Matt Sornson

Must progress come to an end – either in catastrophe or in some sort of completion – or is it unbounded? 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 sc... See more

Think of Memes as any ideas that are passed between lots of people. For example, a language, scientific theory, or religious belief are all memes. Memes have to be actively replicated to survive (i.e. spoken or written and distributed). A Rational Meme is a Good Explanation that relies on the recipient's critical faculties to cause itself to be rep... See more

Universal Systems have Reach, unintended potential. For example the computer in your washing machine could, given enough memory and time, do astrophysics calculations. Oddly most jumps to Universality have been accidents. Only since the Enlightenment has their significance been understood and sought after.Both the Principle of Mediocrity (we are no... See more

Humanity was never sustainable. It is a myth that there ever was a time of tranquility where we lived peacefully at one with nature and each other. Existence was absolutely brutal until very recently. And eventually, unless we choose otherwise, we will be wiped out by an extinction event. Only by creating the right Knowledge can we be saved.

We have made virtually no Progress over the vast majority of human history. Only recently (mostly since the European Enlightenment) has progress been discernible inside a human lifetime.

Knowledge creating entities (aka People) can exist almost anywhere in the universe. With the right knowledge People could feasibly create an ideally suited environment in an empty area of space by hoovering up and transmuting hydrogen atoms into a space-station.Technology, once created, is automatic. We will not have to think about vacuums or the c... See more

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. They should have known better. There is indeed an objective difference between a false explanation and a true one, between chronic failure to solve a problem and solving it, and also ... See more

Good Explanations objectively differ from Bad Explanations because they are Hard to vary. Explanations are inherently error prone (see Fallibilism) which is why we need Criticism and Error Correction. Explanations can have unbounded Reach (i.e. apply to solve unforeseen problems).