“The Beginning of Infinity”: David Deutsch on knowledge and human progress

 

I recently finished The Beginning of Infinity by physicist David Deutsch. Here are a sampling of ideas that I thought were noteworthy or compelling:

• A key driver of human progress is the search for better explanations. “There is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism” (203).
• “Scientific truth consists of correspondence between theories and physical reality” (39).
• He rejects the idea that knowledge is bounded, either by the methods of finding knowledge or the capacity of the human brain. “Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.”
• Consciousness and free will are emergent phenomena, but that doesn’t mean they are not real. 
• “If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it” (154).
• Societies can either be static or dynamic (or something in between). Static societies are dominated by memes (ideas) that resist change. Dynamic societies promote memes that foster criticism and critical thinking. Of the two, dynamic societies progress and discover knowledge. In contrast, static societies by and large perpetuate human suffering, ignorance, and misery. 
• The human species made progress because it became able to internalize and reproduce memes (similar to Yuval Harari’s “imagined stories” argument). Through most of human history, memes were static. But the Enlightenment shifted the scales toward dynamic memes and has resulted in the fastest period of progress and advancement of knowledge ever in our species.

It caused me to reflect on a variety of questions, including:

• What are some key things that humans want to do that are 1) not forbidden by the laws of nature but are 2) simply waiting for the appropriate knowledge to be discovered?
• What “static memes” are reflected in my ideas and behavior? What are the consequences of this? What can I do increase the proportion of dynamic memes that I employ?
• What are occasions in which “static memes” are beneficial to humans and societies? How does one determine what is “beneficial”?
• What explanations do I have about my own behavior or those of other important phenomena? What am I doing to test the validity of those explanations?