Knowledge

Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our ‘wall’. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

It follows that humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The most important of all limitations on knowledge – creation is that we cannot prophecy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it. — David Deutsch, N/A

The scientific revolution was part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment, which also brought progress in other fields, especially moral and political philosophy, and in the institutions of society. Unfortunately, the term ‘the Enlightenment’ is used by historians and philosophers to denote a variety of different trends, some of them violently opposed to each other... But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The Enlightenment [was the start of] a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

The biologist Peter Medawar described science as ‘the art of the soluble’, but the same applies to all forms of knowledge. All kinds of creative thought involve judgements about what approaches might or might not work. Gaining or losing interest in particular problems or sub-problems is part of the creative process and itself constitutes problem-solving. So whether ‘problems are soluble’ does not depend on whether any given question can be answered, or answered by a particular thinker on a particular day. But if progress ever depended on violating a law of physics, then ‘problems are soluble’ would be false. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Again we were too parochial, and were led to the false conclusion that knowledge-bearing entities can be physically identical to non-knowledge-bearing ones; and this in turn cast doubt on the fundamental status of knowledge. But now we have come almost full circle. We can see that the ancient idea that living matter has special physical properties was almost true: it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the multiverse. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

From the least parochial perspectives available to us, people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not ‘supported’ by their environments, but support themselves by creating knowledge. Once they have suitable knowledge (essentially, the knowledge of the Enlightenment), they are capable of sparking unlimited further progress. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge. Thus ‘how do we know…?’ is transformed into ‘by what authority do we claim…? — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them. It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible to — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Suppose that the lecturer had repeatedly returned to a certain key idea, and had expressed it with different words and gestures each time. The parrot’s (or ape’s) job would be that much harder than imitating only the first instance; the student’s much easier, because to a human observer each different way of putting the idea would convey additional knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

The real situation is that people need inexplicit knowledge to understand laws and other explicit statements, not vice versa. — 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

The sea [of] change in the values and patterns of thinking of a whole community of thinkers, which brought about a sustained and accelerating creation of knowledge, happened only once in history, with the Enlightenment and its scientific revolution. An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. It is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed: It trivially implies that prediction alone is insufficient. Somewhat less trivially, it leads to the rejection of authority, because if we adopt a theory on authority, that means that we would also have accepted a range of different theories on authority. And hence it also implies the need for a tradition of criticism. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Both the future of civilization and the outcome of a game of Russian roulette are unpredictable, but in different senses and for entirely unrelated reasons. Russian roulette is merely random. Although we cannot predict the outcome, we do know what the possible outcomes are, and the probability of each, provided that the rules of the game are obeyed. The future of civilization is unknowable, because the knowledge that is going to affect it has yet to be created. Hence the possible outcomes are not yet known, let alone their probabilities. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Just as no one in 1900 could have foreseen the consequences of innovations made during the twentieth century – including whole new fields such as nuclear physics, computer science and biotechnology – so our own future will be shaped by knowledge that we do not yet have. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Thus we acquire ever more knowledge of reality by solving problems and finding better explanations. But when all is said and done, problems and explanations are located within the human mind, which owes its reasoning power to a fallible brain, and its supply of information to fallible senses. What, then, entitles a human mind to draw conclusions about objective, external reality from its own purely subjective experience and reason? — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

The Medici were soon promoting the new philosophy of ‘humanism’, which valued knowledge above dogma, and virtues such as intellectual independence, curiosity, good taste and friendship over piety and humility. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The critical question about these statues is, Why were they all made alike? You see them sitting there, like Diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them. When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition…These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilization which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

You have to live the solution, and to set about solving the new problems that this creates. It is because of this unsustainability that the island of Britain, with a far less hospitable climate than the subtropical Easter Island, now hosts a civilization with at least three times the population density that Easter Island had at its zenith, and at an enormously higher standard of living. Appropriately enough, this civilization has knowledge of how to live well without the forests that once covered much of Britain. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

That is to say, every putative physical transformation, to be performed in a given time with given resources or under any other conditions, is either – impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or – achievable, given the right knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Thus the issue of whether it is becoming harder or easier to understand everything that is understood depends on the overall balance between these two opposing effects of the growth of knowledge: the increasing breadth of our theories, and their increasing depth. Breadth makes it harder; depth makes it easier. One thesis of this book is that, slowly but surely, depth is winning. In other words, the proposition that I refused to believe as a child is indeed false, and practically the opposite is true. We are not heading away from a state in which one person could understand everything that is understood, but towards it. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

The assumption that progress in a hypothetical rapacious civilization is limited by raw materials rather than by knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

One thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Fallibilism: The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Good/bad explanation: An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for. The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. Mini-enlightenment A short-lived tradition of criticism. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

But failure need not be permanent in a world in which all evils are due to lack of knowledge. We failed at first to notice the non-existence of a force of gravity. Now we understand it. Locating hang-ups is, in the last analysis, easier. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism. We create theories by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories, not to be the source of new ones. We interpret experiences through explanatory theories, but true explanations are not obvious. Fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but instead acknowledging that we may always be mistaken, and trying to correct errors. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Person: An entity that can create explanatory knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Both the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth idea are, contrary to their motivations, irreparably parochial and mistaken. From the least parochial perspectives available to us, people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not ‘supported’ by their environments, but support themselves by creating knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

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

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

The first people to live at the latitude of Oxford (who were actually from a species related to us, possibly the Neanderthals) could do so only because they brought knowledge with them, about such things as tools, weapons, fire and clothing. That knowledge was transmitted from generation to generation not genetically but culturally. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Quantum theory is, as I have said, one such theory. But the other three main strands of explanation through which we seek to understand the fabric of reality are all ‘high level’ from the point of view of quantum physics. They are the theory of evolution (primarily the evolution of living organisms), epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the theory of computation (about computers and what they can and cannot, in principle, compute). — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures – all evils – are due to insufficient knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Bad philosophy [is] philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

More generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge and knowledge embodied in technological artefacts, namely sufficient wealth. Let me define that in a non-parochial way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

As with wealth, so with scientific knowledge: it is hard to imagine what it would be like to know twice as much as we do, and so if we try to prophesy it we find ourselves just picturing the next few decimal places of what we already know. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

What are the best sources of our knowledge – the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?’ I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist – no more than ideal rulers – and that all ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ — Karl Popper, Knowledge without Authority (1960)

Infinite ignorance is a necessary condition for there to be infinite potential for knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Optimism and reason are incompatible with the conceit that our knowledge is ‘nearly there’ in any sense, or that its foundations are. — 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

It would be much truer to say that the landscape we live in is the product of ideas. The primeval landscape, though packed with evidence and therefore opportunity, contained not a single idea. It is knowledge alone that converts landscapes into resources, and humans alone who are the authors of explanatory knowledge and hence of the uniquely human behaviour called ‘history’. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

For most of the history of our species, we had almost no success in creating such knowledge. Where does it come from? Empiricism said that we derive it from sensory experience. This is false. The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

This finite resource model of the world implicitly assumes finite knowledge. It says knowledge creation has come to an end. We are stuck at this current point, and, therefore, based on the knowledge that we have currently, these are all the resources available to us. Now we must start conserving. But knowledge is a thing that we can always create more of. — Naval Ravikant (source)

Domestication, harvesting crops, metallurgy, chemistry, physics, developing engines and rockets—all of these are things that are taking things that we thought were worthless and turning them into resources. Uranium has gone from being completely worthless to being an incredible resource. — Naval Ravikant (source)

Because I grew up on rote sci-fi, I used to be pessimistic about alien encounters ... The reality of it is that any species that finds us is going to immediately give us all the knowledge that they have. And they’re going to crave new knowledge that we have, because they will realize that would allow them to light up the dark matter, the dark energy, the unused resources in the universe, to allow them to thrive as well. — Naval Ravikant (source)