David Deutsch begins his 'Beginning of Infinity' thus
Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in the history of our species.
Nonsense! Urbanization represented progress and it is an ongoing, rapid and very noticeable, phenomenon to those affected by it. London hasn't changed very much since I was born. The only 'progress' I can think off has to do with smart-phones. Everything else already existed. But for indigenous people who, six decades ago, still lived largely traditional lives, I imagine that a very sharp break was experienced with the advent of Electrification, Television, Jet Planes etc.
I suppose Deutsch is thinking of the 'Dark Ages' in England- i.e. the interregnum represented by the invasion and paramountcy of pagan tribes- but the lamp of learning remained alight in Ireland and elsewhere. When Rome fell, there was a second Rome- Byzantium- which flourished.
Wherever general purpose productivity rises, or- because of the lifting of a resource constraint- there is a positive shock for total factor productivity- there is a rapid and noticeable change which we may term progress.
In the case of England, it is likely that the 'great divergence' in general purpose productivity arose even before the Black Death. There were ideographic political and geopolitical reasons why this tended to rise incrementally. But, this is just another way of saying that England hasn't been conquered for a thousand years or, that, serfdom proved unprofitable and a class of entrepreneurs- literally 'farmers'- started combining factors of production which had something approaching 'open market' prices. In other words, first there was economic change and then there was 'scientific' and 'technological' change.
It began at approximately the time of the scientific revolution,
which occurred because oceanic commerce created demand for R&D in STEM subjects. However, a full fledged, market for R&D was a much later development. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, it was thought that offering 'prizes' would be enough. It is what Adam Smith recommended. However, once you had Coasian firms 'internalizing externalities' or else Marshallian industrial districts which could capitalize Tiebout Model 'rents' from external economies of scope and scale, then you could have exponential growth based on 'creative destruction' or 'planned obsolescence'.
This has nothing to do with philosophy. It is a purely economic phenomenon. Whether 'Progress' happens or not depends on whether the thing is incentive compatible. Thus Indians aren't stupider than Chinese people, but India as a country has very bad mechanism design. China deliberately went the other way. It remains to be seen whether this is sustainable or whether China Inc. will turn into a Xerox or a Kodak- both of which did cutting edge R&D at one time but weren't incentivized for 'last mile delivery'.
and is still under way. It has included improvements not only in scientific understanding,
better 'structural causal models'? Is that what Deutsch means by 'explanations'? But a model is only considered better if it enables us to tinker with parameters and thus improve outcomes. It is the incentive to change outcomes which drives everything else.
but also in technology, political institutions, moral values, art, and every aspect of human welfare.
A rising economic tide doesn't lift all boats. It sinks those which aren't economic or 'incentive compatible'. Evelyn Waugh gives the example of his father who ran a very successful Publishing firm. He got through his work in about two or three hours each day and thus, for all practical purposes, lived the life of a cultured man of letters. In the post-War world, everybody was- or pretended to be- as busy as fuck. By the Seventies, you could have a celebrated Professor of English literature who hadn't read Hamlet. But the fellow was very very busy.
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.
Shitheads we will always have with us. Demand they undergo gender reassignment surgery at least twice a week to show solidarity with bisexual Guatemalan goats. Nothing can be meaningful till you have chopped your own dick off.
They should have known better. There is indeed an objective difference between a false explanation and a true one,
sadly, it may be currently inaccessible. Also, the 'false' explanation may be easily repaired. This is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis.
between chronic failure to solve a problem and solving it,
most problems shouldn't be solved till after death or the end of mathematical time. What matters is whether a coordination or discoordination game is solved by the direction in which the Schelling focal solution appears to be moving.
and also between wrong and right,
being provably in the right is the main cause of divorce, or, if not divorce, your g.f banging the Pizza delivery boy. I wouldn't mind so much if she'd let the lad hand over the pizza first. There's nothing less appetizing than tepid deep-pan pineapple and anchovy
ugly and beautiful,
another big cause of marital discord. The fact is, all new-born babies are as ugly as fuck.
suffering and its alleviation
by money. Fuck thoughts and prayers.
– and thus between stagnation and progress in the fullest sense.
cause a slightly less full sense simply won't do.
In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for
more goodies for less cash or other scarce resources? This is what gives rise to the 'law of increasing functional information'.
what I call good explanations.Deutsch thinks 'a key characteristic of a good explanation is its resistance to modification. If you can change parts of the explanation without affecting its ability to explain the phenomenon or introducing contradictions, it's likely not a good explanation'.
Though this quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal, cosmic level – namely that it conforms to universal laws of nature that are indeed good explanations.
It may be that 'the law of increasing functional information' is one of those universal laws. The problem with information is that it just is- like Love or not being able to get it up even if you really really love your wife and aren't attracted to men at all. Explanations, however good, and however much we need them, are at best strategic and at worst self-deceiving.
This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things.
Sadly, we are either just an expression of the law of increasing functional information, or are some sort of parasite confined to a mote of cosmic dust.
Must progress come to an end – either in catastrophe or in some sort of completion – or is it unbounded?
Sadly, what is catastrophe for us may be progress for some other species or superior type of crystal.
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.
Though, in our species, progress has been driven only by economic factors- i.e. choice under scarcity (more particularly the scarcity of land and other natural resources which causes- war a.k.a 'the mother of invention').
From each such field we learn that, although progress has no necessary end,
survival as opposed to enslavement or extinction
it does have a necessary beginning:
If so, there is at least once 'essence'- i.e. a thing true in all possible worlds. Currently, this does not appear to be the case in any scientific field. Otherwise we would have at least one Archimedian point or privileged frame of reference or 'absolute proof' or 'atomic proposition' and thus at least one synthetic a priori truth. In that case logicism would be the royal road to a mathesis universalis- i.e. an algorithmic, deterministic, method of cranking out more and more irrefragable truth.
a cause, or an event with which it starts, or a necessary condition for it to take off and to thrive.
In which case, Time is Newtonian.
Each of these beginnings is ‘the beginning of infinity’ as viewed from the perspective of that field.
The reverse is the case. Every field starts off facing infinite possibilities- Alchemists thought they could turn gold into lead and find the elixir of immortality- but, to become more useful, had to accept more and more constraints.
Many seem, superficially, to be unconnected. But they are all facets of a single attribute of reality, which I call the beginning of infinity.
The problem with saying 'it from bit'- i.e. Reality is information theoretic- is that, to the best of our knowledge, theories are only held by hairless apes who were better at killing or outbreeding their hairier cousins. At least that is the view held by most balding men who never killed a fly and who only became fathers after their wives have ordered lots and lots of Pizzas.
Philosophy, from the time of Socrates, has been the set of propositions regarding which the same person- if a 'lover of wisdom' who knows he knows nothing other than love- can make equally good arguments for or against. Put differently, Philosophy is confined to 'open questions' in other disciplines. Once that question is closed- e.g. by a crucial experiment- Philosophy has to move on. I suppose Philosophy could be called a 'displacement activity'- e.g. an animal under stress, suddenly displaying behaviour from an inappropriate repertoire- e.g. feeding in the middle of a fight.
David Deutsch is ten years older than me and completed his A levels at the same School I did. Back then, my memory is, Karl Popper was considered the cat's whiskers. His very readable 'Poverty of Historicism' & 'Open Society and its Enemies' made a strong impression on adolescent minds. Clearly, 'Bad Philosophy' was one reason why many of the boys at our school had lost so many relatives to the Shoah.
A Physicist’s History of Bad Philosophy With Some Comments on Bad Science Reader: So, I am an emergent, quasi-autonomous flow of information in the multiverse.
Only if something like Yoneda' lemma holds- i.e. everything about you can be captured by your interactions with everything else. If categoricity obtains, well and good. But, it may be that, as Socrates said, categorical thinking is like using the oars when there is no wind to belly out the sails- in other words, it is contingent and arbitrary save under specific boundary conditions. But even this type of 'naturality' is arbitrary and some yet to be observed 'uncorrelated asymmetry', arising perhaps out of increased functional information, may give rise to a bourgeois strategy which is expunges 'fungibility' or 'identity of indiscernibles'.
David: You are.
Is David? For him to answer in the affirmative, he must be more than a stream of information. He must be a binary, or at least scalar, receptor.
Reader: And I exist in multiple instances, some of them different from each other, some not.
We find this easy to believe because our behaviour is in fact based on our 'possible selves'. But it is also based on 'impossible selves'. If the fourth dimension is of compossible worldlines and other 'infolded' dimensions extend to possible worlds, why might there not be impossible worlds at dimensions higher, or more infolded, yet? Indeed, most of us are 'ontologically dysphoric'- not at home in this or any possible world.
And those are the least weird things about the world according to quantum theory.
Not for us. We are fed up to the gills with Spidermans from alternative realities teaming up to restore the stability of our time-line- or the profitability of the Marvel Corporation.
David: Yes.
Reader: But your argument is that we have no option but to accept the theory’s implications,
if we are hella smart and doing useful work in Quantum computing- sure.
because it is the only known explanation of many phenomena and has survived all known experimental tests.
david: What other option would you like to have?
Panpsychism. Quantum Monty Hall is like a dude on a gameshow changing his answer regarding which door to choose after the presenter opens one to show it doesn't lead to a prize.
reader: I’m just summarizing. david: Then yes: quantum theory does have universal reach. But if all you want to explain is how we know that there are other universes, you don’t have to go via the full theory. You need look no further than what a Mach–Zehnder interferometer does to a single photon: the path that was not taken affects the one that was. Or, if you want the same thing writ large, just think of a quantum computer: its output will depend on intermediate results being computed in vast numbers of different histories of the same few atoms.
Energy is being expended and, by setting good boundary conditions, some useful result is arrived at. That's how economics- or just economizing- works.
reader: But that’s just a few atoms existing in multiple instances. Not people. david: Are you claiming to be made of something other than atoms?
Yes. I don't know what I'm made of- perhaps it is whatever underlies memories and desires and moods and sudden 'eureka' moments- and I don't care if quarks or quacks or cosmic question marks make up what makes me up. This is because I suspect those quarks are themselves made up of things which are made of other things and so on ad infinitum.
reader: Ah, I see. david: Also, imagine a vast cloud of instances of a single photon, some of which are stopped by a barrier. Are they absorbed by the barrier that we see, or is each absorbed by a different, quasiautonomous barrier at the same location?
I can imagine a vast probability distribution of my selves all obstructed by the same barrier- gravity- from leaping to the moon. I can also imagine different barriers affecting each self preventing it from ever doing anything worthwhile or saying anything sensible.
reader: Does it make a difference? david: Yes. If they were all absorbed by the barrier we see, it would vaporize. reader: So it would. david: And we can ask – as I did in the story of the starship and the twilight zone – what is holding up those barriers? It must be other instances of the floor. And of the planet. And then we can consider the experimenters who set all this up and who observe the results, and so on. reader: So that trickle of photons through the interferometer really does provide a window on a vast multiplicity of universes. david: Yes.
So does my window. I can imagine that it isn't raining or that the sky is purple- as perhaps in a parallel reality it is.
It’s another example of reach – just a small portion of the reach of quantum theory. The explanation of those experiments in isolation isn’t as hard to vary as the full theory. But in regard to the existence of other universes it’s incontrovertible all the same.
The problem here is that what is true at the quantum level may not be true at the macroscopic level. Still, it does appear that Deutsch's research program will yield macroscopic results which may well change how people live their lives in the not too remote future.
Sadly they will also prove he has shit for brains. That's not such a bad thing as you grow older. Shit is manure. Maybe God is the seed which will take hold.
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