Book

The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch

Fallibilism, the importance of error detection/correction and ‘infinite reach’.

Further reading:

Knowledge and Authority (Popper)
The Ascent of Man (Bronowski)
Science and Human Values (Bronowski)
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins)
Conjectures and refutations (Popper)

“Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” ~ Feynman.
Science would be impossible if it were not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of false theories can be rejected out of hand without any experiemnt, simply for being bad explanations.
Fallibilism: The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.
Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.
Nearly the whole of the Earth’s biosphere in its primeval state was likewise incapable of keeping an unprotected human alive for long. It would be much more accurate to call it a death trap for humans rather than a life-support system. Even the Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa, where our species evolved, was barely more hospitable than primeval Oxfordshire. Unlike the life-support system in that imagined spaceship, the Great Rift Valley lacked a safe water supply, and medical equipment, and comfortable living quarters, and was infested with predators, parasites and disease organisms. It frequently injured, poisoned, drenched, starved and sickened its ‘passengers’, and most of them died as a result.
That is the situation to which evolution adapts organisms. And that, therefore, is the lifestyle in which the Earth’s biosphere ‘seems adapted’ to sustaining them. The biosphere only ever achieves stability - and only temporarily at that - by continually neglecting, harming, disabling and killing individuals. Hence the metaphor of a spaceship or a life-support system, is quite perverse: when humans design a life-support system, they design it to provide the maximum possible comfort, safety and longevity for its users within the available resources; the biosphere has no such priorities.
Nor is the biosphere a great preserver of species. In addition to being notoriously cruel to individuals, evolution involves continual extinctions of entire species. The average rate of extinction since the beginning of life on Earth has been about ten species per year (the number is known only very approximately), becoming much higher during the relatively brief periods that palaeontologists call mass extinction events’. The rate at which species have come into existence has on balance only slightly exceeded the extinction rate, and the net effect is that the overwhelming majority of species that have ever existed on Earth (perhaps 99.9 per cent of them) are now extinct. Genetic evidence suggests that our own species narrowly escaped extinction on at least one occasion. Several species closely related to ours did become extinct.

Significantly, the ‘life-support system’ itself wiped them out - by means such as natural disasters, evolutionary changes in other species, and climate change. Those cousins of ours had not invited extinction by changing their lifestyles or overloading the biosphere: on the contrary, it wiped them out because they were living the lifestyles that they had evolved to live, and in which, according to the Spaceship Earth metaphor, the biosphere had been ‘supporting’ them.
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. There are people in the Great Rift Valley today who live far more comfortably than early humans did, and in far greater numbers, through knowledge of things like tools, farming and hygiene. The Earth did provide the raw materials for our survival

just as the sun has provided the energy, and supernovae provided the elements, and so on. But a heap of raw materials is not the same thing as a life-support system. It takes knowledge to convert the one into the other… the biosphere no more provides humans with a life-support system than it provides us with radio telescopes.
In the unique case of humans, the difference between a hospitable environment and a deathtrap depends on what knowledge they have created.
The astrophysicist Martin Rees has speculated that somewhere in the universe ‘there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains?’ But that cannot be so. For if the ‘capacity’ in question is mere computational speed and amount of memory, then we can understand the aspects in question with the help of computers - just as we have understood the world for centuries with the help of pencil and paper. As Einstein remarked, ‘My pencil and I are more clever than I’ In terms of computational repertoire, our computers - and brains - are already universal.
Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble.
The ‘argument from design’ has been used for millennia as one of the classic ‘proofs’ of the existence of God, as follows. Some aspects of the world appear to have been designed, but they were not designed by humans; since “design requires a designer’, there must therefore be a God. As I said, that is a bad explanation because it does not address how the knowledge of how to create such designs could possibly have been created. (Who designed the designer?’, and so on.)
Non-explanatory human knowledge can also evolve in an analogous way: rules of thumb are not passed on perfectly to the next generation of users, and the ones that survive in the long run are not necessarily the ones that optimize the ostensible function. For instance, a rule that is expressed in an elegant rhyme may be remembered, and repeated, better than one that is more accurate but expressed in ungainly prose.
Look up the difference engine
Infinite regress: A fallacy in which an argument or explanation depends on a sub-argument of the same form which purports to address essentially the same problem as the original argument.
We cannot predict most of the problems that we shall encounter, or most of the opportunities to solve them, let alone the solutions and attempted solutions and how they will affect events. People in 1900 did not consider the internet or nuclear power unlikely: they did not conceive of them at all… Trying to know the unknowable leads inexorably to error and self-deception. Among other things, it creates a bias towards pessimism.
Moods do not necessitate any particular stance about the future: the statesman Winston Churchill suffered from intense depression, yet his outlook on the future of civilization, and his specific expectations as wartime leader, were unusually positive. Conversely the economist Thomas Malthus, a notorious prophet of doom (of whom more below), is said to have been a serene and happy fellow, who often had his companions at the dinner table in gales of laughter.
Blind optimism is also known as “overconfidence’ or ‘recklessness’. An often cited example, perhaps unfairly, is the judgement of the builders of the ocean liner Titanic that it was ‘practically unsinkable. The largest ship of its day, it sank on its maiden voyage in 1912. Designed to survive every foreseeable disaster, it collided with an iceberg in a manner that had not been foreseen.
As we look back on the failed civilizations of the past, we can see that they were so poor, their technology was so feeble, and their explanations of the world so fragmentary and full of misconceptions that their caution about innovation and progress was as perverse as expecting a blindfold to be useful when navigating dangerous waters.

Pessimists believe that the present state of our own civilization is an exception to that pattern. But what does the precautionary principle say about that claim? Can we be sure that our present knowledge, too, is not riddled with dangerous gaps and misconceptions? That our present wealth is not pathetically inadequate to deal with unforeseen problems? Since we cannot be sure, would not the precautionary principle require us to confine ourselves to the policy that would always have been salutary in the past - namely innovation and, in emergencies, even blind optimism about the benefits of new knowledge?
There is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism. And the only moral values that permit sustained progress are the objective values that the enlightenment has begun to discover.
Neither Malthus nor Rees intended to prophesy. They were warning that unless we solve certain problems in time, we are doomed. But that has always been true, and always will be. Problems are inevitable. As I said, many civilizations have fallen. Even before the dawn of civilization, all our sister species, such as the Neanderthals, became extinct through challenges with which they could easily have coped, had they known how.
Popper therefore applies his basic ‘how can we detect and eliminate errors?’ to political philosophy in the form how can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence? Just as science seeks explanations that are experimentally testable, so a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect, and persuade others, that a leader or policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are. Just as the institutions of science are structured so as to avoid entrenching theories, but instead to expose them to criticism and testing, so political institutions should not make it hard to oppose rulers and policies, non-violently, and should embody traditions of peaceful, critical discussion of them and of the institutions themselves and everything else. Thus, systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.
Sometimes ‘immortality’ is even regarded as undesirable. For instance, there are arguments from overpopulation; but those are examples of the Malthusian prophetic fallacy: what each additional surviving person would need to survive at present-day standards of living is easily calculated; what knowledge that person would contribute to the solution of the resulting problems is unknowable.
There is a traditional optimistic story that runs as follows. Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favourite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The horse might die. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk!’ The prisoner understands that, while his immediate problems have to do with prison bars and the king and his horse, ultimately the evil he faces is caused by insufficient knowledge.
Students are told ‘If you think you’ve understood quantum mechanics then you don’t.’ Inconsistency was defended as ‘complementarity’ or duality; parochialism was hailed as philosophical sophistication. Thus the theory claimed to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal (i.e. all) modes of criticism - a hallmark of bad philosophy.

Its combination of vagueness, immunity from criticism, and the prestige and perceived authority of fundamental physics opened the door to countless systems of pseudo-science and quackery supposedly based on quantum theory. Its disparagement of plain criticism and reason as being ‘classical’, and therefore illegitimate, has given endless comfort to those who want to defy reason and embrace any number of irrational modes of thought. Thus quantum theory - the deepest discovery of the physical sciences - has acquired a reputation for endorsing practically every mystical and occult doctrine ever proposed.
Error is the normal state of our knowledge, and is no disgrace.
Bad philosophy has always existed too. For instance, children have always been told, ‘Because I say so.’ Although that is not always intended as a philosophical position, it is worth analysing it as one, for in four simple words it contains remarkably many themes of false and bad philosophy. First, it is a perfect example of bad explanation: it could be used to ‘explain’ anything. Second, one way it achieves that status is by addressing only the form of the question and not the substance: it is about who said something, not what they said. That is the opposite of truth-seeking. Third, it reinterprets a request for true explanation (why should something-or-other be as it is?) as a request for justification (what entitles you to assert that it is so?), which is the justified-true-belief chimera. Fourth, it confuses the nonexistent authority for ideas with human authority (power) - a much-travelled path in bad political philosophy. And, fifth, it claims by this means to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism.
Perhaps inevitably, these charges are true of postmodernism itself: it is a narrative that resists rational criticism or improvement, precisely because it rejects all criticism as mere narrative. Creating a successful postmodernist theory is indeed purely a matter of meeting the criteria of the postmodernist community - which have evolved to be complex, exclusive and authority-based. Nothing like that is true of rational ways of thinking: creating a good explanation is hard not because of what anyone has decided, but because there is an objective reality that does not meet anyone’s prior expectations, including those of authorities.
Western advocates of society-wide planning were forced to address a fundamental question that totalitarians do not encounter: when society as a whole faces a choice, and citizens differ in their preferences among the options, which option is it best for society to choose? If people are unanimous, there is no problem - but no need for a planner either. If they are not, which option can be rationally defended as being ‘the will of the people’ the option that society ‘wants’? And that raises a second question: how should society organize its decision-making so that it does indeed choose the options that it ‘wants? These two questions had been present, at least implicitly, from the beginning of modern democracy.
Proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies. But compromises - amalgams of the policies of the contributors - have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it.
Enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change - a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always - and can only be - to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.
To be transferred to a single person, a meme need seem useful only to that person. To be transferred to a group of similar people under unchanging circumstances, it need be only a parochial truth. But what sort of idea is best suited to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable objectives?

A true idea is a good candidate. But not just any truth will do. It must seem useful to all those people, for it is they who will be choosing whether to enact it or not. ‘Useful’ in this context does not necessarily mean functionally useful: it refers to any property that can make people want to adopt an idea and enact it, such as being interesting, funny, elegant, easily remembered, morally right and so on.
We are fallible, but through conjecture, criticism and seeking good explanations we may correct some of our errors.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, primitive societies are unimaginably unpleasant to live in. Either they are static, and survive only by extinguishing their members’ creativity and breaking their spirits, or they quickly lose their knowledge and disintegrate, and violence takes over.
A student might well acquire a complex meme at a lecture without being able to repeat a single sentence spoken by the lecturer, even immediately afterwards. In such a case the student has replicated the meaning - which is the whole content - of the meme without imitating any actions at all. As I said, imitation is not at the heart of human meme replication. (Think Parrots, good at imitation but not at replicating memes)
Creativity would have had to evolve as well. For no human-level mental achievements would be possible without human-type (explanatory) memes, and the laws of epistemology ditate that no such memes are possible without creativity.
Contra Diamond’s “Guns, Germs & Steel.“:

“The bigger picture is that the spread of llamas can only have been prevented by people’s ideas and outlook. Had the Andeans had a Polynesian outlook instead, llamas might have spread all over the Americas. Had the ancient Polynesians not had that outlook, they might never have settled Polynesia in the first place, and biogeographical explanations would now be referring to the great ocean barrier as the ‘ultimate explanation’ for that. If the Polynesians had been even better at long-range trading, they might have managed to transport horses from Asia to their islands and thence to South America - a feat perhaps no more impressive than Hannibal’s transporting elephants across the Alps. If the ancient Greek enlightenment had continued, Athenians might have been the first to settle the Pacific islands and they would now be the ‘Polynesians’. Or, if the early Andeans had worked out how to breed giant war llamas and had ridden out to explore and conquer before anyone else had even thought of domesticating the horse, South American biogeographers might now be explaining that their ancestors colonized the world because no other continent had llamas.”

So there is no resource-management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories. But there are ideas that reliably cause disasters, and one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned. The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes: removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters.

For example, one of the triumphs of twentieth-century progress was the discovery of antibiotics, which ended many of the plagues and endemic illnesses that had caused suffering and death since time im-memorial. However, it has been pointed out almost from the outset by critics of ‘so-called progress’ that this triumph may only be temporary, because of the evolution of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. This is often held up as an indictment of - to give it its broad context - Enlightenment hubris. We need lose only one battle in this war of science against bacteria and their weapon, evolution (so the argument goes), to be doomed, because our other ‘so-called progress’ - such as cheap worldwide air travel, global trade, enormous cities - makes us more vulnerable than ever before to a global pandemic that could exceed the Black Death in destructiveness and even cause our extinction.

But all triumphs are temporary. So to use this fact to reinterpret progress as ‘so-called progress’ is bad philosophy. The fact that reliance on specific antibiotics is unsustainable is only an indictment from the point of view of someone who expects a sustainable lifestyle. But in reality there is no such thing. Only progress is sustainable.
Prevention and delaying tactics are useful, but they can be no more than a minor part of a viable strategy for the future. Problems are inevitable, and sooner or later survival will depend on being able to cope when prevention and delaying tactics have failed. Obviously we need to work towards cures. But we can do that only for diseases that we already know about. So we need the capacity to deal with unfore-seen, unforeseeable failures. For this we need a large and vibrant research community, interested in explanation and problem-solving. We need the wealth to fund it, and the technological capacity to implement what it discovers.
Trying to predict what our net effect on the environment will be for the next century and then subordinating all policy decisions to optimizing that prediction cannot work. We cannot know how much to reduce emissions by, nor how much effect that will have, because we cannot know the future discoveries that will make some of our present actions seem wise, some counter-productive and some irrelevant, nor how much our efforts are going to be assisted or impeded by sheer luck. Tactics to delay the onset of foreseeable problems may help. But they cannot replace, and must be subordinate to, increasing our ability to intervene after events turn out as we did not foresee. If that does not happen in regard to carbon-dioxide-induced warming, it will happen with something else.
“I believe that it would be worth trying to learn something about the world even if in trying to do so we should merely learn that we do not know much … It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.” ~ Popper