About This Article: Like other entries in my Notes from the Book series, I wrote this primarily for myself. These notes serve as an online journal, where writing helps me learn and publishing sharpens my thoughts while creating an accessible reference. Expect longer quotations, drawn directly from my Kindle highlights, as I aim to capture key insights. Learn more about my workflow for syncing these notes here.
Introduction
The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch, is one of the consensus books that super-smart people (Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivassan) tend to recommend.
At it’s soul, this book puts forward a deeply techno-optimistic view on humanity and the future.
The below X thread really resonates with how i feel about it – i.e. “It comes with homework… most books are understood immediately. This one takes work”.
If i’m honest, I started reading most chapters and found the opening engrossing – but as the chapter got deeper into a specific topic, it became harder to absorb the content, and so i skipped to the summaries at the end of each chapter.
There are a number of podcasts which discuss this book which i believe will be helpful. Namely:
- ToKCast – which is largely centered on the philosophies of David Deutsche. https://www.bretthall.org/tokcast
- Naval’s own podcasts: https://nav.al/david-deutsch
- Tim Ferriss’ podcast – which discusses David Deutsche’s prior book – Fabric of reality. I’ve never heard Tim Ferriss so overwhelmed by the depth of a topic as in this podcast – which he is open about on the show: https://tim.blog/2023/03/23/david-deutsch-naval-ravikant/
Key takeaways
I’ve set out in the table at the bottom quick takeaways from each chapter.
The bits which really resonated, and i’m dwelling on are as follows (*long form):
The possibility of unlimited knowledge
Fabilism
The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge.
The opposing position – namely the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying ideas as being true or probable – is called fallibilism. Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed to try to change them for the better.
So it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity.
The enlightenment and scientific method
What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.
One consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable (though this was not made explicit at first). That is to say, the theory must make predictions which, if the theory were false, could be contradicted by the outcome of some possible observation.
Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science.
The search for good Explanations, and origins of ‘the West’
An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.
That is what makes good explanations essential to science: it is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable.
The theory reaches out, as it were, from its finite origins inside one brain that has been affected only by scraps of patchy evidence from a small part of one hemisphere of one planet – to infinity. This reach of explanations is another meaning of ‘the beginning of infinity’. It is the ability of some of them to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve.
The growth of knowledge consists of correcting misconceptions in our theories.
Personal note
The older I become, the more I feel it’s a mistake for people to become to centered on one discipline. By varying the diet of the topics you study and learning explanatory frameworks and mental models from multiple disciplines – and creative deploying these against new disciplines – you become more effective across everything you do.
Notes on Deuthsche’s rejection of emperisism.
- Deutsch argues that empiricism incorrectly assumes we derive all our knowledge from experience. He contends that knowledge is actually conjectural, and experience only serves to test it, not create it.
- According to Deutsch, all observation is “theory-laden”. This means we interpret our experiences through pre-existing explanatory theories, rather than deriving knowledge directly from our senses.
- Deutsch believes that empiricism is insufficient for generating good explanations. He argues that scientific theories often explain the observable in terms of the unobservable, which cannot be derived solely from sensory data.
- Instead of empiricism, Deutsch emphasizes the importance of creative conjecture in forming explanations. He asserts that scientific theories are created by rearranging, combining, and altering existing ideas, rather than being derived from observations.
Survival of the species
Today, almost the entire capacity of the Earth’s ‘life-support system for humans’ has been provided not for us but by us, using our ability to create new knowledge.
We are accustomed to thinking of the Earth as hospitable and the moon as a bleak, faraway deathtrap. But that is how our ancestors would have regarded Oxfordshire, and, ironically, it is how I, today, would regard the primeval Great Rift Valley. In the unique case of humans, the difference between a hospitable environment and a deathtrap depends on what knowledge they have created.
Be careful with the term ‘The Enlightenment’
Unfortunately, the term ‘the Enlightenment’ is used by historians and philosophers to denote a variety of different trends, some of them violently opposed to each other.
But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.
The Continental Enlightenment was impatient for the perfected state – which led to intellectual dogmatism, political violence and new forms of tyranny. The French Revolution of 1789 and the Reign of Terror that followed it are the archetypal examples.
The British Enlightenment, which was evolutionary and cognizant of human fallibility, was impatient for institutions that did not stifle gradual, continuing change.
The economist Robin Hanson has suggested that there have been several singularities in the history of our species, such as the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. Arguably, even the early Enlightenment was a ‘singularity’ by that definition. Who could have predicted that someone who lived through the English Civil War – a bloody struggle of religious fanatics versus an absolute monarch – and through the victory of the religious fanatics in 1651, might also live through the peaceful birth of a society that saw liberty and reason as its principal characteristics?
Niche knowledge tends to Universality
All knowledge growth is by incremental improvement, but in many fields there comes a point when one of the incremental improvements in a system of knowledge or technology causes a sudden increase in reach, making it a universal system in the relevant domain. In the past, innovators who brought about such a jump to universality had rarely been seeking it, but since the Enlightenment they have been, and universal explanations have been valued both for their own sake and for their usefulness. Because error-correction is essential in processes of potentially unlimited length, the jump to universality only ever happens in digital systems.
The keys to unlimited progress = Universality (laws of nature) + Universal explainers (people)
The ‘beginning of infinity’ – the possibility of the unlimited growth of knowledge in the future – depends on a number of other infinities. One of them is the universality in the laws of nature which allows finite, local symbols to apply to the whole of time and space – and to all phenomena and all possible phenomena. Another is the existence of physical objects that are universal explainers – people – which, it turns out, are necessarily universal constructors as well, and must contain universal classical computers.
The future is not predictable
No good explanation can predict the outcome, or the probability of an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge. This is a fundamental limitation on the reach of scientific prediction, and, when planning for the future, it is vital to come to terms with it.
The Multiverse & Quantum Theory
Quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science. It violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and of all previous science – including some that no one suspected were being made at all until quantum theory came along and contradicted them. And yet this seemingly alien territory is the reality of which we and everything we experience are part.
The world is the whole of physical reality. In classical (pre-quantum) physics, the world was thought to consist of one universe – something like a whole three-dimensional space for the whole of time, and all its contents. According to quantum physics, as I shall explain, the world is a much larger and more complicated object, a multiverse, which includes many such universes (among other things). And a history is a sequence of events happening to objects and possibly their identical counterparts. So, in my story so far, the world is a multiverse that consists of two universes but has only a single history.
The physical world is a multiverse, and its structure is determined by how information flows in it. In many regions of the multiverse, information flows in quasi-autonomous streams called histories, one of which we call our ‘universe’.
Side notes
Quantum theory starts at the Atomic Level. As we are all made of atoms it’s explanatory power becomes vast.
It was proven via Quantum interference, a fundamental phenomenon where particles like electrons or photons behave as waves, creating patterns of probability that can boost or cancel out outcomes. Here’s a simple breakdown:
The Wave Nature of Particles
At the quantum scale, particles such as electrons or photons exist in a superposition—meaning they can be in multiple states or locations at once. This wave-like behavior allows them to interact with themselves or other particles, much like ripples in a pond:
- Constructive interference: Waves combine to create a stronger effect (higher probability of detecting a particle).
- Destructive interference: Waves cancel each other out (lower probability).
The Double-Slit Experiment: A Key Example
When particles are fired one at a time through two slits:
- Without measuring which slit they pass through: They create an interference pattern on the screen, as if each particle goes through both slits simultaneously and interferes with itself.
- With measurement: Observing which slit a particle uses collapses its wave-like state, destroying the interference pattern.
This shows particles act as both waves and particles, and interference depends on whether we “look” at their path.
Quantum interference reveals the dual wave-particle nature of matter. It’s not just a curiosity – it’s the reason quantum computers can solve problems faster and why technologies like GPS and medical imaging work so accurately. By manipulating these interference patterns, scientists unlock new ways to harness the quantum world.
On culture, creativity and the importance of memes
A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour.
Thus the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline and the appreciation of a given musical style are all, in this sense, ‘sets of ideas’ that define cultures.
The world’s major cultures – including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions – have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them, including the inexplicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another. That makes these ideas memes – ideas that are replicators.
Cultures consist of memes, and they evolve. In many ways memes are analogous to genes, but there are also profound differences in the way they evolve. The most important differences are that each meme has to include its own replication mechanism, and that a meme exists alternately in two different physical forms: a mental representation and a behaviour.
Today, the creativity that humans use to improve ideas is what pre-eminently sets us apart from other species. Yet for most of the time that humans have existed it was not noticeably in use
The reassignment of creativity from its original function of preserving memes faithfully, to the function of creating new knowledge.
On rejecting ‘Sustainability’
We need to
Reject(ing) (the semblance of) sustainability as an aspiration or a constraint on planning
Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe. Analogies between such societies and the technological civilization of the West today are therefore fallacies.
We are at the Beginning
This is Earth. Not the eternal and only home of mankind, but only a starting point of an infinite adventure. All you need do is make the decision [to end your static society]. It is yours to make.’ [With that decision] came the end, the final end of Eternity. – And the beginning of Infinity. Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity (1955)
In regard to theoretical knowledge, however, the prevailing world view has not yet caught up with Enlightenment values. Thanks to the fallacy and bias of prophecy, a persistent assumption remains that our existing theories are at or fairly close to the limit of what it is knowable – that we are nearly there, or perhaps halfway there.
Our best theories are telling us of profound mismatches between themselves and the reality that they are supposed to explain. One of the most blatant examples of that is that physics currently has two fundamental ‘systems of the world’ – quantum theory and the general theory of relativity – and they are radically inconsistent.
To attempt to predict anything beyond the relevant horizon is futile – it is prophecy – but wondering what is beyond it is not. When wondering leads to conjecture, that constitutes speculation, which is not irrational either. In fact it is vital. Every one of those deeply unforeseeable new ideas that make the future unpredictable will begin as a speculation. And every speculation begins with a problem: problems in regard to the future can reach beyond the horizon of prediction too – and problems have solutions.
Many people have an aversion to infinity of various kinds. But there are some things that we do not have a choice about. There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What lies ahead of us is in any case infinity. All we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, wrong or right, death or life.
