Quotes

Epistemology#

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. It has included improvements not only in scientific understanding, but also in technology, political institutions, moral values, art, and every aspect of human welfare. Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful. They should have known better. There is indeed an objective difference between a false explanation and a true one, between chronic failure to solve a problem and solving it, and also between wrong and right, ugly and beautiful, suffering and its alleviation – and thus between stagnation and progress in the fullest sense.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Must progress come to an end – either in catastrophe or in some sort of completion – or is it unbounded? The answer is the latter. That unboundedness is the ‘infinity’ referred to in the title of this book. Explaining it, and the conditions under which progress can and cannot happen, entails a journey through virtually every fundamental field of science and philosophy. From each such field we learn that, although progress has no necessary end, it does have a necessary beginning: a cause, or an event with which it starts, or a necessary condition for it to take off and to thrive. Each of these beginnings is ‘the beginning of infinity’ as viewed from the perspective of that field. Many seem, superficially, to be unconnected. But they are all facets of a single attribute of reality, which I call the beginning of infinity.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed to try to change them for the better. In contrast, the logic of justificationism is to seek (and typically, to believe that one has found) ways of securing ideas against change. Moreover, the logic of fallibilism is that one not only seeks to correct the misconceptions of the past, but hopes in the future to find and change mistaken ideas that no one today questions or finds problematic. So it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

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. What I mean by it will emerge here as we go along. It is one of several aspects of ‘the beginning of infinity’, and is a theme of this book. 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.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Authorities have been rejected many times in history, and only rarely has any lasting good come of it. The usual sequel has merely been that new authorities replaced the old. What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same. Thus the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge: by trying not to rely on authority.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

For the superstitious gambler or the end-of-the-world prophet: when their theory is refuted by experience, they do indeed switch to a new one; but, because their underlying explanations are bad, they can easily accommodate the new experience without changing the substance of the explanation. Without a good explanatory theory, they can simply reinterpret the omens, pick a new date, and make essentially the same prediction. In such cases, testing one’s theory and abandoning it when it is refuted constitutes no progress towards understanding the world. If an explanation could easily explain anything in the given field, then it actually explains nothing.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

The emergence of science, and more broadly what I am calling the Enlightenment, was the beginning of the end of such static, parochial systems of ideas. It initiated the present era in human history, unique for its sustained, rapid creation of knowledge with ever-increasing reach.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

The mysterious universality of DNA as a constructor may have been the first universality to exist. But, of all the different forms of universality, the most significant physically is the characteristic universality of people, namely that they are universal explainers, which makes them universal constructors as well.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

All knowledge growth is by incremental improvement, but in many fields there comes a point when one of the incremental improvements in a system of knowledge or technology causes a sudden increase in reach, making it a universal system in the relevant domain.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

There can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors. The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

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.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

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.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

There can be no such thing as a disease for which it is impossible to discover a cure, other than certain types of brain damage – those that have dissipated the knowledge that constitutes the patient’s personality.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

If it is a good theory – if it is a superb theory, as the fundamental theories of physics nowadays are – then it is exceedingly hard to vary while still remaining a viable explanation.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

The way to converge with each other is to converge upon the truth.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

There is only one known phenomenon which, if it ever occurred, would have effects that did not fall off with distance, and that is the creation of a certain type of knowledge, namely a beginning of infinity. Indeed, knowledge can aim itself at a target, travel vast distances having scarcely any effect, and then utterly transform the destination.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Since the growth of knowledge is a process of error-correction, and since there are many more ways of being wrong than right, knowledge-creating entities rapidly become more alike in different histories than other entities. As far as is known, knowledge-creating processes are unique in both these respects: all other effects diminish with distance in space, and become increasingly different across the multiverse, in the long run.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Bad philosophy: Philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge.

Positivism: The bad philosophy that everything not ‘derived from observation’ should be eliminated from science.

Logical positivism: The bad philosophy that statements not verifiable by observation are meaningless.

In science, the main impact of bad philosophy has been through the idea of separating a scientific theory into (explanationless) predictions and (arbitrary) interpretation.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

In science, we do not consider it surprising that a community of scientists with different initial hopes and expectations, continually in dispute about their rival theories, gradually come into near-unanimous agreement over a steady stream of issues (yet still continue to disagree all the time). It is not surprising because, in their case, there are observable facts that they can use to test their theories. They converge with each other on any given issue because they are all converging on the objective truth.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

A human brain – quite unlike a genome – is itself an arena of intense variation, selection and competition. Most ideas within a brain are created by it for the very purpose of trying them out in imagination, criticizing them, and varying them until they meet the person’s preferences.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

The behaviour of people in a long-lived culture is therefore determined partly by recent ideas that will soon become extinct, and partly by long-lived memes: exceptional ideas that have been accurately replicated many times in succession.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

A fundamental question in the study of cultures is: what is it about a long-lived meme that gives it this exceptional ability to resist change throughout many replications?

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Genes and memes are about as different as can be at the level of mechanisms, and of outcomes; they are similar only at the lowest level of explanation, where they are both replicators that embody knowledge and are therefore conditioned by the same fundamental principles that determine the conditions under which knowledge can or cannot be preserved, can or cannot improve.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Memes necessarily become embodied in two different physical forms alternately: as memories in a brain, and as behaviour...

Because of the alternating physical forms of a meme, it has to survive two different, and potentially unrelated, mechanisms of selection in every generation. The brain-memory form has to cause the holder to enact the behaviour; and the behaviour form has to cause the new recipient to remember it – and to enact it. So, for example, although religions prescribe behaviours such as educating one’s children to adopt the religion, the mere intention to transmit a meme to one’s children or anyone else is quite insufficient to make that happen. That is why the overwhelming majority of attempts to start a new religion fail, even if the founder members try hard to propagate it.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

People think and try to improve upon their ideas – which entails changing them. A long-lived meme is an idea that runs that gauntlet again and again, and survives.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

This pushes memes in the direction of causing a finely tuned compulsion in the holder’s mind: ideally, this would be just the inability to refrain from enacting that particular meme (or memeplex). Thus, for example, long-lived religions typically cause fear of specific supernatural entities, but they do not cause general fearfulness or gullibility, because that would both harm the holders in general and make them more susceptible to rival memes.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

What sort of idea is best suited to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable objectives? A true idea is a good candidate. But not just any truth will do. It must seem useful to all those people, for it is they who will be choosing whether to enact it or not. ‘Useful’ in this context does not necessarily mean functionally useful: it refers to any property that can make people want to adopt an idea and enact it, such as being interesting, funny, elegant, easily remembered, morally right and so on.

In fact such memes are not merely capable of surviving under rapidly changing criteria of criticism, they positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication. Unprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people’s critical faculties, they are criticized, but so are their rivals, and the rivals fare worse, and are not enacted. In the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage and can deteriorate or be superseded.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

A rational meme’s natural home is a dynamic society – more or less any dynamic society – because there the tradition of criticism (optimistically directed at problem-solving) will suppress variants of the meme with even slightly less truth. Moreover, the rapid progress will subject these variants to continually varying criteria of criticism, which again only deeply true memes have a chance of surviving. An anti-rational meme’s natural home is a static society – not any static society, but preferably the one in which it evolved – for all the converse reasons. And therefore each type of meme, when present in a society that is broadly of the opposite kind, is less able to cause itself to be replicated.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Memes of each type cause behaviours that impede the faithful replication of the other: to replicate faithfully, anti-rational memes need people to avoid thinking critically about their choices, while rational memes need people to think as critically as possible.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

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.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Biological evolution was merely a finite preface to the main story of evolution, the unbounded evolution of memes. – So was the evolution of anti-rational memes in static societies.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Ethics#

Our Final Century makes the case that the period since the mid twentieth century has been the first in which technology has been capable of destroying civilization. But that is not so. Many civilizations in history were destroyed by the simple technologies of fire and the sword. Indeed, of all civilizations in history, the overwhelming majority have been destroyed, some intentionally, some as a result of plague or natural disaster. Virtually all of them could have avoided the catastrophes that destroyed them if only they had possessed a little additional knowledge, such as improved agricultural or military technology, better hygiene, or better political or economic institutions.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

The Principle of Optimism: All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favourite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The horse might die. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk!’ The prisoner understands that, while his immediate problems have to do with prison bars and the king and his horse, ultimately the evil he faces is caused by insufficient knowledge.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative? That all other moral truths follow from it?

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

In the case of our civilization, the precautionary principle rules itself out. Since our civilization has not been following it, a transition to it would entail reining in the rapid technological progress that is under way. And such a change has never been successful before. So a blind pessimist would have to oppose it on principle.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization 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.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Wealth: The repertoire of physical transformations that one is capable of causing.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

We Athenians are concerned above all with improvement; the Spartans seek only – stasis.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Society is not a zero-sum game: the civilization of the Enlightenment did not get where it is today by cleverly sharing out the wealth, votes or anything else that was in dispute when it began. It got here by creating ex nihilo.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Popper’s criterion: 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.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

A static society forms when there is no escape from this effect: all significant behaviour, all relationships between people, and all thoughts are subordinated to causing faithful replication of the memes. In all areas controlled by the memes, no critical faculties are exercised. No innovation is tolerated, and almost none is attempted.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Our society (the West) is not a static society. It is the only known instance of a long-lived dynamic (rapidly changing) society. It is unique in history for its ability to mediate long-term, rapid, peaceful change and improvement, including improvements in the broad consensus about values and aims... This has been made possible by the emergence of a radically different class of memes which, though still ‘selfish’, are not necessarily harmful to individuals.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Another thing that should make us suspicious is the presence of the conditions for anti-rational meme evolution, such as deference to authority, static subcultures and so on. Anything that says ‘Because I say so’ or ‘It never did me any harm,’ anything that says ‘Let us suppress criticism of our idea because it is true,’ suggests static-society thinking. We should examine and criticize laws, customs and other institutions with an eye to whether they set up conditions for anti-rational memes to evolve.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

There is a saying that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure. But that is only when one knows what to prevent. No precautions can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. To prepare for those, there is nothing we can do but increase our ability to put things right if they go wrong.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

The world is currently buzzing with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at almost any cost. But it ought to be buzzing much more with plans to reduce the temperature, or for how to thrive at a higher temperature. And not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. Some such plans exist – for instance to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by a variety of methods; and to generate clouds over the oceans to reflect sunlight; and to encourage aquatic organisms to absorb more carbon dioxide.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Infinite ignorance is a necessary condition for there to be infinite potential for knowledge. Rejecting the idea that we are ‘nearly there’ is a necessary condition for the avoidance of dogmatism, stagnation and tyranny.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Death does not make sense. Stagnation does not make sense. A bubble of sense within endless senselessness does not make sense. Whether the world ultimately does make sense will depend on how people – the likes of us – chose to think and to act.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous.

— "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse

Metaphysics#

[You live your life in a] waking dream that corresponds to reality. But there is more. It is a dream of which you then gain control. You do that by controlling the corresponding aspects of the external reality.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

But the cosmologist Frank Tipler discovered that in certain types of recollapsing universes the Big Crunch singularity is suitable for performing the faster-and-faster trick that we used in Infinity Hotel: an infinite sequence of computational steps could be executed in a finite time before the singularity, powered by the ever-increasing tidal effects of the gravitational collapse itself. To the inhabitants – who would eventually have to upload their personalities into computers made of something like pure tides – the universe would last for ever because they would be thinking faster and faster, without limit, as it collapsed, and storing their memories in ever smaller volumes so that access times could also be reduced without limit. Tipler called such universes ‘omega-point universes’.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

Any theory involving an anthropic argument must provide a measure for defining probabilities in an infinite set of things. It is unknown how to do that in the spatially infinite universe that cosmologists currently believe we live in.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

[A dubious] example of anthropic-type reasoning is the doomsday argument. It attempts to estimate the life expectancy of our species by assuming that the typical human is roughly halfway through the sequence of all humans. Hence we should expect the total number who will ever live to be about twice the number who have lived so far. Of course this is prophecy, and for that reason alone cannot possibly be a valid argument, but let me briefly pursue it in its own terms. First, it does not apply at all if the total number of humans is going to be infinite – for in that case every human who ever lives will live unusually early in the sequence. So, if anything, it suggests that we are at the beginning of infinity.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

In future, when the rate of innovation will also increase due to the sheer increasing clock rate and throughput of brain add-ons and AI computers, then our capacity to cope with that will increase at the same rate or faster: if everyone were suddenly able to think a million times as fast, no one would feel hurried as a result. Hence I think that the concept of the Singularity as a sort of discontinuity is a mistake. Knowledge will continue to grow exponentially or even faster, and that is astounding enough.

— "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch