The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
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The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.
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the supposed unproblematic state would be a good state to be in. Some theologians have denied this, and I agree with them: an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.
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Apart from the thoughts of people, the only process known to be capable of creating knowledge is biological evolution.
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they were slightly altered they would serve it less well, or not at all. A
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scientist’s discoveries. And it really is creation. Before a discovery is made, no predictive process could reveal the content or the consequences of that discovery.
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Thus there is a class of high-level phenomena – including the liquidity of water and the relationship between containers, heating elements, boiling and bubbles – that can be well explained in terms of each other alone, with no direct reference to anything at the atomic level or below. In other words, the behaviour of that whole class of high-level phenomena is quasi-autonomous – almost self-contained. This resolution into explicability at a higher, quasi-autonomous level is known as emergence.
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In an evolving species, the adaptations of the organisms in each generation must have enough functionality to keep the organism alive, and to pass all the tests that they encounter in propagating themselves to the next generation.
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Because of the necessity for error-correction, all jumps to universality occur in digital systems.
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One of them is that, if unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be.
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No good explanation can predict the outcome, or the probability of an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge. This is a fundamental limitation on the reach of scientific prediction, and, when planning for the future, it is vital to come to terms with it. Following Popper, I shall use the term prediction for conclusions about future events that follow from good explanations, and prophecy for anything that purports to know what is not yet knowable.
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Neither Malthus nor Rees intended to prophesy. They were warning that unless we solve certain problems in time, we are doomed. But that has always been true, and always will be. Problems are inevitable.
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The Principle of Optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.
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Suppose they just happen to be aware of the explanation of something. You and I would say that they know it. But to them, no matter how good an explanation it is, and no matter how true and important and useful it may be, they still do not consider it to be knowledge. It is only if a god then comes along and reassures them that it is true (or if they imagine such a god or other authority) that they count it as knowledge. So, to them it does count as a revelation if the authority tells them what they are already fully aware of.
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‘configurational’ entities: they are states or configurations of objects, not what we usually think of as physical objects in their own right.
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A stratum, like a history, has no separate existence over and above the objects in it: it consists of them.
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creating a good explanation is hard not because of what anyone has decided, but because there is an objective reality that does not meet anyone’s prior expectations, including those of authorities. The creators of bad explanations such as myths are indeed just making things up. But the method of seeking good explanations creates an engagement with reality, not only in science, but in good philosophy too – which is why it works, and why it is the antithesis of concocting stories to meet made-up criteria.
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Another misconception to which the idea of decision-making by weighing sometimes leads is that problems can be solved by weighing – in particular, that disputes between advocates of rival explanations can be resolved by creating a weighted average of their proposals. But the fact is that a good explanation, being hard to vary at all without losing its explanatory power, is hard to mix with a rival explanation: something halfway between them is usually worse than either of them separately. Mixing two explanations to create a better explanation requires an additional act of creativity. That is why good explanations are discrete – separated from each other by bad explanations – and why, when choosing between explanations, we are faced with discrete options.
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Choice that involves creating new options rather than weighing existing ones.
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It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.
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in a dynamic society, scientific and technological innovations are generally made creatively. That is to say, they emerge from individual minds as novel ideas,
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when evolution takes place largely within an individual mind, it is not meme evolution. It is creativity by a heroic inventor.
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Meme evolution took place, and, like all evolution, this was always in the direction of greater faithfulness. This meant becoming ever more anti-rational. At some point, meme evolution achieved static societies – presumably they were tribes. Consequently, all those increases in creativity never produced streams of innovations. Innovation remained imperceptibly slow, even as the capacity for it was increasing rapidly.
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Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories.
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Horgan wrote that he had originally believed science to be ‘open-ended, even infinite’. But he became convinced of the contrary by (what I would call) a series of misconceptions and bad arguments. His basic misconception was empiricism. He believed that what distinguishes science from unscientific fields such as literary criticism, philosophy or art is that science has the ability to ‘resolve questions’ objectively (by comparing theories with reality), while other fields can produce only multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations of any issue. He was mistaken in both respects. As I have explained throughout this book, there is objective truth to be found in all those fields, while
