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Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlduniverse
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Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldpersonoptimism
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The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationsgeneproblem
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We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationsuniverseinterpretation
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An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldproblemcreativity
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All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldphysics
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Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldinfinityinfiniteknowledge
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Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlduniversegeneknowledgephysics
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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.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlddecision-making
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Objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our ‘wall’.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldconjectureknowledge
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Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlduniverse
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Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldinstitution
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The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract, as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationscomputationcomputerphysicsmathematics
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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.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationparochialismimitationuniverseknowledge
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History is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldsciencewealthbiogeographyhistory
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Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlduniverse
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To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplainerinterpretation
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There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. WhatDavid DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationcreativity
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Sparta has no philosophers. That’s because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don’t want it. Another difference: they don’t honour living poets, only dead ones. Why? Because dead poets don’t write anything new, but live ones do. A third difference: their education system is insanely harsh; ours is famously lax. Why? Because they don’t want their kids to dare to question anything, so that they won’t ever think of changing anything.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldeducation
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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.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldknowledgebehaviourism
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Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. WheneverDavid DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplaineroptimism
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Although, through the vagaries of international politics, Athens became independent and democratic again soon afterwards, and continued for several generations to produce art, literature and philosophy, it was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldrationalgenerationalityoptimism
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The most important of all limitations on knowledge – creation is that we cannot prophecy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.David DeutschN/Apredictionknowledgeimitation
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But in any case, understanding is one of the higher functions of the human mind and brain, and a unique one. Many other physical systems, such as animals’ brains, computers and other machines, can assimilate facts and act upon them. But at present we know of nothing that is capable of understanding an explanation – or of wanting one in the first place – other than a human mind.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationscomputationphysicsexplanationcomputer
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The scientific revolution was part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment, which also brought progress in other fields, especially moral and political philosophy, and in the institutions of society. Unfortunately, the term ‘the Enlightenment’ is used by historians and philosophers to denote a variety of different trends, some of them violently opposed to each other... 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.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldinfinityemergenceinstitutioninfinitehistoryknowledgeenlightenment
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Arthur C. Clarke once remarked that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. This is true, but slightly misleading. It is stated from the point of view of a pre-scientific thinker, which is the wrong way round. The fact is that to anyone who understands what virtual reality is, even genuine magic would be indistinguishable from technology, for there is no room for magic in a comprehensible reality. Anything that seems incomprehensible is regarded by science merely as evidence that there is something we have not yet understood, be it a conjuring trick, advanced technology or a new law of physics.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationssciencephysics
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Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlduniversegeneexplainer
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If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldphysics
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We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden, and hence fallible, as all our theories are.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldinterpretationtheory
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The only uniquely significant thing about humans (whether in the cosmic scheme of things or according to any rational human criterion) is our ability to create new explanations, and we have that in common with all people. You do not become less of a person if you lose a limb in an accident; it is only if you lose your brain that you do. 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.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldhuamnperson
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To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationrefutationrationalityjustificationismqualedecision-makingexplainerrationalconjecturecreativity
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During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationcreativity
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Amending the ‘data’, or rejecting some as erroneous, is a frequent concomitant of scientific discovery, and the crucial ‘data’ cannot even be obtained until theory tells us what to look for and how and why.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlddatatheory
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We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldproblem
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An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldoptimismsociety
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A rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect, and persuade others, that a leader or policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldrationalrationalitygovernment
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Systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldgovernment
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Trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlderror-correction
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I have settled on a simple test for judging claims, including Dennett’s, to have explained the nature of consciousness (or any other computational task): if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it. Turing invented his test in the hope of bypassing all those philosophical problems. In other words, he hoped that the functionality could be achieved before it was explained. Unfortunately it is very rare for practical solutions to fundamental problems to be discovered without any explanation of why they work.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationcomputerprogramcomputationproblemexplainer
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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.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldproblemknowledgetheory
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The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldgenedarwinreplicator
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Using our explanations, we ‘see’ right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people’s behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. ThatDavid DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationbehaviourismimitationgeneconjecture
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A population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldreplicator
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Whenever we observe anything – a scientific instrument or a galaxy or a human being – what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlduniverseinstrumentalism
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Copenhagen Interpretation: Niels Bohr’s combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldinstrumentalisminterpretationanthropocentricquantum
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[Jared Diamond's] mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs [in his book Guns, Germs and Steel] not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationinterpretation
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The Enlightenment [was the start of] a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldenlightenmentexplanationknowledge
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Conjectures are the products of creative imagination. But the problem with imagination is that it can create fiction much more easily than truth. As I have suggested, historically, virtually all human attempts to explain experience in terms of a wider reality have indeed been fiction, in the form of myths, dogma and mistaken common sense – and the rule of testability is an insufficient check on such mistakes. But the quest for good explanations does the job: inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found; discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationproblemconjecturehistoryexplainercreativity
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They are also about coherence, elegance and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity, though none of those things is easy to define either.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationseleganceimplicit
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The whole motivation for seeking a perfectly secure foundation for mathematics was mistaken. It was a form of justificationism. Mathematics is characterized by its use of proofs in the same way that science is characterized by its use of experimental testing; in neither case is that the object of the exercise. The object of mathematics is to understand – to explain – abstract entities. Proof is primarily a means of ruling out false explanations; and sometimes it also provides mathematical truths that need to be explained. But, like all fields in which progress is possible, mathematics seeks not random truths but good explanations.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldscienceexplanationjustificationismproofmathematicsexplainer
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Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldtheory
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All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldknowledgeoptimism
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Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldimitation
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Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldrationalityexplainerrationaltheoryquale
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If two programs respond in the same way to every possible action by the user, then they render the same environment; if they would respond perceptibly differently to even one possible action, they render different environments.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationsprogram
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The fundamental theories of modern physics explain the world in jarringly counter-intuitive ways. For example, most non-physicists consider it self-evident that when you hold your arm out horizontally you can feel the force of gravity pulling it downwards. But you cannot. The existence of a force of gravity is, astonishingly, denied by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, one of the two deepest theories of physics. This says that the only force on your arm in that situation is that which you yourself are exerting, upwards, to keep it constantly accelerating away from the straightest possible path in a curved region of spacetimeDavid DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldphysicsgenerelativismexplainertheory
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This inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusions.David DeutschN/Ainductioninductivism
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Instrumentalism is rather like reductionism except that, instead of rejecting only high-level explanations, it tries to reject all explanations. The Principle of Mediocrity is a milder form of reductionism: it rejects only high-level explanations that involve people. While I am on the subject of bad philosophical doctrines with moral overtones, let me add holism, a sort of mirror image of reductionism. It is the idea that the only valid explanations (or at least the only significant ones) are of parts in terms of wholes. Holists also often share with reductionists the mistaken belief that science can only (or should only) be reductive, and therefore they oppose much of science. All those doctrines are irrational for the same reason: they advocate accepting or rejecting theories on grounds other than whether they are good explanations.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldscienceinstrumentalismexplanationholismrationalityreductionismrationaleducationtheory
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Very little in nature is detectable by unaided human senses.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldnaturepeople
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The biologist Peter Medawar described science as ‘the art of the soluble’, but the same applies to all forms of knowledge. All kinds of creative thought involve judgements about what approaches might or might not work. Gaining or losing interest in particular problems or sub-problems is part of the creative process and itself constitutes problem-solving. So whether ‘problems are soluble’ does not depend on whether any given question can be answered, or answered by a particular thinker on a particular day. But if progress ever depended on violating a law of physics, then ‘problems are soluble’ would be false.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldsciencephysicsproblemproblem-solvingknowledgecreativity
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Its quest for good explanations corrects the errors, allows for the biases and misleading perspectives, and fills in the gaps.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationerror-correction
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So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of. And when we can change them no more, we have understood some objective truth. And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real. We are like gods!David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanation
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The theory reaches out, as it were, from its finite origins inside one brain that has been affected only by scraps of patchy evidence from a small part of one hemisphere of one planet – to infinity. This reach of explanations is another meaning of ‘the beginning of infinity’. It is the ability of some of them to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldinfinityinfiniteexplanationproblem
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We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldexplanationphysics
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Thus, although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldexplainergeneoptimism
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Knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldknowledge
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Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods. So the situation was that all the sources from which it was generally believed knowledge came actually knew very little, and were mistaken about most of the things that they claimed to know. And therefore progress depended on learning how to reject their authority. This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto ‘Nullius in verba’, which means something like ‘Take no one’s word for it.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldenlightenmentgeneknowledge
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Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlduniverse
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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. GoodDavid DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worlddecision-making
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But that is really the least of the irrational attributes of proportional representation. A more important one – which is shared by even the mildest of proportional systems – is that they assign disproportionate power in the legislature to the third-largest party, and often to even smaller parties. It works like this. It is rare (in any system) for a single party to receive an overall majority of votes. Hence, if votes are reflected proportionately in the legislature, no legislation can be passed unless some of the parties cooperate to pass it, and no government can be formed unless some of them form a coalition. Sometimes the two largest parties manage to do this, but the most common outcome is that the leader of the third-largest party holds the ‘balance of power’ and decides which of the two largest parties shall join it in government, and which shall be sidelined, and for how long. That means that it is correspondingly harder for the electorate to decide which party, and which policies, will be removed from power.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldrationalgovernmentrationality
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Discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldexplanation
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Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldinstitution
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Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative?David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worlderror-correction
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Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldknowledge
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There can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldpersonuniverseconstructorexplainer
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There is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticismDavid DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldconjecturecriticism
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Beware the difference between prediction and prophecy. Prophecy purports to know things which cannot be known.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldprediction
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The last room number [in Hilbert's Infinite Hotel Paradox] is not infinity. First of all, there is no last room.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldinfinityinfinite
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Again we were too parochial, and were led to the false conclusion that knowledge-bearing entities can be physically identical to non-knowledge-bearing ones; and this in turn cast doubt on the fundamental status of knowledge. But now we have come almost full circle. We can see that the ancient idea that living matter has special physical properties was almost true: it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the multiverse.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationsphysicsparochialismmultiverseuniverseknowledge
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From the least parochial perspectives available to us, people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not ‘supported’ by their environments, but support themselves by creating knowledge. Once they have suitable knowledge (essentially, the knowledge of the Enlightenment), they are capable of sparking unlimited further progress.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldenlightenmentknowledgeimitationparochialism
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The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge. Thus ‘how do we know…?’ is transformed into ‘by what authority do we claim…?David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldknowledge
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Consider also the revolutionary utopians, who typically achieve only destruction and stagnation. Though they are blind optimists, what defines them as utopians is their pessimism that their supposed utopia, or their violent proposals for achieving and entrenching it, could ever be improved upon. Additionally,David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldoptimism
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If it turns out that all this time we have merely been studying the programming of a cosmic planetarium, then that would merely mean that we have been studying a smaller portion of reality than we thought. So what? Such things have happened many times in the history of science, as our horizons have expanded beyond the Earth to include the solar system, our Galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on, and, of course, parallel universes.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationsuniverseprogramscience
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The fact that the principles of neo-Darwinist theory are, from a certain perspective, self-evident has itself been used as a criticism of the theory. For instance, if the theory must be true, how can it be testable? One reply, often attributed to Haldane, is that the whole theory would be refuted by the discovery of a single fossilized rabbit in a stratum of Cambrian rock. However, that is misleading. The import of such an observation would depend on what explanations were available under the given circumstances. For instance, misidentifications of fossils, and of strata, have sometimes been made and would have to be ruled out by good explanations before one could call the discovery ‘a fossilized rabbit in Cambrian rock’.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanationdarwinrefutation
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Not only is there constant backtracking, but the many subproblems all remain simultaneously active and are addressed opportunistically.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationsproblem
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The argument of Chapter 2, applied to any interference phenomenon destroys the classical idea that there is only one universe. Logically, the possibility of complex quantum computations adds nothing to a case that is already unanswerable. But it does add psychological impact. With Shor’s algorithm, the argument has been writ very large. To those who still cling to a single-universe world-view, I issue this challenge: explain how Shor’s algorithm works. I do not merely mean predict that it will work, which is merely a matter of solving a few uncontroversial equations. I mean provide an explanation. When Shor’s algorithm has factorized a number, using 10500 or so times the computational resources that can be seen to be present, where was the number factorized? There are only about 1080 atoms in the entire visible universe, an utterly minuscule number compared with 10500. So if the visible universe were the extent of physical reality, physical reality would not even remotely contain the resources required to factorize such a large number. Who did factorize it, then? How, and where, was the computation performed?David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationsexplanationcomputerphysicsquantumcomputationuniverseexplainerprediction
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Shoddy explanations that yield correct predictions are two a penny, as UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy-theorists and pseudo-scientists of every variety should (but never do) bear in mind.David DeutschThe Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implicationspredictionexplanationtheory
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inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found; discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplanation
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Proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies. But compromises – amalgams of the policies of the contributors – have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldexplainergenegovernment
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One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one’s own and others’.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldoptimism
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The system used to elect members of the legislatures of most countries in the British political tradition is that each district (or ‘constituency’) in the country is entitled to one seat in the legislature, and that seat goes to the candidate with the largest number of votes in that district. This is called the plurality voting system (‘plurality’ meaning ‘largest number of votes’) – often called the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, because there is no prize for any runner-up, and no second round of voting (both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake of increasing the proportionality of the outcomes). Plurality voting typically ‘over-represents’ the two largest parties, compared with the proportion of votes they receive. Moreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox, and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
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The meaning of life is something we are using creativity to discover, to build. We can’t find the meaning of life in the world ‘out there’, nor just by pure thought, or by reference to an authority. What we have to do is form explanations about what is right and wrong, what is better and worse, what is beautiful and ugly, and hone those theories, while also trying to meet them. At any one moment, we will meet them imperfectly, just like scientific theories, at any one moment, are only an imperfect explanation of what the physical world is like. But, through criticism and conjecture and seeking the truth, we can resolve the errors in what we had previously thought and thereby make progress.David DeutschN/Aexplanationphysicsconjecturetheorycreativity
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I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children…David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldscienceproblem
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Yet, over time, the conclusions that science has drawn have become ever truer to reality.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldscience
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There is an explanatory link between ought and is, and this provides one of the ways in which reason can indeed address moral issues.David DeutschN/Aexplanation
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It would be astonishing if the details of a primitive, static society’s collapse had any relevance to hidden dangers that may be facing our open, dynamic and scientific society, let alone what we should do about them.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldstaticdynamicimitation
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Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the Worldenlightenment
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If a parrot had copied snatches of Popper’s voice at a lecture, it would certainly have copied them with his Austrian accent: parrots are incapable of copying an utterance without its accent. But a human student might well be unable to copy it with the accent.David DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
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It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them. It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible toDavid DeutschThe Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The Worldphysicsimitationproblemknowledgequale