Constructors

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

The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’ – The ‘perspiration’ phase can always be automated. – The knowledge-friendliness of the physical world. – People are universal constructors. – The beginning of the open-ended creation of explanations. – The environments that could create an open-ended stream of knowledge, if suitably primed – i.e. almost all environments. – The fact that new explanations create new problems. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Universal constructor: A constructor that can cause any raw materials to undergo any physically possible transformation, given the right information. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Constructor: A device capable of causing other objects to undergo transformations without undergoing any net change itself. — 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 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

While humans transform inhospitable environments like the biosphere into support systems for themselves. And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors’. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World