The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

But your paper takes no position on that. It is entirely about the outcomes of your observations.

So there is something special – infinitely special, it seems – about the laws of physics as we actually find them, something exceptionally computation-friendly, prediction-friendly and explanation-friendly. The physicist Eugene Wigner called this ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences’. For the reasons I have given,

A genome contains coded descriptions of them, and hence implicitly specifies the environments in which the organism can survive. For example, all primates require vitamin C. Without it, they fall ill and die of the disease scurvy, but their genes do not contain the knowledge of how to synthesize it. So, whenever any non-human primate is in an envir

the truth is that imitating people’s actions and remembering their utterances could not possibly be the basis of human meme replication.

inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found; discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found. The ideal that explanatory science strives for is nicely described by the quotation from Wheeler with which I began this chapter: ‘Behind it all is surely an id

However, in the aftermath of the Black Death a few true and functional ideas did also spread, and may well have contributed to ending that particular static society in an unusually good way (with the Renaissance).

Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke set out to free political institutions from arbitrary rules and assumptions.

human listener might still have a good chance of understanding the idea that was in the lecturer’s mind – and, again, without imitating any behaviour.

All flowers do contrast with their background in some sense – that is a precondition for being used for signalling – but a spider in the bath contrasts with its background even more, and there is no widespread consensus that such a sight is beautiful.