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The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
SOCRATES: So – let me combine that insight with what I know of criticism. A guess might come from a dream, or it might just be a wild speculation or random combination of ideas, or anything. But then we do not just accept it blindly or because we imagine it is ‘authorized’, or because we want it to be true. Instead we criticize it and try to discov
... See moreDavid Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
If the best-spreading genes impose sufficiently large disadvantages on the species, the species becomes extinct.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
And the next such object to strike us is already out there at this moment, speeding towards us with nothing to stop it except human knowledge.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
Lack of knowledge is you we die as a species
From this we supposedly ‘derive’ the theory that under similar circumstances we shall always have that experience, or that we probably shall. On each occasion when that prediction comes true, and provided that it never fails, the probability that it will always come true is supposed to increase. Thus one supposedly obtains ever more reliable knowle... See more
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
Some people may enjoy conjuring tricks without ever wanting to know how they work. Similarly, during the twentieth century, most philosophers, and many scientists, took the view that science is incapable of discovering anything about reality.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
The other kind of problem, the pure kind, which has no analogue in biology, is that of creating beauty for its own sake – which includes creating improved criteria for beauty: new artistic standards or styles. This is the analogue of pure scientific research.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individual. The other is unrelated to any of those: it is universal, and as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge; but the second kind requires knowledge with uni
... See moreDavid Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
To make it print out a table of a given function, one would program it only once with the definition of the function in terms of simple operations. In contrast, human ‘computers’ had to use (or be used by) both the definition and the general rules of arithmetic thousands of times per table, each time being an opportunity for human error.