(Universal) Explainers

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

I have settled on a simple test for judging claims, including Dennett’s, to have explained the nature of consciousness (or any other computational task): if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it. Turing invented his test in the hope of bypassing all those philosophical problems. In other words, he hoped that the functionality could be achieved before it was explained. Unfortunately it is very rare for practical solutions to fundamental problems to be discovered without any explanation of why they work. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The whole motivation for seeking a perfectly secure foundation for mathematics was mistaken. It was a form of justificationism. Mathematics is characterized by its use of proofs in the same way that science is characterized by its use of experimental testing; in neither case is that the object of the exercise. The object of mathematics is to understand – to explain – abstract entities. Proof is primarily a means of ruling out false explanations; and sometimes it also provides mathematical truths that need to be explained. But, like all fields in which progress is possible, mathematics seeks not random truths but good explanations. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The fundamental theories of modern physics explain the world in jarringly counter-intuitive ways. For example, most non-physicists consider it self-evident that when you hold your arm out horizontally you can feel the force of gravity pulling it downwards. But you cannot. The existence of a force of gravity is, astonishingly, denied by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, one of the two deepest theories of physics. This says that the only force on your arm in that situation is that which you yourself are exerting, upwards, to keep it constantly accelerating away from the straightest possible path in a curved region of spacetime — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Thus, although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

There can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

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. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Observations are theory-laden. Given an experimental oddity, we have no way of predicting whether it will eventually be explained merely by correcting a minor parochial assumption or by revolutionizing entire sciences. We can know that only after we have seen it in the light of a new explanation. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

They can be understood only by being explained. Fortunately, our best theories embody deep explanations as well as accurate predictions. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

Scientific theories explain the objects and phenomena of our experience in terms of an underlying reality which we do not experience directly. But the ability of a theory to explain what we experience is not its most valuable attribute. Its most valuable attribute is that it explains the fabric of reality itself. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. In fact, burning fuel is only one of many things a spaceship has to do to accomplish its real purpose, which is to transport its payload from one point in space to another. Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

For example, you cannot predict what numbers will come up on a fair (i.e. unbiased) roulette wheel. But if you understand what it is in the wheel’s design and operation that makes it fair, then you can explain why predicting the numbers is impossible. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

A theory may be superseded by a new theory which explains more, and is more accurate, but is also easier to understand, in which case the old theory becomes redundant, and we gain more understanding while needing to learn less than before. That is what happened when Nicolaus Copernicus’s theory of the Earth travelling round the Sun superseded the complex Ptolemaic system which had placed the Earth at the centre of the universe. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

We understand the fabric of reality only by understanding theories that explain it. And since they explain more than we are immediately aware of, we can understand more than we are immediately aware that we understand. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

Also, memes can be passed to people other than the holders’ biological descendants. Those factors make meme evolution enormously faster than gene evolution, which partly explains how memes can contain so much knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Dawkins named his tour-de-force account of neo-Darwinism The Selfish Gene because he wanted to stress that evolution does not especially promote the ‘welfare’ of species or individual organisms. But, as he also explained, it does not promote the ‘welfare’ of genes either: it adapts them not for survival in larger numbers, nor indeed for survival at all, but only for spreading through the population at the expense of rival genes, particularly slight variants of themselves. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Would we seem like insects to it? This can seem plausible only if one forgets that there can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors. The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

In early prehistory, populations were tiny, knowledge was parochial, and history-making ideas were millennia apart. In those days, a meme spread only when one person observed another enacting it nearby, and (because of the staticity of cultures) rarely even then. So at that time human behaviour resembled that of other animals, and much of what happened was indeed explained by biogeography. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

In reality, the difference between Sparta and Athens, or between Savonarola and Lorenzo de’ Medici, had nothing to do with their genes; nor did the difference between the Easter Islanders and the imperial British. They were all people – universal explainers and constructors. But their ideas were different. Nor did landscape cause the Enlightenment. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World