The Beginning of Infinity is probably one of the best books I have ever read. David Deutsch, the author, takes you through an intellectual rollercoaster discussing all things knowledge related: what knowledge is, how we acquire it, why it matters, how societies should structure themselves to incentivize knowledge creation, etc.
I wrote down so many ideas out of this book that it will be impossible to publish them all. So I am gonna pick some of my favorites:
The Beginning of Infinity
It represents the possibility of the unlimited growth of knowledge in the future. This knowledge consists of explanations: assertions about what is out there beyond the appearances, and how it behaves.
David Deutsch thinks knowledge is the answer to all humanity’s problems. While this realization may seem self-evident, for most of the history of our species, we had almost no success in creating such knowledge. Athens during the classical era may have been a potential beginning of infinity, Venice's Renaissance may have been another. But we are living through such a period, brought up by the Enlightenment.
For Deutsch, the 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.
Conjecture & Criticism
Scientific discoveries are guesses – bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering, and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them.
Criticism is the other magical ingredient. Ideas need a healthy dose of criticism.
And the only moral values that permit sustained progress are the objective values that the Enlightenment has begun to discover. Which is interesting because Deutsch observes that the empiricism loved by so many enlightened thinkers is a false way to acquire knowledge, thus making the Enlightenment important philosophically more than scientifically.
The Role of Science
Science is not about prediction. But explanations. Predictions are used to validate new explanations. A predictive theory whose explanatory content consists only of background knowledge is a rule of thumb.
Problems
Are conflicts between explanations or theories. Expectations are theories too. Similarly, it is a problem when the way things are (according to our best explanation) is not the way they should be – that is, according to our current criterion of how they should be.
Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have a conflict. Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.
Problem Solving needs Optimism
No one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic.
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. If one is successful he will not get rid of problems, just upgrade the ones he stresses about.
I am not kidding when I say I have tens more ideas that I scribbled down from this book, but I will live you with this quote:
“Here we sit, for ever imprisoned in the dark, almost-sealed cave of our skull, guessing. We weave stories of an outside world – worlds, actually: a physical world, a moral world, a world of abstract geometrical shapes, and so on – but we are not satisfied with merely weaving, nor with mere stories.
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! ”