The Beginning of Infinity - Notes
Until very recently, people could not see improvements in the world within the span of their lifetime. “Discoveries such as fire, clothing, stone tools, bronze, and so on, happened so rarely that from an individual’s point of view the world never improved.” Some people realized that progress in practical ways would depend on progress in understanding puzzling phenomena, like stars in the sky. They conjectured links between their lives and the stars. Astrology was a desire for knowledge, control. It still is.
“Nullius in verba” = “Take no one’s word for it.” Motto of the Royal Society, one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660.
Good explanations are often strikingly simple or elegant. F = ma. E = mc^2. Life’s toughest problems have simple answers w/ few variables.
80% of matter in the universe is dark matter. It cannot absorb or emit light. We only know about it by its indirect gravitational effect on galaxies. The other 20% is called ordinary matter and it is characterized by glowing constantly. We are glowing matter. Our bodies emit radiant heat, which is infrared light. We also emit faint amounts of light in the visible range, too faint for eyes to detect.
Spaceship Earth theory. Deutsch says we are not merely passengers. We are its designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous materials.
Everything that is not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.
Explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature that is not limited. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge—and hence of people.
Gene-editing. Changing our genes to improve our lives and facilitate further improvements is no different from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes. It’s a tool.
There is a 1/1000 chance that the Earth will be struck by a comet or asteroid large enough to kill at least a substantial proportion of all human beings in any 100 year period. A child born in the US today is more likely to die as a result of an astronomical event than a plane crash.
Hypothetical people on other planets in other galaxies get the same evidence re: how the universe works that we do—gamma rays, X-rays, radiation, radio waves, cosmic-ray particles. This is the underlying unity in the physical world. The laws of nature are uniform. Explanatory knowledge can make life possible anywhere.
Knowledge is a physical force like gravity. You could even posit that gravity pulls things in, and knowledge moves things outward. “Astrophysics is incomplete without a theory of people.”
Fermi’s problem. The constants of physics may be different in other universes. In those universes, there may be intergalactic life.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity denied the theory of gravity. If you hold your arm out, you can “feel” the force of gravity pulling it downwards. But you cannot. The only force on your arm in that situation is that you yourself are exerting, upwards, to keep it constantly accelerating away from the straightest possible path in a curved region of spacetime.
Numbers are abstract entities that designate values (1, 2, 3, etc.). Numerals are physical symbols that represent numbers (I, II, III, IV, V, etc.).
Arabic numbers actually began in India. It took like 1000 years for them to catch on.
M = one myriad = 10,000.
Charles Babbage created the “Difference Engine” in 1802. This was the first computer. But Babbage was unorganized and it never took off.
Humans can distinguish between only about 7 different sound volumes. This is reflected in musical notation (p, mf, f, etc.).
AI. Deutsch finds much of modern AI not to be “true” AI. It is not creating new knowledge. Instead, the designer/programmer is.
Singularities are functions or expressions of infinity. Singularities may well happen in reality, inside black holes.
Some have suggested that elementary-particle accelerators that briefly create conditions that are in some respects more extreme than any since the Big Bang might destabilize the very vacuum of space and destroy our entire universe.
People used to die from exposure on top of the means for making fires that would have saved their lives. People died of cholera within sight of hearths that could have boiled their drinking water. So yes, cholera “killed” them. But the deeper explanation is lack of knowledge.
We have a duty to be optimistic, about civilization in particular. A “hard” problem is not necessarily one with a low probability of being solved.
Pessimism is conformity. It views change or novelty as bad. If pre-enlightenment societies had not been so pessimistic and static, we would be exploring the stars today. We would be immortal. So we should take it personally.
Tradition, especially moral tradition, can mislead. It’s what did the Spartans in. Improvement requires both explanations and persuasion. Persuading others of some improvement. Banning debate is banning persuasion. Which is “a rare and deadly sort of error: it prevents itself from being undone.” Deutsch surmises that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only, real moral imperative.
Our experience of the world is a form of virtual-reality rendering which happens wholly inside the brain.
Plato’s real name was Aristocles. They called him Plato (”the broad”) because of his wrestler’s build.
The universe is not a receptacle containing physical objects: it is those objects. Even space is a physical object, capable of warping and affecting matter and being affected by it.
The multiverse is like a branching tree. Certain branches are thicker because they represent more likely occurrences.
One form of quantum theory holds that different times are a special case of different universes.
Happiness is a state of continually solving one’s problems. This is the principle of optimism.
The 3/5 compromise is often misinterpreted as illustrating how slaves were regarded as less than human. Black people were indeed widely regarded as being inferior to white ones, but this particular measure was designed to reduce the power of slave-owning states compared to what it would have been if slaves had been counted like everyone else.
In a two-party system, the third party often has majority of the power. If Party A has 48%, and Party B has 48%, then Party C (4%) gets to decide who to side with on each issue and who to sideline.
Some people believe Jupiter is not a planet but a star that never ignited.
Good stories contain truth. Good stories are truth. Some memes (stories) can replicate themselves with great fidelity for many generations. That is a token of how much knowledge they contain.
A substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes (ideas that replicate).
Easter Island is an example of a static society. They had all the resources they needed. Britain, which has a far less hospitable climate, now hosts a civilization with at least 3x the population density that Easter Island had at its zenith, and at an enormously higher standard of living. Resources matter far, far less than whether the people and institutions have what it takes to solve problems.
Climate change. There are some benefits to climate change: increase in crop yields, a general boost to plant life, a reduction in the number of people dying of hypothermia in the winter. A coastal defence project is well within the capabilities of almost any coastal nation — and would add decades to the time available to find other solutions to rising sea levels. It is not known how sensitive the atmosphere’s temperature is to the concentration of carbon dioxide. This has led to political debate about how anthropogenic the increase in temperature to date has been. “It is as if people were arguing about how best to prepare for the next hurricane while all agreeing that the only hurricanes one should prepare for are human-induced ones.” There are some cool solutions out there: removing CO2 from the atmosphere, generating clouds over the oceans to reflect sunlight, and to encourage aquatic organisms to absorb more carbon dioxide. Deutsch thinks people are too focused on retreating into a “sustainable” lifestyle. That’s what static societies do.
Deutsch calls global warming a disaster because the prevailing theory is that our best option is to prevent CO2 emissions by spending vast sums and enforcing severe worldwide restrictions on behaviour, and that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure.
Popper: we differ widely in the various little bits we know, but in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
Dark energy is the term for the reason the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, but no one knows why really.