Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
So fruitful has this abandonment of anthropocentric theories been, and so important in the broader history of ideas, that anti-anthropocentrism has increasingly been elevated to the status of a universal principle, sometimes called the ‘Principle of Mediocrity’: there is nothing significant about humans (in the cosmic scheme of things). As the
... See moreDavid Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
Just as organisms are the tools of genes, so individuals are used by memes to achieve their ‘purpose’ of spreading themselves through the population.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World



I am not asking what authority scientific knowledge is derived from, or rests on. I mean, literally, by what process do ever truer and more detailed explanations about the world come to be represented physically in our brains? How do we come to know about the interactions of subatomic particles during transmutation at the centre of a distant star,
... See moreDavid Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
There is often a moral overtone to reductionism (science should be essentially reductive). This is related both to instrumentalism and to the Principle of Mediocrity, which I criticized in Chapters 1 and 3. Instrumentalism is rather like reductionism except that, instead of rejecting only high-level explanations, it tries to reject all
... See more