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The Beginning of Infinity Summary
About The Beginning of Infinity Book
A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers.
Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavor. This stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach, according to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve.
In his previous book, The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch describe the four deepest strands of existing knowledge-the theories of evolution, quantum physics, knowledge, and computation-arguing jointly they reveal a unified fabric of reality. In this new book, he applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems, from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species. Filled with startling new conclusions about human choice, optimism, scientific explanation, and the evolution of culture, The Beginning of Infinity is a groundbreaking book that will become a classic of its kind.
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The Beginning of Infinity
Is the possibility of the unlimited growth of knowledge in the future.
David Deutsch, a renouned phisicist, postulates that Knowledge consists of explanations (assertions about what is out there beyond the appearances). For most of the history , we had almost no success in creating such knowledge.
Deutsch’s worldview is that reality is comprehensible. Problems are solvable. Progress is inevitable as long as we have good explanations.
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False Ways to Get Knowledge
- Empiricism: said that we derive it from sensory experience. False, We interpret experiences through explanatory theories, but true explanations are not obvious. We create new explanations through conjecture. One cannot derive predictions from experience, one certainly cannot derive explanations.
- Inductivism the theory that the present resembles the past, ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. But that's also false.
- Authority: religions, kings etc. Who-ever is in power can decide what truth is.
All of these are intitively right, and some even sound scientific. But they are not.
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Real Knowledge = conjecture + criticism
There is only one way of making progress: conjecture (guesses) and criticism. We create theories by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories, not to be the source of new ones.
Experience is indeed essential to science, but it's not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed.
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Chasing good explanations
Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.
The quest for good explanations is, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally.
That is what a good explanation will do: it makes it harder for you to fool yourself.
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…all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations
DAVID DEUTSCH
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