The Beginning of Infinity

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David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity explores the nature of progress and knowledge. He argues that progress is unbounded and driven by the human quest for good explanations, which are created through conjecture and criticism, not mere justification or reliance on authority. Deutsch contrasts fallibilism, the acceptance of the inherent limitations of our knowledge, with justificationism, the search for absolute certainty. He emphasizes that scientific theories are not derived from observation but are bold conjectures refined through testing, and that good explanations are difficult to find but resistant to easy variation. Finally, he asserts that the human capacity to create and apply explanatory knowledge is the key to overcoming challenges and transforming the world, limited only by the laws of physics, not inherent human limitations.

The text presents several key ideas about the nature of progress, knowledge, and the human capacity to solve problems. Here are some of the most important:
Progress is driven by the quest for good explanations. Progress, both theoretical and practical, stems from the human endeavor to find true explanations, and to differentiate them from false ones.
Scientific theories are conjectures. They are not derived from observations, but are bold guesses created by rearranging, combining, and altering existing ideas.
There are no authoritative sources of knowledge. The concept of "justified true belief" is challenged by the idea of fallibilism, which recognizes that all knowledge is subject to error. Fallibilism is necessary for unlimited knowledge growth because it encourages the correction of past misconceptions and the improvement of current ideas.
Testability is a key component of science, but not its purpose. While testability is a defining characteristic of the scientific method, the real purpose of science is to pursue good explanations.
Good explanations are hard to vary and help to avoid self-deception. The more difficult a good explanation is to find, the more resistant it is to change. A good explanation helps people avoid fooling themselves.
The universe is our home and resource and we should not feel insignificant because of its size. The universe is not there to overwhelm humans; it is our home and our resource.
Scientific instruments allow us to perceive phenomena beyond our everyday experience. They are built using explanatory theories that help us to see what is really there.
Explanations of reality should not be anthropocentric. While human-level explanations are adequate for everyday affairs, they have not yielded good explanations beyond that. The "Principle of Mediocrity" suggests that humans are not significant in the cosmic scheme of things.
The human capacity for problem-solving is not bounded. The reach of problem-solving, knowledge creation, and adapting the world is not limited.
Technological progress depends on explanatory knowledge. The ability to create explanatory knowledge gives people the power to transform nature, which is ultimately limited only by the universal laws of physics. All technological knowledge can eventually be implemented in automated devices.
Problems are soluble. The ability to solve problems is a fundamental aspect of human survival and progress, and there is no problem that is an impassable barrier.

These ideas are interconnected, highlighting the importance of good explanations, the nature of knowledge, and the boundless potential of human progress.

Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful. They should have known better. There is indeed an objective difference between a false explanation and a true one, between chronic failure to solve a problem

all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.

Must progress come to an end – either in catastrophe or in some sort of completion – or is it unbounded? The answer is the latter. That unboundedness is the ‘infinity’ referred to in the title of this book. Explaining it, and the conditions under which progress can and cannot happen, entails a journey through virtually every fundamental field of science and philosophy.

The physical world is not only much bigger and more violent than it once seemed, it is also immensely richer in detail, diversity and incident. Yet it all proceeds according to elegant laws of physics that we understand in some depth. I do not know which is more awesome: the phenomena themselves or the fact that we know so much about them.

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

But, in reality, scientific theories are not ‘derived’ from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses – bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them.

To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge. Thus ‘how do we know…?’ is transformed into ‘by what authority do we claim…?’ The latter question is a chimera that may well have wasted more philosophers’ time and effort than any other idea. It converts the quest for truth into a quest for certainty (a feeling) or for endorsement (a social status). This misconception is called justificationism.

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. To believers in the justified-true-belief theory of knowledge, this recognition is the occasion for despair or cynicism, because to them it means that knowledge is unattainable. But to those of us for whom creating knowledge means understanding better what is really there, and how it really behaves and why, fallibilism is part of the very means by which this is achieved. Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed to try to change them for the better. In contrast, the logic of justificationism is to seek (and typically, to believe that one has found) ways of securing ideas against change. Moreover, the logic of fallibilism is that one not only seeks to correct the misconceptions of the past, but hopes in the future to find and change mistaken ideas that no one today questions or finds problematic. So it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity.

The quest for authority led empiricists to downplay and even stigmatize conjecture, the real source of all our theories. For if the senses were the only source of knowledge, then error (or at least avoidable error) could be caused only by adding to, subtracting from or misinterpreting what that source is saying. Thus empiricists came to believe that, in addition to rejecting ancient authority and tradition, scientists should suppress or ignore any new ideas they might have, except those that had been properly ‘derived’ from experience. As Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes put it in the short story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.’ But that was itself a capital mistake. We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden,* and hence fallible, as all our theories are.

However, rebellion against authority cannot by itself be what made the difference. Authorities have been rejected many times in history, and only rarely has any lasting good come of it. The usual sequel has merely been that new authorities replaced the old. What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same. Thus the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge: by trying not to rely on authority.

Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science.

The reason that testability is not enough is that prediction is not, and cannot be, the purpose of science.

I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children…

In general, when theories are easily variable in the sense I have described, experimental testing is almost useless for correcting their errors. I call such theories bad explanations. Being proved wrong by experiment, and changing the theories to other bad explanations, does not get their holders one jot closer to the truth.

The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. It is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed:

That is what we do today. We do not test every testable theory, but only the few that we find are good explanations.

discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.

That is what a good explanation will do for you: it makes it harder for you to fool yourself.

Chapter 2

Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.

A trial that fails is still fun. A repetitive experiment is not repetitive if one is thinking about the ideas that it is testing and the reality that it is investigating.

Most of what happens is too fast or too slow, too big or too small, or too remote, or hidden behind opaque barriers, or operates on principles too different from anything that influenced our evolution. But in some cases we can arrange for such phenomena to become perceptible, via scientific instruments.

The better we come to understand phenomena remote from our everyday experience, the longer those chains of interpretation become, and every additional link necessitates more theory.

Yet, over time, the conclusions that science has drawn have become ever truer to reality. Its quest for good explanations corrects the errors, allows for the biases and misleading perspectives, and fills in the gaps. This is what we can achieve when, as Feynman said, we keep learning more about how not to fool ourselves.

But the fact is that progress requires the application of ever more knowledge in advance of our observations.

Explanatory theories tell us how to build and operate instruments in exactly the right way to work this miracle. Like conjuring tricks in reverse, such instruments fool our senses into seeing what is really there.

Chapter 3

Most ancient accounts of the reality beyond our everyday experience were not only false, they had a radically different character from modern ones: they were anthropocentric. That is to say, they centred on human beings, and more broadly on people – entities with intentions and human-like thoughts – which included powerful, supernatural people such as spirits and gods.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (p. 42). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

After all, that is how we explain much of our everyday experience even today: if a jewel is mysteriously missing from a locked safe, we seek human-level explanations such as error or theft (or, under some circumstances, conjuring), not new laws of physics. But that anthropocentric approach has never yielded any good explanations beyond the realm of human affairs.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (pp. 42-43). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

the ‘Principle of Mediocrity’: there is nothing significant about humans (in the cosmic scheme of things). As the physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are ‘just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that’s in orbit round a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy’.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (pp. 43-44). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

At root, the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth metaphor overlap in a claim about reach: they both claim that the reach of the distinctively human way of being – that is to say, the way of problem-solving, knowledge-creating and adapting the world around us – is bounded. And they argue that its bounds cannot be very far beyond what it has already reached. Trying to go beyond that range must lead to failure and catastrophe respectively.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (p. 54). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Since the Enlightenment, technological progress has depended specifically on the creation of explanatory knowledge. People had dreamed for millennia of flying to the moon, but it was only with the advent of Newton’s theories about the behaviour of invisible entities such as forces and momentum that they began to understand what was needed in order to go there. This increasingly intimate connection between explaining the world and controlling it is no accident, but is part of the deep structure of the world. Consider the set of all conceivable transformations of physical objects. Some of those (like faster-than-light communication) never happen because they are forbidden by laws of nature; some (like the formation of stars out of primordial hydrogen) happen spontaneously; and some (such as converting air and water into trees, or converting raw materials into a radio telescope) are possible, but happen only when the requisite knowledge is present – for instance, embodied in genes or brains. But those are the only possibilities. That is to say, every putative physical transformation, to be performed in a given time with given resources or under any other conditions, is either – impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or – achievable, given the right knowledge.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (pp. 55-56). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (p. 56). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

all technological knowledge can eventually be implemented in automated devices. This is another reason that ‘one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration’ is a misleading description of how progress happens: the ‘perspiration’ phase can be automated – just as the task of recognizing galaxies on astronomical photographs was. And the more advanced technology becomes, the shorter is the gap between inspiration and automation. The more this happens in the moon colony, the less human effort will be required to live there. Eventually the moon colonists will take air for granted, just as the people now living in Oxfordshire take for granted that water will flow if they turn on a tap. If either of those populations lacked the right knowledge, their environment would soon kill them.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (p. 58). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In the unique case of humans, the difference between a hospitable environment and a deathtrap depends on what knowledge they have created. Once enough knowledge has been embodied in the lunar colony, the colonists can devote their thoughts and energies to creating even more knowledge, and soon it will cease to be a colony and become simply home. No one will think of the moon as a fringe habitat, distinguished from our ‘natural’ environment on Earth, any more than we now think of Oxfordshire as being fundamentally different from the Great Rift Valley as a place to live.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (p. 58). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

how they create it (conjecture and criticism of ideas, rather than the variation and selection of genes).

conjecture: an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information.

Nor will we ever run out of problems. The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates. That must be so, if only because there can be no such thing as an ultimate explanation: just as ‘the gods did it’ is always a bad explanation, so any other purported foundation of all explanations must be bad too. It must be easily variable because it cannot answer the question: why that foundation and not another? Nothing can be explained only in terms of itself. That holds for philosophy just as it does for science, and in particular it holds for moral philosophy: no utopia is possible, but only because our values and our objectives can continue to improve indefinitely.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (p. 64). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them. It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible to us. So let us carve that in stone too:

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity (pp. 64-65). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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