The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
In any case, we should expect AI to be achieved in a jump to universality, starting from something much less powerful.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
At the heart of decision-making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. It is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed:
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
They enforce the enactment of the existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants, and suppress criticism of the status quo. However, that alone could not suppress change. First, no enactment of a meme is completely identical to that of the previous generation.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
poetry and mathematics or physics share the property that they develop a language different from ordinary language in order to state things efficiently that it would be very inefficient to state in ordinary language.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
And reach always has an explanation.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
Explanation why things spread
What is the point of giving the party with the most votes the most seats, if the party with the third-largest number of seats can then put the second-largest party in power regardless – there to enact a compromise platform that absolutely no one voted for?
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
When there is a small shift in opinion away from the ruling party, it is usually in real danger of losing power completely.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
when the Black Death plague destabilized the static societies of Europe in the fourteenth century, the new ideas for plague-prevention that spread best were extremely bad ones.