on the recipients’ critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated. Anti-rational meme An idea that relies on disabling the recipients’ critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated.

Static culture/society One whose changes happen on a timescale longer than its members can notice. Such cultures are dominated by anti-rational memes. Dynamic culture/society One that is dominated by rational memes.

The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity.

Thesis

The statues were all made alike because Easter Island was a static society. It never took that first step in the ascent of man – the beginning of infinity.