Universe

Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. 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. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe. — 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

Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. — 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

Whenever we observe anything – a scientific instrument or a galaxy or a human being – what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. — 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

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

If it turns out that all this time we have merely been studying the programming of a cosmic planetarium, then that would merely mean that we have been studying a smaller portion of reality than we thought. So what? Such things have happened many times in the history of science, as our horizons have expanded beyond the Earth to include the solar system, our Galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on, and, of course, parallel universes. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

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

Blind optimism is a stance towards the future. It consists of proceeding as if one knows that the bad outcomes will not happen. The opposite approach, blind pessimism, often called the precautionary principle, seeks to ward off disaster by avoiding everything not known to be safe. No one seriously advocates either of these two as a universal policy, but their assumptions and their arguments are common, and often creep into people’s planning. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and that ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. (Or that it ‘probably’ will.) But in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen. Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

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

Before 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear-fission (atomic-bomb) explosion; there may never have been one in the history of the universe. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Prediction – even perfect, universal prediction – is simply no substitute for explanation. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

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

We now have to accept, and rejoice in bringing about, our next transformation: to active agents of progress in the emerging rational society – and universe. — 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

That is a universal system of tallying. But, like levels of emergence, there is a hierarchy of universality. The next level above tallying is counting, which involves numerals. When tallying goats one is merely thinking ‘another, and another, and another’; but when counting them one is thinking ‘forty, forty-one, forty-two…’ It is only with hindsight that we can regard tally marks as a system of numerals, known as the ‘unary’ system. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

However, in regard to these more sophisticated applications, the system was not universal. Since there was no higher-valued symbol than (one thousand), the numerals from two thousand onwards all began with a string of ’s, which therefore became nothing more than tally marks for thousands. — 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

Because of the necessity for error-correction, all jumps to universality occur in digital systems. — 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