The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch - Summary & Notes

David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity is a sweeping exploration of knowledge, progress, and the nature of reality.
Its central argument is that all forms of progress are the result of a single, uniquely human capacity: the creation of good explanations.

These explanations are not simply derived from observation (as empiricism claims) or repeated experience (as inductivism suggests).
Instead, they are the product of creative conjecture, rigorously tested and refined through criticism.
A “good explanation” is one that is “hard to vary” – meaning it is tightly constrained by existing knowledge and cannot be easily modified without losing its explanatory power.
This quest for better explanations is inherently unbounded, leading to the “beginning of infinity” of the title.

Deutsch argues against justificationism (the search for authoritative sources of knowledge) and for fallibilism (the recognition that all knowledge is potentially flawed).
He champions the Enlightenment as a crucial turning point, where a tradition of criticism replaced reliance on authority.

The book covers a lot of ground, including:

The nature of artificial intelligence.
The limitations of prediction.
The importance of a dynamic society.
The refutation of “bad philosophy” that hinders the growth of knowledge.

Ultimately, The Beginning of Infinity asserts that all problems are soluble, given sufficient knowledge.
Progress, driven by the pursuit of good explanations, is not only possible but sustainable indefinitely.
This optimistic vision – that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge, and that we have the inherent capacity to create the knowledge needed to overcome any challenge – is the driving force behind the book’s powerful defense of reason, creativity, and the boundless potential of human understanding.
It is a call to embrace the principle of optimism and to actively participate in the ongoing, infinite journey of discovery.

Explanations and Theories

The core of scientific theories are explanations. These are statements about what exists and how it behaves.

Scientific theories are explanations: assertions about what is out there and how it behaves.

For most of history, we mistakenly believed that explanations were somehow derived from the evidence of our senses. This is the philosophical idea that we have all heard called Empiricism.

Empiricism, Inductivism, and Their Flaws

For a long time, people thought we learned about the world just by observing it (empiricism). But that’s not quite right. Our theories are really just educated guesses that we refine over time.

Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from experience’ is.

Experience helps us pick the best guess from the pool of existing ones.

No amount of deduction applied to statements describing a set of experiences can reach a conclusion about anything other than those experiences.

So here’s the argument against Empiricism for experimental science.

Imagine you’ve only ever seen apples, and you know everything about them. Now, someone asks you about oranges, which you’ve never seen or tasted. How can you explain about oranges just by knowing about apples? That’s the same as trying to learn about Mars only from what we know about Earth, or learning about something we haven’t experienced from something we have. This is hard because just using logic and thinking won’t fill this knowledge gap. No matter how much we think about apples, we can’t learn about oranges. The same applies to learning about new things based on what we already know.

You can’t logically leap from one set of experiences to something completely different. Inductivism tries to solve this by saying we extrapolate from repeated experiences – like assuming the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has.

The conventional wisdom was that the key is repetition: if one repeatedly has similar experiences under similar circumstances, then one is supposed to ‘extrapolate’ or ‘generalize’ that pattern and predict that it will continue.

And so here’s the counter-argument. We use repeated experiences to extrapolate rules for existence. Since the sun has risen and fallen every day we’ve kept track, it’s reasonable to expect it’ll continue doing so.

The above argument is inductivist.

Inductivism   The misconception that scientific theories are obtained by generalizing or extrapolating repeated experiences, and that the more often a theory is confirmed by observation the more likely it becomes.
Induction   The non-existent process of ‘obtaining’ referred to above.
Principle of induction   The idea that ‘the future will resemble the past’, combined with the misconception that this asserts anything about the future.

Imagine if you tried to predict what will happen tomorrow only based on what happened today. That’s what we call inductivism - making guesses about the future or unknown things based on what we already know or have seen. But there are two big problems with this way of thinking.

The first problem is that inductivism is supposed to help us make predictions, but in reality, much of our scientific knowledge isn’t about predicting specific experiences. It’s about understanding the world around us, which is much larger than just our experiences. For example, studying stars isn’t just about predicting what we’ll see in the night sky. It’s about understanding what stars are, how they work, and how they formed under the laws of physics. A lot of these things can’t be seen or touched; they can only be understood through theories. So, inductivism doesn’t really help us understand things like stars or the universe.

The second problem is that inductivism assumes that the future will be similar to the past and that things we haven’t seen will be like things we have. But in reality, the future is often very different from the past, and unseen things can be very different from what we’ve seen. Science has predicted and even caused things to happen that are very different from anything we’ve experienced before. For example, people dreamed about flying for a long time, but all they knew was falling. Then they came up with theories about flight, and only after that, they were able to fly. Or take the example of the atomic bomb. Before 1945, no one had ever seen a nuclear explosion, but scientists were able to predict what would happen based on their theories, not by assuming that the future would be like the past. Even the sunrise, which seems predictable, can change depending on where you are - like in space where you might see it every 90 minutes, or not at all. And we knew this before anyone ever went to space, thanks to our theories.

So, in summary, the way of thinking that tries to understand the unknown just based on what we already know has some big problems and doesn’t really work for science.

This is obviously a problem - how would we make new things or create new theories? If the future looks like the past, what’s to be of our technological innovation?

Would your sensory experience tell us that gravitational pull is 9.81 m/s^2?
You’d likely be able to say that you don’t somehow just float around, but that isn’t enough for science.

You also didn’t see the Big Bang, you haven’t experienced a black hole nor the death of a star.

Even sunrise – that favourite example of inductivists – is not always observed every twenty-four hours: when viewed from orbit it may happen every ninety minutes, or not at all. And that was known from theory long before anyone had ever orbited the Earth.

Even sunrise doesn’t necessarily occur every 24h.

If we were to only assume the future is exactly like the past, what’s to be of technological innovation?

Justificationism vs. Fallibilism

Historically, people believed knowledge needed authority to be valid.

The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails.

This leads to justificationism – trying to find authoritative sources to prove things are true. It’s like shifting from “how do we know?” to “who says so, and are they trustworthy?”
Focus on “how do we know,” but it’s not practical to do that for everything. We have, however, to make sure we at least do it in our own field.

Fallibilism, on the other hand, recognizes that there are no perfect sources and no way to absolutely justify knowledge.

The opposing position – namely the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying ideas as being true or probable – is called fallibilism.

For fallibilists, creating knowledge means understanding reality better, not proving something with certainty. We expect our best explanations to be flawed and actively try to improve them. We not only want to correct past mistakes but also find and fix the mistakes we don’t even know we’re making today. This fallibilist mindset is essential for the beginning of infinity.

So it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity.

The Enlightenment and the Tradition of Criticism

The Enlightenment was a rebellion against authority in knowledge.

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.

Before the Enlightenment, people thought all important knowledge was already discovered and written down in authoritative texts.

Before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions

To make progress, we needed a tradition of criticism – questioning established beliefs.

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism.
Thus the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge: by trying not to rely on authority

This led to the idea that scientific theories must be testable.

One consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable (though this was not made explicit at first).

But testability alone isn’t enough, because even myths can be testable.

Instrumentalism, Realism, and Relativism

During the 20th century, many philosophers and scientists adopted instrumentalism.

during the twentieth century, most philosophers, and many scientists, took the view that science is incapable of discovering anything about reality.

Instrumentalism claims that science can only predict observations, not describe the reality behind them. It denies that “explanations” as we usually think of them can even exist. This leads to relativism – the idea that truth is relative to a culture or standard, and no claim about reality is objectively better than another.

Instrumentalism: nothing really is, so any idea about it is like myth
Realism: the world exists and is real
Relativism: ideas can only be judged in relation to other ideas

Good Explanations vs. Bad Explanations

A good explanation is hard to vary without losing its explanatory power.

It is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable. Bad explanations are equally useless whether they are testable or not.

If an explanation can easily be changed, it’s probably too general or vague. The myth of Demeter being sad in winter is easily variable; the axis-tilt theory is not. The axis-tilt theory is specific and tied to observable phenomena.

Because explanation plays this central role in science, and because testability is of little use in the case of bad explanations, I myself prefer to call myths, superstitions and similar theories unscientific even when they make testable predictions.

Being testable doesn’t make something scientific. And being willing to change your mind isn’t enough – you need to seek better explanations, not just different ones.

Background Knowledge and Rules of Thumb

Background knowledge is knowledge that’s familiar and uncontroversial.

Knowledge that is both familiar and uncontroversial is background knowledge.

A rule of thumb is a predictive theory whose explanation is just background knowledge. Rules of thumb might seem explanationless, but that’s an illusion.

The Reach of Explanations

The reach of an explanation is its ability to solve problems beyond those it was originally intended to solve.

This reach of explanations is another meaning of ‘the beginning of infinity’. It is the ability of some of them to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve.

This is another facet of the “beginning of infinity.” Good explanations apply even to the unknown.

Conjectures

Conjectures are guesses, bold assumptions made by rearranging, combining, and adding to existing ideas to improve them.

Conjectures are the products of creative imagination. But the problem with imagination is that it can create fiction much more easily than truth

They are essential for creating new knowledge.

Human Significance and Universal Constructors

Humans are uniquely significant because of our ability to create new explanations.

The only uniquely significant thing about humans (whether in the cosmic scheme of things or according to any rational human criterion) is our ability to create new explanations, and we have that in common with all people.

This ability gives us “universal reach.” We can augment ourselves with anything we need, as long as it’s allowed by the laws of physics. We’re universal constructors.

Constructor A device capable of causing other objects to undergo transformations without undergoing any net change itself.
Universal constructor A constructor that can cause any raw materials to undergo any physically possible transformation, given the right information.

Other species are limited by their biology, but we’re not. If something requires a bigger brain, we can build computers.

The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’

Cosmic Insignificance

The vastness of the universe shouldn’t make us feel insignificant.

I was wrong to be impressed by the mere scale of what I was looking at. Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes.

It’s our home and our resource. The bigger, the better.

Evolution and Progress

Evolution is natural, and striving for progress is essential.

One might wonder whether the reach of people in general might be greater than the reach of humans. What if, for instance, the reach of technology is indeed unlimited, but only to creatures with two opposable thumbs on each hand; or if the reach of scientific knowledge is unlimited, but only to beings whose brains are twice the size of ours? But our faculty of being universal constructors makes these issues as irrelevant as that of access to vitamins.

We shouldn’t slow down; we should accelerate progress to ensure our survival.

Setting up self-sufficient colonies on the moon and elsewhere in the solar system – and eventually in other solar systems – will be a good hedge against the extinction of our species or the destruction of civilization, and is a highly desirable goal for that reason among others. As Hawking has said:

Colonizing space is a way to hedge our bets.

The Inexplicable

The idea that there are things we simply cannot understand is wrong.

The astrophysicist Martin Rees has speculated that somewhere in the universe ‘there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.’ But that cannot be so.

What if X is the only thing that means a species can attain Y?
Where X is something humans don’t have.

Well, as long as we can discover this rule, and the attainment of Y is sufficiently desirable, we can advance towards augmenting ourselves with X.
We did that with computers and so many other technologies. The knowledge of the entire human race is accessible from a device in your pocket.

What if there’s something we simply cannot understand?
Well, if it’s simply about computational capacity and memory, we can get there with computers.

Otherwise, it seems like it would have to be something supernatural - only for the gods to know. In that case, we may as well regress to the old ways of following mythology.

But I’d rather try to figure it out anyway. Whether that is hubris or not, time will tell.

Automation and Progress

Technology automates the “perspiration” part of invention, making progress faster.

Both tasks can be automated so as to require arbitrarily little human effort or attention

One of the platitudes.. or sayings.. Deutsch has refuted is Edison’s “Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

First by saying that the 99% isn’t merely mindless work, but is actually where so many of the learning comes from.

Secondly, later in the book, by also saying that with the more advanced technology, the faster we automate the “perspiration” process.
For example, clothes can more easily be hand-crafted than cars. Therefore, we use automation to help us.

Creationism

Creationism (“God did it”) is a bad explanation.

As Charles Darwin put it in The Origin of Species, ‘On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility … should so frequently occur.’

If a perfect designer created everything, why are there flaws that work against the design’s purpose?

Reductionism and Utilitarianism

Reductionism in philosophy is empty. You can’t explain everything by reducing it to lower-level laws. Utilitarianism, like empiricism, was a useful step in rebelling against dogma, but its positive content is lacking.

This also illustrates the emptiness of reductionism in philosophy. For if I ask you for advice about what objectives to pursue in life, it is no good telling me to do what the laws of physics mandate. I shall do that in any case. Nor is it any good telling me to do what I prefer, because I don’t know what I prefer to do until I have decided what sort of life I want to lead or how I should want the world to be.

There’s an objective difference between right and wrong, just like there’s objective beauty.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Chatbots

True AI must have universality – a general-purpose ability to explain things, like a person. Deutsch believes that attributes like consciousness and explanation arrived in humans in a “jump to universality,” not incrementally.

AI abilities must have some sort of universality: special-purpose thinking would not count as thinking in the sense Turing intended. My guess is that every AI is a person: a general-purpose explainer.

Chatbots, even if they get better at imitating humans, aren’t on the path to true AI.

Becoming better at pretending to think is not the same as coming closer to being able to think.

The latter is, unfortunately, exactly how the Turing test asks the judge to regard a candidate AI. Hence it encouraged the attitude that if a program could fake AI well enough, one would have achieved it. But ultimately a non-AI program cannot fake AI. The path to AI cannot be through ever better tricks for making chatbots more convincing.

Achieving true AI will likely require a similar “jump to universality.”

Behaviorism is like believing that a convincing fake AI is actually intelligent (AGI).

There is a philosophy whose basic tenet is that those are the same. It is called behaviourism – which is instrumentalism applied to psychology. In other words, it is the doctrine that psychology can only, or should only, be the science of behaviour, not of minds; that it can only measure and predict relationships between people’s external circumstances (‘stimuli’) and their observed behaviours (‘responses’).

Behaviorism is to only regard behavior and not the mind.
In this context, it is to believe that a convincing (fake) AI chatbot is actual AI.

But a collection of tricks isn’t the same as genuine AI abilities.

A behaviourist would no doubt ask: what exactly is the difference between giving a chatbot a very rich repertoire of tricks, templates and databases and giving it AI abilities? What is an AI program, other than a collection of such tricks?

The analogue of evolutionary change in a species is creative thought in a person. The analogue of the idea that AI could be achieved by an accumulation of chatbot tricks is Lamarckism, the theory that new adaptations could be explained by changes that are in reality just a manifestation of existing knowledge.

It’s like Lamarckism – thinking that adaptations come from changes that are just manifestations of existing knowledge, instead of genuine creative thought.

This reminds me of Richard Sutton’s bitter lesson – that encoding human knowledge into models isn’t the way; they should learn through computation.

Infinity and Hilbert’s Hotel

“Potential infinity” and “realized infinity” are used interchangeably in the book. There’s no substantive difference in this context.

This is what opponents of infinity call a ‘potential infinity’ rather than a ‘realized’ one. For instance, the beginning of infinity can be described either as a condition where ‘progress in the future will be unbounded’ or as the condition where ‘an infinite amount of progress will be made’. But I use those concepts interchangeably, because in this context there is no substantive difference between them.

Hilbert’s Infinity Hotel illustrates that in an infinite set, there’s no “last” element.

The last room number is not infinity. First of all, there is no last room. The idea that any numbered set of rooms has a highest-numbered member is the first intuition from everyday life that we have to drop.

All room numbers are infinitely far below infinity. The hotel is never “full”; you can always add more guests.

Now imagine that Infinity Hotel is fully occupied. Each room contains one guest and cannot contain more. With finite hotels, ‘fully occupied’ is the same thing as ‘no room for more guests’. But Infinity Hotel always has room for more.

However, some infinities are larger than others (Cantor’s work). A countable infinity can be put in one-to-one correspondence with natural numbers; uncountable infinities cannot.

An infinity that is small enough to be placed in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers is called a ‘countable infinity’ – rather an unfortunate term, because no one can count up to infinity. But it has the connotation that every element of a countably infinite set could in principle be reached by counting those elements in some suitable order. Larger infinities are called uncountable.

We’re only scratching the surface, and we always will be.

That is one of the attributes of the unbounded growth of knowledge too: we are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else.

Optimism and the Precautionary Principle

Blind pessimism (the precautionary principle) is a bad approach.

There would be no existing ship designs to stick with, nor records to stay within, if no one had ever violated the precautionary principle.

It is to always choose what is safe. For example when building new vehicles, a pessimist would choose tried and true designs.

But you would never have gotten there had it not been for those willing to be optimistic. To believe that we could do better - and risk whatever might come their way as a consequence of designing something novel.

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

Optimism is the expectation that we’ll learn from failure.
We have historically died from soluble problems, had we only had the knowledge.

illness curable by penicillin
cold curable by heat
starvation curable by mass production of food

So likely today we face challenges that lead to our deaths. All we need is the knowledge to solve them. And that requires us to create it.

Let us aim to not perish from lack of knowledge.

The principle of optimism also helps deal with failure. Failure isn’t the will of the gods or destiny. It is the result of a lack of knowledge, in time.
It also tells us about the future: nearly all failures and successes are yet to come.

Usually the hardness of a problem is one of the very factors that cause it to be solved. Thus President John F. Kennedy said in 1962, in a celebrated example of an optimistic approach to the unknown, ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’

Embrace hard problems; those are the ones worth solving. Venturing into the unknown is necessary for progress.

We should see obstacles as problems, and problems as soluble.

Yet there have always been a few individuals who see obstacles as problems, and see problems as soluble.

Throughout history there have been mini-enlightenments. These were unfortunately extinguished. For example, Sparta likely led to the suffocation of optimism in Athens when they overtook it. Perhaps the Athenians thought the way of the Spartans right - they did win, after all. Even though the Athenians regained their independence later, their optimism died.

The death of these mini-enlightenments is more than unfortunate. It’s something we should take deeply personal. We could have been a space-faring civilization of immortals.

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.

We must never let optimism be extinguished again.

Wealth

Wealth is the ability to cause physical transformations.

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

Currency is meaningless if it doesn’t give you that ability. Power and relationships are also forms of wealth.

A Dynamic Society

Problems are inevitable because our knowledge is incomplete. But problems are soluble.

Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved.

An optimistic, dynamic society is open to innovation and based on traditions of criticism.

An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.

Its institutions improve, and the most important knowledge is how to detect and eliminate errors.

Criticism, Fallibilism, and Conjecture (Socrates and Hermes)

This chapter summarizes key points about criticism, fallibilism, and conjecture.

SOCRATES: So – let me combine that insight with what I know of criticism. A guess might come from a dream, or it might just be a wild speculation or random combination of ideas, or anything. But then we do not just accept it blindly or because we imagine it is ‘authorized’, or because we want it to be true. Instead we criticize it and try to discover its flaws.

We guess, then criticize, not accepting things blindly or because we want them to be true.

Original Works vs. Successive Works

We often learn from successive works, not original ones, because we improve upon them.

We don’t often read the originals because we improve upon them.

Original theories may contain misconceptions that have been corrected later.

Bad Philosophy

Bad philosophy denies the possibility, desirability, or existence of progress.

Bad philosophy Philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge.

Progress is the only effective way to oppose bad philosophy.

Rational and Anti-Rational Memes

The West is the first long-lived dynamic society.

This is the kind of idea that has a chance of becoming a long-lived meme in a rapidly changing society.

But which sort of memes (ideas, in this case, that replicate — using Dawkins theory) would actually survive in such an environment?

Well, those that are useful to a broad variety of people! Even when that large set of people has various beliefs, and sometimes even conflicting objectives.
Newton’s laws, for example.

Rational memes come from rational thought and depend on criticism to replicate faithfully.

Thus, memes of this new kind, which are created by rational and critical thought, subsequently also depend on such thought to get themselves replicated faithfully. So I shall call them rational memes.

Anti-rational memes survive by disabling critical faculties.

Memes of the older, static-society kind, which survive by disabling their holders’ critical faculties, I shall call anti-rational memes.

Rational memes evolve towards truth; anti-rational memes evolve away from it.

Anti-rational memes: like subscribing to entire belief systems (ideology) — “I am a democrat.”

Thus, just as rational memes evolve towards deep truths, anti-rational memes evolve away from them.

Anti-rational memes prevent critical thinking; rational memes require it.

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

Questioning Beliefs

We can be wrong. It isn’t a surprise — nor should it be.

We should question even our most fundamental beliefs and assumptions.
By continuously doing so, we’ll find wrong ideas that are even well-hidden.

Question tradition and “the usual way” you do things. Be wary when you give bad explanations to justify your actions.
Be careful of “it is obviously true”, “because I said so”, and similar. These help the anti-rational memes create a static society.

This helps us detect and eliminate errors, even those hidden by memes.

Imitation and Memes

We don’t acquire memes through imitation or observation.

So there is no such thing as ‘just imitating the behaviour’ – still less, therefore, can one discover those ideas by imitating it. One needs to know the ideas before one can imitate the behaviour. So imitating behaviour cannot be how we acquire memes.

Earlier, he gave the example of a child observing someone wave, and therefore learn the behavior. But it’s more than just the contraction and extension of muscles. It’s also the meaning of waving, who to wave to, in which situations to wave, and so on.

We humans learn very much from very few samples. This also just goes to show how much progress is needed for AI to reach human levels of intelligence.

Humans acquire memes in ways much different to animals.
Animals have genes that determine what they can, and should, imitate. So they already know the meaning of what they are about to take in.
Humans, on the other hand, may attend a lecture without knowing the meaning of the material beforehand. We’d attend the lecture and aim to find out.

We use our creativity to create explanations. We reject the bad explanations.
For example, in a lecture setting, the teacher may say “do the following.”
In such a case, we don’t walk up to the podium and push the professor away to take their place. That’s not a good explanation for what to imitate. Instead, the professor likely communicates an approach to something, which is what we take in.

We don’t just copy; we create good explanations of meaning.

We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error.

Sustainable Progress

Progress is sustainable indefinitely. But we need the optimism of a dynamic society. We need thinking and problem-solving. To act in accordance with the Enlightenment.

I have argued that the laws of nature cannot possibly impose any bound on progress: by the argument of Chapters 1 and 3, denying this is tantamount to invoking the supernatural. In other words, progress is sustainable, indefinitely. But only by people who engage in a particular kind of thinking and behaviour – the problem-solving and problem-creating kind characteristic of the Enlightenment. And that requires the optimism of a dynamic society.

As a consequence of optimism, we expect to learn from failures. We expect to grow.

One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one’s own and others’.

We can build anything within the laws of physics; the only problem is knowing how.

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

Biogeography and Jared Diamond

Deutsch criticizes Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” for its reductionist explanation of European success.

Diamond says that his main reason for writing Guns, Germs and Steel was that, unless people are convinced that the relative success of Europeans was caused by biogeography, they will for ever be tempted by racist explanations. Well, not readers of this book, I trust!

Deutsch criticizes Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, due to its “ultimate explanation” ascribing the European success in exploration and conquest to geographical advantages–favorable climates, a wealth of domesticable plants and animals, and an axis that promoted rapid diffusion of innovations. He wrote to book to ensure people wouldn’t come to racist conclusions.

However, Deutsch disproves the claims by arguing that the reasons Diamond gave couldn’t have explained it, as there were no good reason for them to be true. For example, Diamond claims that Europeans had fauna that could act as beasts of burden, and that the Americas had not. This isn’t true, they had llamas. They were found only in a certain region of South America, but there isn’t a good reason why they couldn’t have been transported (/traded, gifted, etc.) to Central America.

So in reality, it’s because they simply didn’t manage to solve the problems that enabled them to explore in the same manner as Europeans.

It makes no sense to trade narrow-minded, reductionist arguments for new ones, while claiming you’re trying to open the minds of people. This isn’t something the modern world has stopped doing, unfortunately.

In reality, the difference between Sparta and Athens, or between Savonarola and Lorenzo de’ Medici, had nothing to do with their genes; nor did the difference between the Easter Islanders and the imperial British. They were all people – universal explainers and constructors. But their ideas were different. Nor did landscape cause the Enlightenment. It would be much truer to say that the landscape we live in is the product of ideas. The primeval landscape, though packed with evidence and therefore opportunity, contained not a single idea. It is knowledge alone that converts landscapes into resources, and humans alone who are the authors of explanatory knowledge and hence of the uniquely human behaviour called ‘history’.

It’s about ideas, not geography.

Correcting Mistakes

We need a system for correcting mistakes.

So there is no resource-management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories. But there are ideas that reliably cause disasters, and one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned. The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes: removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters.

We experiment, learn, correct, and repeat. Judge by how good we are at correcting mistakes.

“This can’t last forever!!” No, and it won’t. We solved an issue leading to the current solution, and we’ll solve the issues that arise from that as well.

Reject “sustainable lifestyles”; only progress is sustainable.

We can’t survive by only being defensive.

Prevention and delaying tactics are useful, but they can be no more than a minor part of a viable strategy for the future. Problems are inevitable, and sooner or later survival will depend on being able to cope when prevention and delaying tactics have failed.

We need to be both defensive and offensive, focusing on problem-solving and explanation.

Climate Change

Climate change is a problem regardless of human cause.

It is not yet accurately known how sensitive the atmosphere’s temperature is to the concentration of carbon dioxide – that is, how much a given increase in concentration increases the temperature. This number is important politically, because it affects how urgent the problem is: high sensitivity means high urgency; low sensitivity means the opposite. Unfortunately, this has led to the political debate being dominated by the side issue of how ‘anthropogenic’ (human-caused) the increase in temperature to date has been.

We need to address it all the same.

Trying to predict what our net effect on the environment will be for the next century and then subordinating all policy decisions to optimizing that prediction cannot work.

Time and again, the unpredictable factor of new human ideas, both good and bad, would make the scientific prediction useless. The same is bound to be true – even more so – of forecasts today for the coming century.

We need the ability to quickly solve problems when they arise, not just prevent foreseeable ones.

Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.

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. Trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering.

How can we prevent problems we cannot foresee?

The solution is the ability to quickly solve the problem when it does arise.

We can’t bet on never getting the short straw (getting unlucky), so we better prepare by becoming first-class problem solvers.

There is as yet no serious sign of retreat into a sustainable lifestyle (which would really mean achieving only the semblance of sustainability), but even the aspiration is dangerous. For what would we be aspiring to? To forcing the future world into our image, endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes. But if we choose instead to embark on an open-ended journey of creation and exploration whose every step is unsustainable until it is redeemed by the next – if this becomes the prevailing ethic and aspiration of our society – then the ascent of man, the beginning of infinity, will have become, if not secure, then at least sustainable.

A “sustainable lifestyle” is dangerous; it forces the future into our current image. Only an open-ended journey of creation is sustainable.

Focus on reducing temperature or thriving with it, not just reducing emissions. Resource management is not sustainable.

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.

Fewer plastic straw regulations, more innovation on how to reduce temperature - or thrive with it increasing.

Resource management is not sustainable.

The Singularity

Deutsch refutes superintelligence.

Most advocates of the Singularity believe that, soon after the AI breakthrough, superhuman minds will be constructed and that then, as Vinge put it, ‘the human era will be over.’ But my discussion of the universality of human minds rules out that possibility. Since humans are already universal explainers and constructors, they can already transcend their parochial origins, so there can be no such thing as a superhuman mind as such.

Humans are already universal explainers; there can be no superhuman mind. There can only be further automation, not a fundamentally different kind of intelligence.

The Singularity as a discontinuity is a mistake.

Similarly, the Singularity is often assumed to be a moment of unprecedented upheaval and danger, as the rate of innovation becomes too rapid for humans to cope with. But this is a parochial misconception. During the first few centuries of the Enlightenment, there has been a constant feeling that rapid and accelerating innovation is getting out of hand. But our capacity to cope with, and enjoy, changes in our technology, lifestyle, ethical norms and so on has been increasing too, with the weakening and extinction of some of the anti-rational memes that used to sabotage it.

Knowledge will grow exponentially, but our capacity to cope will increase too.

The argument essentially goes that things will get “out of hand” and we won’t be able to keep up due to some recursively improving (compounding) intelligence.

We’ve thought this before, but things have been fine. We get better at coping with it, and learn to deal with it.

As the Whitehead quote goes, society advances by the number of things it can automate.

Speculation vs. Prophecy

Predicting beyond the relevant horizon is futile (prophecy), but wondering and speculating are vital.

To attempt to predict anything beyond the relevant horizon is futile – it is prophecy – but wondering what is beyond it is not. When wondering leads to conjecture, that constitutes speculation, which is not irrational either. In fact it is vital.

Every new idea begins as a speculation, and every speculation begins with a problem.

The Only Way of Thinking

There’s only one way of thinking that leads to progress: seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism.

Many people have an aversion to infinity of various kinds. But there are some things that we do not have a choice about. There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What lies ahead of us is in any case infinity. All we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, wrong or right, death or life.

What lies ahead is infinity; we choose whether it’s an infinity of ignorance or knowledge.

Resources

These are some of the resources I’ve found useful in understanding the book.

The following book lists are taken directly from the book - I have not yet read all of them.

Everyone should read these

Jacob Bronowski - The Ascent of Man (BBC Publications, 1973)
Jacob Bronowski - Science and Human Values (Harper & Row, 1956)
Richard Byrne - “Imitation as Behaviour Parsing” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B358 (2003)
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976)
David Deutsch - “Comment on Michael Lockwood, ‘Many Minds’ Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics” in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47, 2 (1996)
David Deutsch - The Fabric of Reality (Allen Lane, 1997)
Karl Popper - Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge, 1963)
Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, 1945)

Additional resources

Some notes from the reflect.app team’s notes
We have made virtually no progress over most human history. Only since the European Enlightenment have we seen progress that is discernible in a human lifetime.

At first, progress was slow. Then it accelerated.
We tried to institutionalize a tradition of Criticism, which is the key to rapid progress.
Criticism is necessary because it’s how we grow our knowledge; it can only grow through correcting misconceptions in our theories, and you won’t find misconceptions if you never stop to question your theories in the first place.

Through Conjecture and criticism, we have created all knowledge and progress.
No idea can be above criticism.

Humanity has ‘attempted’ multiple times to accelerate progress. We only succeeded with the European Enlightenment. Athens was a good attempt.
But why did we fail all those times? Our culture was wrong.

Science is the practice of finding good explanations.
Among the many misconceptions of where scientific theories come from is Empiricism. Another is Inductivism.
It is also a misconception to think that testability is the defining characteristic of [[The Scientific Method]]. While important, it cannot be. (See description under “Empiricism”).

Good explanations differ from bad explanations in that they are hard to vary.
Explanations are inherently error prone (see fallibilism). This is why we need criticism, and to correct our errors.
Explanations can have unbounded reach, meaning they can even apply to solve problems we didn’t foresee when creating the explanation.

Any problem can be solved with the right explanations, limited only by the laws of nature.

Explanations are a form of information.
Information can only be processed in one way: with Universal Computation of the kind invented by Babbage and Turing.

Glossary

Conjecture: A guess or hypothesis about the world that is not yet known to be true or false.
Prediction: A statement about what will happen in the future, often based on current knowledge and theories.
Knowledge: Explanatory information that allows one to solve problems and achieve goals.
- Knowledge creation: The process of creating new explanations through conjecture and criticism.
Explanation: An assertion about what is out there in the physical world, how it behaves, and why.
- Good explanation: An explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.
- Bad explanation: An explanation that is easy to vary while still accounting for the phenomena it purports to explain.
Creativity: The capacity to create new explanations.
Criticism: The act of questioning and testing explanations to eliminate errors and make progress.
Optimism: The expectation that all evils and problems are soluble, and that progress can and will continue indefinitely.
Pessimism: The belief that some evils or problems are insoluble or inevitable.
Fallibilism: The recognition that all our knowledge is tentative, and that we can always be mistaken.
Justificationism: The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.
Empiricism: The misconception that all knowledge comes from sensory experience.
- When this was first introduced, it helped defend against traditional authorities and dogma. Any claims of supernatural had to be backed up by hard evidence, which meant science superseded religious superstition.
- However, empiricism only worked because scientists didn’t take it literally. If they had, we wouldn’t have made much progress. Testability is not sufficient because prediction isn’t, and cannot be, the purpose of science. Predictions don’t tell you anything about how a system works.
- I could predict that the sun rises every morning, and it would likely become confirmed through experiments. I’d just check every day for a few days, and I’d say I was right. But that tells me nothing of orbital dynamics.
- The goal of science is not to merely predict, but to understand and explain. Testing is part of the puzzle, but not the entire thing. The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism. We use experimentation and observation only to choose between existing theories, not as the source of new ones.
Inductivism: The misconception that scientific theories are obtained by generalizing from repeated experiences.
- This makes me think of Taleb’s Turkey. Taleb’s Turkey illustrates the problem with inductivism by showing how a turkey might observe that every day, it is fed by humans. Based on this repeated experience, the turkey may induce that humans are benevolent creatures that exist to ensure its well-being. This inductive reasoning leads the turkey to a comforting but ultimately false conclusion about its future. Right up until the day before Thanksgiving, every observation confirms the turkey’s theory. However, on Thanksgiving’s eve, the turkey receives a lethal surprise, disproving its theory based on all prior observations.
Reductionism: The misconception that explanations of higher-level phenomena can always be reduced to lower-level ones.
Instrumentalism: The view that scientific theories are merely instruments for predicting observations, rather than descriptions of reality.
Relativism: The doctrine that statements cannot be objectively true or false, only true or false relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard.
Universality: The capacity to perform any computation that is possible in the physical world.
Infinity: The idea that something is unlimited or endless, such as the potential for knowledge growth.
Reach: The ability of an explanation to solve problems beyond the ones it was originally designed to solve.
Science: The process of creating and refining explanatory theories about the world through conjecture and criticism.
Problem: A question or challenge that requires an explanation or solution.
Progress: The creation of solutions to problems via the creation of new knowledge.
Meme: A replicator in the realm of ideas, capable of being transmitted from one person to another and evolving over time.
- Rational meme: A meme that encourages critical thinking and the search for good explanations.
- Anti-rational meme: A meme that discourages critical thinking and promotes blind acceptance of ideas.
Static society: A society that suppresses innovation and creativity to maintain the status quo.
Dynamic society: A society that embraces change, innovation, and the creation of new knowledge.
Enlightenment: A philosophical movement characterized by a commitment to reason, science, progress, and humanism.
Sustainability: The capacity for something to persist or be maintained indefinitely.
The beginning of infinity: The point at which an endless process of knowledge creation and problem-solving begins, and the principle that such a process can and should continue without limit.

Notes on

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch