The Beginning of Infinity

Metadata

• Author: [[David Deutsch]]
• Full Title: The Beginning of Infinity
• Category: #books

Highlights

• In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations. (Location 71)
  • Tags: [[progress]] [[explanation]]
• So much for inductivism. And since inductivism is false, empiricism must be as well. For if one cannot derive predictions from experience, one certainly cannot derive explanations. Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity. (Location 198)
• it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity. (Location 234)
• What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. (Location 297)
• The essence of experimental testing is that there are at least two apparently viable theories known about the issue in question, making conflicting predictions that can be distinguished by the experiment. Just as conflicting predictions are the occasion for experiment and observation, so conflicting ideas in a broader sense are the occasion for all rational thought and inquiry. For example, if we are simply curious about something, it means that we believe that our existing ideas do not adequately capture or explain it. So, we have some criterion that our best existing explanation fails to meet. The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem. (Location 360)
• 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… Realism and the Aim of Science (1983) (Location 380)
• The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. (Location 465)
• An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole. (Location 479)
• That is what makes good explanations essential to science: it is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable. Bad explanations are equally useless whether they are testable or not. (Location 502)
  • Tags: [[explanation]]
• But humans are part of the biosphere, and the supposedly immoral behaviour is identical to what all other species do when times are good – except that humans alone try to mitigate the effect of that response on their descendants and on other species. (Location 923)
• The difference between humans and other species is in what kind of knowledge they can use (explanatory instead of rule-of-thumb) and in how they create it (conjecture and criticism of ideas, rather than the variation and selection of genes). It is precisely those two differences that explain why every other organism can function only in a certain range of environments that are hospitable to it, while humans transform inhospitable environments like the biosphere into support systems for themselves. (Location 1052)
• 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. (Location 1156)
• What exactly has the evolution of those birds achieved during that period? It has optimized not the functional adaptation of a variant gene to its environment – the attribute that would have impressed Paley – but the relative ability of the surviving variant to spread through the population. (Location 1596)
• Neo-Darwinism does not refer, at its fundamental level, to anything biological. It is based on the idea of a replicator (anything that contributes causally to its own copying). (Location 1626)
• Ideas can be replicators too. For example, a good joke is a replicator: when lodged in a person’s mind, it has a tendency to cause that person to tell it to other people, thus copying it into their minds. Dawkins coined the term memes (rhymes with ‘dreams’) for ideas that are replicators. Most ideas are not replicators: they do not cause us to convey them to other people. Nearly all long-lasting ideas, however, such as languages, scientific theories and religious beliefs, and the ineffable states of mind that constitute cultures such as being British, or the skill of performing classical music, are memes (or ‘memeplexes’ – collections of interacting memes). (Location 1630)
• The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated. This is a surprisingly deep truth which is commonly criticized either for being too obvious to be worth stating or for being false. (Location 1636)
• And it really is creation. Before a discovery is made, no predictive process could reveal the content or the consequences of that discovery. For if it could, it would be that discovery. So scientific discovery is profoundly unpredictable, despite the fact that it is determined by the laws of physics. (Location 1820)

New highlights added September 26, 2022 at 9:58 PM

• Here we see a transition that is typical of the jump to universality: before the jump, one has to make specialized objects for each document to be printed; after the jump, one customizes (or specializes, or programs) a universal object – in this case a printing press with movable type. Similarly, in 1801 Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a general-purpose silk-weaving machine now known as the Jacquard loom. Instead of having to control manually each row of stitches in each individual bolt of patterned silk, one could program an arbitrary pattern on punched cards which would instruct the machine to weave that pattern any number of times. (Location 2342)
• Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity. (Location 2443)
  • Tags: [[beginning of infinity]]
• All knowledge growth is by incremental improvement, but in many fields there comes a point when one of the incremental improvements in a system of knowledge or technology causes a sudden increase in reach, making it a universal system in the relevant domain. In the past, innovators who brought about such a jump to universality had rarely been seeking it, but since the Enlightenment they have been, and universal explanations have been valued both for their own sake and for their usefulness. Because error-correction is essential in processes of potentially unlimited length, the jump to universality only ever happens in digital systems. (Location 2549)
  • Tags: [[knowledge]]
• The question ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ is echoed by Feynman’s remark that ‘science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves’. And the answer is basically the same for human decision-making as it is for science: it requires a tradition of criticism, in which good explanations are sought – for example, explanations of what has gone wrong, what would be better, what effect various policies have had in the past and would have in the future. (Location 3598)
• Popper therefore applies his basic ‘how can we detect and eliminate errors?’ to political philosophy in the form how can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence? Just as science seeks explanations that are experimentally testable, so a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect, and persuade others, that a leader or policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are. Just as the institutions of science are structured so as to avoid entrenching theories, but instead to expose them to criticism and testing, so political institutions should not make it hard to oppose rulers and policies, non-violently, and should embody traditions of peaceful, critical discussion of them and of the institutions themselves and everything else. Thus, systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there. (Location 3633)
• That entire stance is fallibilism in action. It assumes that rulers and policies are always going to be flawed – that problems are inevitable. But it also assumes that improving upon them is possible: problems are soluble. The ideal towards which this is working is not that nothing unexpected will go wrong, but that when it does it will be an opportunity for further progress. (Location 3640)
• At the height of the Golden Age, the Athenian leader Pericles tried to explain what made Athens successful. Though he no doubt believed that the city’s patron goddess, Athena, was on their side, he evidently did not consider ‘the goddess did it’ to be a sufficient explanation for the Athenians’ success. Instead, he listed specific attributes of Athenian civilization. We do not know exactly how much of what he described was flattery or wishful thinking, but, in assessing the optimism of a civilization, what that civilization aspired to be must be even more important than what it had yet succeeded in becoming. (Location 3732)
• Instead of looking upon discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’, (Location 3739)
• Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures – all evils – are due to insufficient knowledge. This is the key to the rational philosophy of the unknowable. It would be contentless if there were fundamental limitations to the creation of knowledge, but there are not. It would be false if there were fields – especially philosophical fields such as morality – in which there were no such thing as objective progress. But truth does exist in all those fields, and progress towards it is made by seeking good explanations. Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors. There may have been many short-lived enlightenments in history. Ours has been uniquely long-lived. (Location 3813)
• Fortunately that mental state has nothing to do with what I do yearn for, which is to discover the truth of how the world is, and why – and, even more, of how it should be. (Location 3892)
• In some stories the plot is not important: the story is really about something else. But a good plot always rests, implicitly or explicitly, on good explanations of how and why events happen, given its fictional premises. In that case, even if those premises are about wizards, the story is not really about the supernatural: it is about imaginary laws of physics and imaginary societies, as well as real problems and true ideas. As I shall explain in Chapter 14, not only do all good science-fiction plots resemble scientific explanation in this way, in the broadest sense all good art does. (Location 4593)
  • Tags: [[stories]] [[writing]]
• A writer of real science fiction faces two conflicting incentives. One is, as with all fiction, to allow the reader to engage with the story, and the easiest way to do that is to draw on themes that are already familiar. But that is an anthropocentric incentive. For instance, it pushes authors to imagine ways around the absolute speed limit that the laws of physics impose on travel and communication (namely the speed of light). But when authors do that, they relegate distance to the role that it has in stories about our home planet: star systems play the same role that remote islands or the Wild West did in the fiction of earlier eras. Similarly, the temptation in parallel-universe stories is to allow communication or travel between universes. But then the story is really about a single universe: once the barrier between the universes is easily penetrable, it becomes no more than an exotic version of the oceans that separate continents. A story that succumbs entirely to this anthropocentric incentive is not really science fiction but ordinary fiction in disguise. (Location 4617)
• The opposing incentive is to explore the strongest possible version of a fictional-science premise, and its strangest possible implications – which pushes in the anti-anthropocentric direction. This may make the story harder to engage with, but it allows for a much broader range of scientific speculations. (Location 4624)
• It is a rather counter-intuitive fact that if objects are merely identical (in the sense of being exact copies), and obey deterministic laws that make no distinction between them, then they can never become different; but fungible objects, which on the face of it are even more alike, can. This is the first of those weird properties of fungibility that Leibniz never thought of, and which I consider to be at the heart of the phenomena of quantum physics. (Location 4722)
• Diversity within fungibility is a widespread phenomenon in the multiverse, as I shall explain. One big difference from the case of fungible money is that in the latter case we never have to wonder about – or predict – what it would be like to be a dollar. That is to say, what it would be like to be fungible, and then to become differentiated. Many applications of quantum theory require us to do exactly that. (Location 4737)
• These two opposite intuitions reflect the ancient dichotomy between the discrete and the continuous. The above argument – that everything in the sphere of differentiation must become different – depends on the reality of extremely small physical changes – changes that would be many orders of magnitude too small to be measurable. The existence of such changes follows inexorably from the explanations of classical physics, because in classical physics most fundamental quantities (such as energy) are continuously variable. The opposing intuition comes from thinking about the world in terms of information processing, and hence in terms of discrete variables such as the contents of people’s memories. Quantum theory adjudicates this conflict in favour of the discrete. For a typical physical quantity, there is a smallest possible change that it can undergo in a given situation. For instance, there is a smallest possible amount of energy that can be transferred from radiation to any particular atom. The atom cannot absorb any less than that amount, which is called a ‘quantum’ of energy. Since this was the first distinctive feature of quantum physics to be discovered, it gave its name to the field. Let us incorporate it into our fictional physics as well. (Location 4833)
• There is only one known phenomenon which, if it ever occurred, would have effects that did not fall off with distance, and that is the creation of a certain type of knowledge, namely a beginning of infinity. Indeed, knowledge can aim itself at a target, travel vast distances having scarcely any effect, and then utterly transform the destination. (Location 4851)
• Notice that when a random outcome (in this sense) is about to happen, it is a situation of diversity within fungibility: the diversity is in the variable ‘what outcome they are going to see’. The logic of the situation is the same as in cases like that of the bank account I discussed above, except that this time the fungible entities are people. They are fungible, yet half of them are going to see the surge and the other half not. (Location 4902)
• Similarly, common sense and classical physics contain the parochial error that only one history exists. This error, built into our language and conceptual framework, makes it sound odd to say that an event can be in one sense extremely unlikely and in another certain to happen. But there is nothing odd about it in reality. (Location 4936)
• Thus the information in the fictional multiverse flows along a branching tree, whose branches – histories – have different thicknesses (measures) and never rejoin once they have separated. (Location 4961)
• Thanks to the strong internal interference that it is continuously undergoing, a typical electron is an irreducibly multiversal object, and not a collection of parallel-universe or parallel-histories objects. That is to say, it has multiple positions and multiple speeds without being divisible into autonomous sub-entities each of which has one speed and one position. Even different electrons do not have completely separate identities. So the reality is an electron field throughout the whole of space, and disturbances spread through this field as waves, at the speed of light or below. This is what gave rise to the often-quoted misconception among the pioneers of quantum theory that electrons (and likewise all other particles) are ‘particles and waves at the same time’. There is a field (or ‘waves’) in the multiverse for every individual particle that we observe in a particular universe. (Location 5108)
• In this full version of the quantum multiverse, how is our science-fiction story to continue? Almost all the attention that the quantum theory has attracted, from physicists, philosophers and science-fiction authors alike, has focused on its parallel-universes aspect. That is ironic, because it is in the parallel-universe approximation that the world most resembles that of classical physics, yet that is the very aspect of quantum theory that many people seem to find viscerally unacceptable. Fiction can explore the possibilities opened up by parallel universes. For instance, since our story is a romance, the characters may well wonder about their counterparts in other histories. The story could compare their speculations with what we ‘know’ happened in the other histories. The character whose spouse’s unfaithfulness was revealed by a ‘random’ event might wonder whether that event provided a lucky escape from what was a doomed marriage anyway. Are they still married in the history in which the unfaithfulness was not subsequently revealed? Are they still happy? Can it be true happiness if it is ‘based on a lie’? As we see them speculating on these matters, we see the ‘still married’ history and know the (fictional) fact of the matter. (Location 5239)
• All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact. (Location 5257)
• In science fiction, we have a mandate to speculate, even to levels of implausibility that would make for quite bad explanations in real science. But the best explanation of ourselves in real science is that we – sentient beings in this gigantic, unfamiliar structure in which material things have no continuity, in which even something as basic as motion or change is different from anything in our experience – are embedded in multiversal objects. Whenever we observe anything – a scientific instrument or a galaxy or a human being – what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes. In some of those universes, the object looks exactly as it does to us, in others it looks different, or is absent altogether. What an observer sees as a married couple is actually just a sliver of a vast entity that includes many fungible instances of such a couple, together with other instances of them who are divorced, and others who have never married. (Location 5293)
• We are channels of information flow. So are histories, and so are all relatively autonomous objects within histories; but we sentient beings are extremely unusual channels, along which (sometimes) knowledge grows. This can have dramatic effects, not only within a history (where it can, for instance, have effects that do not diminish with distance), but also across the multiverse. Since the growth of knowledge is a process of error-correction, and since there are many more ways of being wrong than right, knowledge-creating entities rapidly become more alike in different histories than other entities. As far as is known, knowledge-creating processes are unique in both these respects: all other effects diminish with distance in space, and become increasingly different across the multiverse, in the long run. (Location 5300)
• But that is only as far as is known. Here is an opportunity for some wild speculations that could inform a science-fiction story. What if there is something other than information flow that can cause coherent, emergent phenomena in the multiverse? What if knowledge, or something other than knowledge, could emerge from that, and begin to have purposes of its own, and to conform the multiverse to those purposes, as we do? Could we communicate with it? Presumably not in the usual sense of the term, because that would be information flow; but perhaps the story could propose some novel analogue of communication which, like quantum inference, did not involve sending messages. Would we be trapped in a war of mutual extermination with such an entity? Or is it possible that we could nevertheless have something in common with it? Let us shun parochial resolutions of the issue – such as a discovery that what bridges the barrier is love, or trust. But let us remember that, just as we are at the top rank of significance in the great scheme of things, anything else that could create explanations would be too. And there is always room at the top. (Location 5306)
• There is something very wrong with that entire conventional model of decision-making, both within single minds and for groups as assumed in social-choice theory. It conceives of decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula (such as an apportionment rule or electoral system). But in fact that is what happens only at the end of decision-making – the phase that does not require creative thought. In terms of Edison’s metaphor, the model refers only to the perspiration phase, without realizing that decision-making is problem-solving, and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between. At the heart of decision-making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones. (Location 5974)
• To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. (Location 5980)
• So let us reconsider collective decision-making in terms of Popper’s criterion instead. Instead of wondering earnestly which of the self-evident yet mutually inconsistent criteria of fairness, representativeness and so on are the most self-evident, so that they can be entrenched, we judge such criteria, along with all other actual or proposed political institutions, according to how well they promote the removal of bad rulers and bad policies. To do this, they must embody traditions of peaceful, critical discussion – of rulers, policies and the political institutions themselves. (Location 6036)
• The purpose of deferring to the majority in democratic systems should be to approach unanimity in the future, by giving all concerned the incentive to abandon bad ideas and to conjecture better ones. Creatively changing the options is what allows people in real life to cooperate in ways that no-go theorems seem to say are impossible; and it is what allows individual minds to choose at all. (Location 6158)
• is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good policies are hard to vary, and therefore conflicting policies are discrete and cannot be arbitrarily mixed. Just as rational thinking does not consist of weighing the justifications of rival theories, but of using conjecture and criticism to seek the best explanation, so coalition governments are not a desirable objective of electoral systems. They should be judged by Popper’s criterion of how easy they make it to remove bad rulers and bad policies. That designates the plurality voting system as best in the case of advanced political cultures. (Location 6173)
• So human artists are trying to signal across the same scale of gap between humans as the flowers and insects are between species. They can use some species-specific criteria; but they can also reach towards objective beauty. Exactly the same is true of all our other knowledge: we can communicate with other people by sending predetermined messages determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new. But in the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we had better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths. This may be the proximate reason that humans ever began to do so. (Location 6367)
• Thus a culture is in practice defined not by a set of strictly identical memes, but by a set of variants that cause slightly different characteristic behaviours. Some variants tend to have the effect that their holders are eager to enact or talk about them, others less so. Some are easier than others for potential recipients to replicate in their own minds. These factors and others affect how likely each variant of a meme is to be passed on faithfully. (Location 6449)
• Like genes, all memes contain knowledge (often inexplicit) of how to cause their own replication. This knowledge is encoded in strands of DNA or remembered by brains respectively. In both cases, the knowledge is adapted to causing itself to be replicated: it causes that more reliably than nearly all its variants do. In both cases, this adaptation is the outcome of alternating rounds of variation and selection. (Location 6537)
• Another way of stating the problem is that people think and try to improve upon their ideas – which entails changing them. A long-lived meme is an idea that runs that gauntlet again and again, and survives. How is that possible? (Location 6610)
• That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place. (Location 6641)
• How is this done? The details are variable and not relevant here, but the sort of thing that happens is that people growing up in such a society acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else which amounts to ridding themselves of distinctive attributes and seeking only conformity with the society’s constitutive memes. They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members’ sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others. So they feel pride and shame, and form all their aspirations and opinions, by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society’s memes. (Location 6645)
• A static society forms when there is no escape from this effect: all significant behaviour, all relationships between people, and all thoughts are subordinated to causing faithful replication of the memes. In all areas controlled by the memes, no critical faculties are exercised. No innovation is tolerated, and almost none is attempted. This destruction of human minds makes static societies almost unimaginable from our perspective. (Location 6688)
• Static societies survive by effectively eliminating the type of evolution that is unique to memes, namely creative variation intended to meet the holders’ individual preferences. In the absence of that, meme evolution resembles gene evolution more closely, and some of the grim conclusions of the naive analogies between them apply after all. Static societies do tend to settle issues by violence, and they do tend to sacrifice the welfare of individuals for the ‘good’ of (that is to say, for the prevention of changes in) society. I mentioned that people who rely on such analogies end up either advocating a static society or condoning violence and oppression. We now see that those two responses are essentially the same: oppression is what it takes to keep a society static; oppression of a given kind will not last long unless the society is static. (Location 6707)
• The ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change are truths with reach – deep truths. People are fallible; they often have preferences for false, shallow, useless or morally wrong ideas. But which false ideas they prefer differs from one person to another, and changes with time. Under changed circumstances, a specious falsehood or parochial truth can survive only by luck. But a true, deep idea has an objective reason to be considered useful by people with diverse purposes over long periods. (Location 6745)
• Present-day methods of education still have a lot in common with their static-society predecessors. Despite modern talk of encouraging critical thinking, it remains the case that teaching by rote and inculcating standard patterns of behaviour through psychological pressure are integral parts of education, even though they are now wholly or partly renounced in explicit theory. Moreover, in regard to academic knowledge, it is still taken for granted, in practice, that the main purpose of education is to transmit a standard curriculum faithfully. One consequence is that people are acquiring scientific knowledge in an anaemic and instrumental way. Without a critical, discriminating approach to what they are learning, most of them are not effectively replicating the memes of science and reason into their minds. (Location 6838)
• The Enlightenment is the moment at which explanatory knowledge is beginning to assume its soon-to-be-normal role as the most important determinant of physical events. At least it could be: we had better remember that what we are attempting – the sustained creation of knowledge – has never worked before. Indeed, everything that we shall ever try to achieve from now on will never have worked before. We have, so far, been transformed from the victims (and enforcers) of an eternal status quo into the mainly passive recipients of the benefits of relatively rapid innovation in a bumpy transition period. We now have to accept, and rejoice in bringing about, our next transformation: to active agents of progress in the emerging rational society – and universe. (Location 6881)

New highlights added October 9, 2022 at 12:10 AM

• Memes, like scientific theories, are not derived from anything. They are created afresh by the recipient. They are conjectural explanations, which are then subjected to criticism and testing before being tentatively adopted. This same pattern of creative conjecture, criticism and testing generates inexplicit as well as explicit ideas. In fact all creativity does, for no idea can be represented entirely explicitly. When we make an explicit conjecture, it has an inexplicit component whether we are aware of it or not. And so does all criticism. (Location 7155)
• The sustained creation of knowledge depends also on the presence of certain kinds of idea, particularly optimism, and an associated tradition of criticism. There would have to be social and political institutions that incorporated and protected such traditions: a society in which some degree of dissent and deviation from the norm was tolerated, and whose educational practices did not entirely extinguish creativity. (Location 7467)
• So there is no resource-management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories. But there are ideas that reliably cause disasters, and one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned. The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes: removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters. (Location 7557)
• There are many ways of characterizing this inconsistency – known as the problem of quantum gravity – corresponding to the many proposals for solving it that have been tried without success. One aspect is the ancient tension between the discrete and the continuous. The resolution that I described in Chapter 11, in terms of continuous clouds of fungible instances of a particle with diverse discrete attributes, works only if the spacetime in which this happens is itself continuous. But if spacetime is affected by the gravitation of the cloud, then it would acquire discrete attributes. (Location 7783)
• Universality implies that, in every important sense, humans and AIs will never be other than equal. (Location 7905)
  • Tags: [[universality]] [[ai]]
• To attempt to predict anything beyond the relevant horizon is futile – it is prophecy – but wondering what is beyond it is not. When wondering leads to conjecture, that constitutes speculation, which is not irrational either. In fact it is vital. Every one of those deeply unforeseeable new ideas that make the future unpredictable will begin as a speculation. And every speculation begins with a problem: problems in regard to the future can reach beyond the horizon of prediction too – and problems have solutions. (Location 7926)
• Many people have an aversion to infinity of various kinds. But there are some things that we do not have a choice about. There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What lies ahead of us is in any case infinity. All we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, wrong or right, death or life. (Location 7955)