Implicit Knowledge

They are also about coherence, elegance and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity, though none of those things is easy to define either. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances the stupendously complex behaviour of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence: high-level simplicity ‘emerges’ from low-level complexity. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

The more accurately the hobgoblin’s attributes exploit genuine, widespread vulnerabilities of the human mind, the more faithfully the anti-rational meme will propagate. If the meme is to survive for many generations, it is essential that its implicit knowledge of these vulnerabilities be true and deep. But its overt content – the idea of the hobgoblin’s existence – need contain no truth. On the contrary, the non-existence of the hobgoblin helps to make the meme a better replicator, because the story is then unconstrained by the mundane attributes of any genuine menace, which are always finite and to some degree combatable. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World