Beginning Of Infinity I

Author: Samuel Peterson

Date Published
2020-12-31 (ISO 8601)
75-12-31 (Post Bomb)

This post is the first of potentially many about an extraordinary book: "The Beginning of Infinity", By David Duetsch. I first read it about eight years ago, and I believe I have thought about it every year since then. I have even mentioned it twice in previous posts on this blog. It could not be put off any longer: I needed to write my thoughts on the book.

But where to begin? Every chapter is dripping with stuff to talk about. This project will have to be broken into several posts with their specific focus. Provided I don't come to a premature demise, I can promise you at least three posts with the following themes:

• A summary of "The Beginning of Infinity" and its principle topics: Epistemology and the Enlightenment.(this post)
• Good Explanations
• David Deutsch's thoughts on sustainability.

Structure of the book

Although not formally separated thusly, "The Beginning of Infinity" is composed of two roughly equal parts. The first deals with the actual theme of the book: epistemology, or the study of knowledge. The second part is a sequence of commentaries or opinions which the author has, where the particular viewpoint of epistemology as developed in the first part plays a crucial role. One way of looking at the structure is that the first part of the book is a fundamental explanation of why Deutsch thinks the way he does about matters discussed in the second part. Separating the two parts of the book is a playful summary of the first in the form of a Socratic dialogue.

The topics covered in the second part of the "The Beginning of Infinity" are diverse. They include:

• A popular scientific summary of the Multiversal(or "many worlds") interpretation of quantum mechanics.
• A criticism of modern philosophy, including more canonical interpretations of quantum mechanics.
• A discussion on the existence of objective beauty.
• A speculation on the nature of creativity.
• The folly of prophesy regarding knowledge.

"The Beginning of Infinity" employs a peculiar structure in its chapters. At the end of almost all of them are the sections:

• Terminology: definitions for idiosyncratic usage of language in the chapter.
• Meanings of "The Beginning of Infinity" in the chapter: Key concepts that corroborate the theme of the book.
• Summary: a summary of the chapter, like what you might find in a textbook.

I found this format to be endearing, and in the case of terminology, legitimately useful. Not only to keep the usage of language straight, but also to form a convenient scaffold for me if I choose to delve deeper into writing about this book than the three posts promised above. For instance, I could get at least a moderately sized post about Deutsch's definition of wealth.

Epistemology

Epistemology forms the central philosophical topic of "The Beginning of Infinity". It is a development of the works of Karl Popper. In fact in the chapter "A conversation with Socrates" which is the summary of the first part of the book, the author only credits himself with summarizing Karl Poppers works with minor additions thrown in. Since I am not too familiar with Karl Popper's work, I cannot weigh in on whether I believe it to be an accurate synthesis. I will say that it seems to be a very good explanation of how knowledge is created, although I still find myself at a loss to give a good formal definition of what knowledge is.

Let me just use an informal notion that knowledge is a type of information which is instantiated in some physical form, whether that form is DNA, writing, oral tradition, mechanical design or what have you. How does knowledge come into existence? It is guessed at, or conjectured.

By guessed at, I am taking some poetic licence. Although the model is that human knowledge is formed by guesses in the literal sense, there is another common form of knowledge which we encounter: that which is instantiated in DNA. In that case new knowledge is "guessed at" in the sense that it is generated by random mutation.

Knowledge, however, is more than mere conjecture. Knowledge must be a guess that fails to be discarded. Exactly what form this process of discarding or survival takes depends on the environment, and on the form of knowledge in question.

In the case of the "guesses" or mutations in a DNA sequence, what comes afterward is a process of selection by the environment in which bad guesses (or at any rate, guesses which are bad at replicating themselves) are discarded. Depending on just what that environment is, certain mutations are going to be much more likely to succeed than others, which is why biological adaptations seem to exploit aspects of their environments.

In the case of explanatory knowledge, guesses made by people are discarded or adopted in ways that are dependant on the social environment. In societies dominated by anti-rational practices, authority or the drive to conformity is the rubric upon which that new guess is judged, whereas a culture governed more by reason would accept or reject the new guess by subjecting it to a gauntlet of criticism and comparison with alternatives.

This model for knowledge (which I shall call a popperian model) is contrasted with two other models of knowledge. These models are: justificationism, and empiricism.

Justificationism was, so Deutsch contends, the norm throughout most of human cultures and history. It is the belief that knowledge is something which is given by some authority. It purports to absolute certainty with regard to knowledge, and in many cases also makes the claim that expansion of knowledge beyond what is laid out by the authority is impossible. Many incarnations of religion might come to mind with this description, which is no accident. To say the author finds this model to be pernicious is an understatement -- I believe David Deutsch thinks Justificationism (and its consequent tendency toward creating static societies) is the single most oppressive notion humans have come up with.

Empiricism is the model that knowledge is derived from sensory experience. This derivation could be through induction or generalization. Essentially, it is the notion that observation of nature is all that is necessary to determine its laws. In empiricism's most extreme form, instrumentalism, knowledge can only describe observation, leaving no rooms for actual descriptions of reality. The model of empiricism (though not instrumentalism) was the prevailing one amongst scientists during much of the enlightenment, and Deutsch credits it with the overthrowing of justificationism in the field of science in the west.

The Justificationist model of knowledge is clearly incompatible with the popperian one. The popperian model assumes the fallibility of any explanation, whereas Justificationism assumes absolute truth in its explanations. The popperian model's method for approaching the truth is via criticism, while criticism is actively suppressed in Justificationism, which relies on authority to assert truth.

Where the empirical and popperian models of knowledge start to be mutually exclusive is a little less clear, indeed Deutsch's assertion is that scientists of the early western enlightenment practiced the philosophy of Popper in their work while being mistaken that their contributions to knowledge followed an empirical approach. The two models of knowledge share a crucial feature: dependence on observation of the natural world, what Deutsch would call evidence. The core difference is that while the popperian approach is to use evidence to critique existing explanations, the empirical model states that knowledge is extracted from observation.

To give a brief sense of the shortcomings of empiricism as a philosophy, one needs only think about the conclusions drawn after seeing a magic trick: when done correctly, the audience will have sensed with their eyes things that would defy their models for how the world worked. Nonetheless nobody would seriously consider that their ideas of how nature worked were dis-proven. This is so even when, as is typical, the audience doesn't know how the trick was performed. This failure of the magician to shake the core beliefs of the audience is due to the fact that the audience's interpretation of their senses is mediated by explanations or models which they have. Namely that magic tricks are mere illusions -- tricks of perspective that make the impossible appear to happen. Their observations of what is before their eyes are "theory laden", as in fact all observations are.

Explanatory Knowledge and the Enlightenment

"The Beginning of Infinity" has a historical focus as well, that of the western enlightenment. Sometime around the 17^th century, western european culture stumbled upon a pattern of behaviour which proved to be far better at acquiring explanatory knowledge than had previously been discovered (or at least, practiced for any appreciable amount of consecutive time). The patterns of behaviour are identified as a rejection of justificationism as basis for knowledge, a tradition of criticism, and a search for "good explanations". The widespread adoption of these norms are what Deutsch refers to as the Enlightenment.

Deutsch credits the Enlightenment with the sudden and sustained expansion of knowledge which is unprecedented. A corollary is that the rapid progress of the last few centuries would not have happened without these changes in behaviour. Had a tradition of criticism and of seeking good explanations not taken hold, we would now be in a far more impoverished state, both intellectually and materially. The enlightenment is not the inevitable culmination of philosophy that had come before it, but a discovery more earth-shaking than the domestication of the horse or the invention of agriculture. Another corollary is that it could have come a lot sooner, and as the book makes clear, the principle culprit for the enlightenment not coming sooner is the tyranny of justificationism in static cultures.

If it is the culture of the enlightenment which is responsible for knowledge to flourish, then it behooves us to cherish the traditions inherent in the enlightenment. If you are to distill the enlightenment down to it's roots, it is the right to intellectual freedom, the right to criticism, and the belief that things can be better. To the extent that a religion constitutes a principle to live by, then "The Beginning of Infinity" may well be considered a religious text.

The religion of the Enlightenment

On the surface, Epistemology is the focus of "The Beginning of Infinity", however the tone of the book appears to aim higher than that. Deutsch spends a good deal of energy explaining the cosmic reach of explanatory knowledge, the unbounded potential for improvements of knowledge, and the principle of optimism -- That all evils (in the conventional and secular sense of the word) are caused by insufficient knowledge. So much time is spent on these matters, it may well be that Epistemology is just a vessel for the true subject of the book. "The Beginning of Infinity" might in fact be a humanist¹ masterpiece.

In almost every case, a religion will attempt to establish the following ideas:

• The significance or the origin of man.
• Man's place in the universe.
• Heroic ideals, or at least a definition of the good life.

Often these and other matters are treated through a justificationist approach via the assertion of truths and the codifying of blasphemy. "The Beginning of Infinity" covers these exact subjects through a rational and fallibilist approach, and with grandiosity.

Take Deutsch's stance on man's significance, or rather the significance of explanatory knowledge, of which man is a universal generator: It is a thing of cosmic importance. The argument is as follows: imagine that it is possible with the right knowledge to add/remove mass from a star or to otherwise alter it at such a scale so as to significantly change its radiance or life-cycle. Then when someone observes a cosmic object, like a star, and wishes to know what its evolution will be, that someone would have to account for whether such knowledge near the star exists. So assuming that such powers are possible, then yes, explanatory knowledge has the potential of immense reach. The book makes other similarly ambitious assertions of man's potential, the sum total of which is the impression that figurative godhood is ours for the taking.

"The Beginning of Infinity" is clear about the good life. There is a wonderful conjecture: "happiness is the state of continually solving one's problems"². There are also numerous exhortations to exercise one's faculties of reason, to not blindly trust in authority, and to abhor suppression of other's rights to criticise ideas -- for it is by criticism and reason that knowledge grows best, and thus evils reduced.

I credit the idea of regarding "The Beginning of Infinity" as a work on religion to "Homo Deus" by Noah Yuval Hariri, who, like Deutsch, uses terms in an idiosyncratic way. "Homo Deus", for which I have an article on this blog, is a challenge to the future of humanism due to the changes brought in by computers. "Homo Deus" mainly exposes as a fallacy the romantic notion that humans are imbued with a magical whatsit which makes our experiences fundamentally more meaningful than those of other animals. It essentially states that we are just pieces of meat which can be manipulated by technology just like any other (and computers are likely to be better than us at an ever-growing set of things). "The Beginning of Infinity" doesn't try to refute anything in "Homo Deus", but rather focusses on the ability which people do uniquely possess: the ability to create explanatory knowledge. If "Homo Deus" poses the question "is man sacred?", Deutsch's answer is a resounding yes.

It's not just about science

Although David Deutsch is himself a scientist by education, and although "The Beginning of Infinity" deals with scientific ideas a great deal, science is not all "The Beginning of Infinity" is about. Reason's field of application is in all things: there is objective progress to be made in morals, humor, art, governance; literally anything capable of being done is subject to improvement through reason and critique.

If enlightenment patterns of thought and behaviour can be so foundational to a way of life as to be considered a religion, they must bear fruits in this larger arena of human endeavor -- science alone is sufficient for only a few mangled souls. This idea that objective progress is possible in fields which to me seem more subjective is both doubtful and intriguing. Whether or not Deutsch is correct that criticism can bring about better explanations of, say, "what is beautiful?" rather than just different explanations is a critical test of how far enlightenment thought can take us.

How we avoid fooling ourselves into thinking we are making progress rather than just replacing one bad explanation for another is by seeking something called a "good explanation". This is a concept which still is a bit elusive to me, but Duetsch defines it as an explanation that is hard to vary while still explaining what it is supposed to. There is much to say about good explanations, but that will be the subject of the next post on this book.