The Beginning of Infinity

"Deutsch's exploration of knowledge creation and its infinite potential aligns with Mark Zuckerberg's interest in technological progress and the future of humanity. It's an expected read for someone exploring how we can solve problems and build a better world."

"This 21st-century statement of the ideals of the Enlightenment offers fresh insight on a vast number of topics."

"Deutsch's focus on the power of explanations and knowledge creation aligns with Naval Ravikant's exploration of first principles thinking and the nature of truth. It's an expected read for someone interested in foundational ideas about progress and the human condition."

"This book's exploration of knowledge creation and the potential for unbounded progress aligns with Patrick Collison's interest in long-term thinking and societal advancement. It's an expected read for someone exploring foundational theories of computation and human flourishing."

"This book's exploration of knowledge creation and its transformative power aligns with Marc Andreessen's long-standing interest in technological progress and the future of innovation. It's an expected read for someone exploring how explanations drive human advancement."

"A staple recommendation; expanded his understanding of the potential of human knowledge and progress."

"Fluidly switching between evolutionary biology, quantum physics, mathematics, philosophy, ancient history and more, Deutsch offers surprisingly — or, perhaps knowing his work, unsurprisingly — plausible answers to everything from why beauty exists to what is infinity."

"David Deutsch is a physicist. He wrote a book in the 90s called The Fabric of Reality . This is his more recent book, and it’s called The Beginning of Infinity . It’s just a wonderfully entertaining romp through astronomy, physics at every scale, science, history, culture. It’s a fabulous popular science book, in a way, though it can also be challenging. What’s central to the topic we’re talking about is that Deutsch picks up and develops Popper’s central concept that I just talked about in The Myth of the Framework . He crystallizes it around two ideas: conjecture and criticism. These are essentially labels for the things that Popper promoted and articulated. The idea of conjecture is that to explain what’s going on, you use your creative side, you conjecture a hypothesis, you come up with reasons why you think something is true. Then you’re subjected to serious criticism. All of the things we’ve said about Popper stand in terms of Deutsch. “Politics is deeply embedded in identity and revenge…It’s not about getting to truths and good explanations” Deutsch argues that this approach is what led to the Enlightenment and true scientific knowledge—and also cumulative knowledge that knows no end. That’s the beginning of infinity. Once you apply this way of thinking, it opens up the possibility of infinitely building knowledge. That’s what culture is: we often refer to it as cumulative. You’ve got to do it right. You can’t build on falsehoods because sooner or later reality will come for you. You’ll die or your spaceship won’t fly. That’s really the essence of it. At the end of each chapter, Deutsch has a little summary page. He’ll say, ‘This is another manifestation of the beginning of infinity. Here’s how we open up an infinite world for ourselves through whatever the domain is that he has just worked through.’* It includes the domains of politics and culture, but also scientific innovation and how we can get to the stars. Nothing that he’s proposing so far is really different from what Popper has argued. It’s just that Popper is not as influential as he should be in this day and age. Deutsch is saying, This really is the way to think about getting to the truth. An example is good science. Do you want a rocket to fly? You’d better know the truth. Those people who put the James Webb telescope into space, flying around the second Lagrange point a million miles from Earth, with a badminton court-sized sheet of gold capturing a vision of the universe—they didn’t do that by pulling stuff out of a hat. Over years and decades, they subjected themselves to the most intense self-criticism and that allowed them to achieve something almost unimaginable. Deutsch’s point is that every breakthrough in science is like that—whether it’s today or the old stories of Kepler and Newton (he also talks about those in the book). So that’s a fundamental piece of it. The other thing to point out about this book is that Deutsch emphasizes that critique of an idea is important, but that it’s nothing without the conjecture side. You’ve got to have good explanations. You have to be able to recognize what a good explanation is. What does it consist of? How would it persist in the long term? He’s saying that the quality of explanations is really fundamental. You don’t go testing an idea unless you’re satisfied that there’s a high-quality, plausible explanation behind it and it’s not just some hunch. He is setting standards for imagining what’s true: you can’t just imagine anything’s true and try to critique it. You’ve got to know how to conjecture well. Good explanation is key. One problem with the Popper-style method of getting at knowledge is just because you have a way of trying to falsify your hypothesis, that’s not reason enough to actually set up a research program and put resources into doing that. You have to have a good hypothesis based in an interesting, useful, well-founded explanation. What’s so interesting and useful about Deutsch’s book is that he lays out the components of what a good explanation looks like. Essentially, it’s a 21st-century version of Popper, applied in a rich and real way to quite a diverse set of demands. So it’s highly recommended. He is able to convey the idea that the scientific method we’ve been discussing is applicable to any domain. In political discourse, that’s also the approach you should take. The challenge is how to get everybody doing that together. You have everyone on the same team: team truth. I’m attacking you not because I want to attack you, but because I want to get closer to the truth and to help you. There’s a whole shift there. Politics is not very much like that. Politics is deeply embedded in identity and revenge and those types of motivations. It’s not about getting to truths and good explanations."

"With the serene confidence that only a brilliant theoretical physicist can get away with, David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity" defends the unfashionable view that the Enlightenment inaugurated an era of unlimited intellectual and moral progress."