The Beginning of Infinity

Enlightenment represents a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. Enlightenment's quintessential idea is that progress is both desirable and attainable.

The Enlightenment was a revolution in ho...

• 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 c...

Problems are conflicts between explanations or theories. Expectations are theories too.

Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have the conflict.

Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no cont...

A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour.

2 interpretations of human progress inspired 2 broad branches of the Enlightenment:

1. The Continental Enlightenment understood that problems are soluble but not that they are inevitable
2. The British Enlightenment understood both equally.

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 rol...

Are ideas that replicate.

The world’s major cultures – including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions – have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them, includi...