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At the heart of this book is a simple question with an intricate answer: What constitutes a good explanation? Whether we are delving into the deepest secrets of universal change, problems of free will, or attempting to comprehend our own bursts of anger, our quest is at root the same. In The Beginning of Infinity, Cambridge and Oxford trained physicist David Deutsch examines what is quite possibly the root problem of knowledge itself. An adventurous, intellectually stimulating book on how problems are solved.
A philosophical exploration of progress, surprisingly lucid and thought-provoking.
Deutsch (Physics/Oxford Univ.; The Fabric of Reality, 1998) asserts that until a few centuries ago, all cultures assumed everything worth knowing was known. Discoveries occurred (fire, tools, iron, gunpowder) but so rarely that no one thought the world could improve—until the scientific revolution in 17th-century Europe. Since then, new knowledge and discoveries have occurred at a steadily increasing rate with the sky being the limit (the "infinity" in the title). What changed? Deutsch maintains that this was part of a wider movement—the Enlightenment—which revolutionized other fields including moral and political philosophy. Its essence was rejecting authority in regard to knowledge, replacing it—not with another authority, but with a tradition of criticism. This simply means that scientists seek good explanations. A good explanation is hard to vary but does its job. Thus, Newton's laws worked beautifully for centuries; Einstein's relativity worked better but didn't alter it greatly. A bad explanation changes easily. Every prescientific culture had an explanation for human origins, the cause of disease or how the sun shines. All were different and wrong. Both skeptical and optimistic, Deutsch devotes ingenious chapters to refuting ideas (empiricism, induction, holism) and philosophies (positivism, most modernism, post-modernism) that limit what we can learn. Today's fashionable no-nos include explaining human consciousness or building an intelligent computer, but putting these off-limits is to believe in magic.
Scientists will eventually understand every phenomenon that obeys the laws of the universe, writes the author in this provocative, imaginative investigation of human genius.
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
1 The Reach of Explanations 1
2 Closer to Reality 34
3 The Spark 42
4 Creation 78
5 The Reality of Abstractions 107
6 The Jump to Universality 125
7 Artificial Creativity 148
8 A Window on Infinity 164
9 Optimism 196
10 A Dream of Socrates 223
11 The Multiverse 258
12 A Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy 305
13 Choices 326
14 Why are Flowers Beautiful? 353
15 The Evolution of Culture 369
16 The Evolution of Creativity 398
17 Unsustainable 418
18 The Beginning 443
Bibliography 460
Index 463
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Posted January 7, 2012
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Posted September 13, 2011
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Posted December 24, 2011
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Overview
Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the YearA bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers.
Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating ...