Thore Husfeldt’s Reviews > The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World > Status Update

Mind = blown. Again. “Hence, paradoxically, it requires creativity to thrive in a static society – creativity that enables one to be less innovative than other people. And that is how primitive, static societies […] constituted environments that strongly favoured the evolution of an ever-greater ability to innovate.”

Deutsch continues to blow my mind. Chapter XIII, on social choice, contains nothing less than a principled and lucid rejection of political compromise (!). (There is also the Popperian rejection of representative election systems, which of course makes complete sense from Deutsch’s perspectives.) Good policies are hard to vary and mix, and therefore incompatible with coalition governments. Bam-wham-slam!

Ah, Deutsch on mathematics: “[F]inding proofs is not the nature of mathematics: it is merely one of the methods of mathematics.” Exactly. And he even goes on to mention the P vs. NP question. I think that’s exactly correct. We should view “P is not NP” not as an open problem, but as an explanation. Science is about explanations. Very nice.

Ah, Deutsch on mathematics: “[F]inding proofs is not the nature of mathematics: it is merely one of the methods of mathematics.” Exactly. And he even goes on to mention the P vs. NP question. I think that’s exactly correct. We should view “P is not NP” not as an open problem, but as an explanation. Science is about explanations. Very nice.

Ah, Deutsch on mathematics: “[F]inding proofs is not the nature of mathematics”: it is merely one of the methods of mathematics.” Exactly. And he even goes on to mention the P vs. NP question. I think that’s exactly correct. We should view “P is not NP” not as an open problem, but as an explanation. Science is about explanations. Very nice.

This is how much success the quest for ‘machines that think’ had achieved in the fifty-eight years following Turing’s paper: nil.