We want true explanations. 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!

2 interpretations of human progress inspired 2 broad branches of the Enlightenment:<ol><li>The Continental Enlightenment understood that problems are soluble but not that they are inevitable</li><li>The British Enlightenment understood both equally.</li></ol>The Continental type was impatient for the perfected state – which led to intellectual dogmatism, political violence & tyranny - The French Revolution & the Reign of Terror are the archetypal examples.The British one, which was evolutionary & cognizant of human fallibility, was impatient for institutions that did not stifle gradual, continuing change.

Continental vs British Enlightenment

Science is not about prediction. But explanations. Predictions are used to validate new explanations.<ul><li>Knowledge that is both familiar and uncontroversial is background knowledge. </li><li>A predictive theory whose explanatory content consists only of background knowledge is a rule of thumb. Because we usually take background knowledge for granted, rules of thumb may seem to be explanation-less predictions, but that is always an illusion.</li></ul>

The role of Science

Problems are conflicts between explanations or theories. Expectations are theories too.<blockquote>Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have the conflict.</blockquote><blockquote>Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.</blockquote>

Problems are conflicts ...

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, including the inexplicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another. That makes these ideas memes – ideas that are replicators.

Memes

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.

Culture

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.

Real Knowledge = conjecture + criticism

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 how people sought knowledge: by trying not to rely on authority. Mainly Religion. That is the context in which empiricism – purporting to rely solely on the senses for knowledge – played such a salutary historical role, despite being fundamentally false and even authoritative in its conception of how science works.

The role of Enlightenment 

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.

The Beginning of Infinity

<ul><li>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.</li><li>Inductivism the theory that the present resembles the past, ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. But that's also false.</li><li>Authority: religions, kings etc. Who-ever is in power can decide what truth is. </li></ul>All of these are intitively right, and some even sound scientific. But they are not.

False Ways to Get Knowledge

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.

philosophy

Philosophy

history

History

books

Books

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

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.

David Deutsch, FRS is a British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. He is also a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.In his books, he also made philosophical contributions. In epistemology, he stressed the importance of explanation, and proposed 'hard to vary' as a criterion for good explanations.

DAVID DEUTSCH

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