Read The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World Online
Authors: David Deutsch
Similarly, the Singularity is often assumed to be a moment of
unprecedented upheaval and danger, as the rate of innovation becomes too rapid for humans to cope with. But this is a parochial misconception. During the first few centuries of the Enlightenment, there has been a constant feeling that rapid and accelerating innovation is getting out of hand. But our capacity to cope with, and enjoy, changes in our technology, lifestyle, ethical norms and so on has been increasing too, with the weakening and extinction of some of the anti-rational memes that used to sabotage it. In future, when the rate of innovation will also increase due to the sheer increasing clock rate and throughput of brain add-ons and AI computers, then our capacity to cope with that will increase at the same rate or faster: if everyone were suddenly able to think a million times as fast, no one would feel hurried as a result. Hence I think that the concept of the Singularity as a sort of discontinuity is a mistake. Knowledge will continue to grow exponentially or even faster, and that is astounding enough.
The economist Robin Hanson has suggested that there have been several singularities in the history of our species, such as the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. Arguably, even the early Enlightenment was a ‘singularity’ by that definition. Who could have predicted that someone who lived through the English Civil War – a bloody struggle of religious fanatics versus an absolute monarch – and through the victory of the religious fanatics in 1651, might also live through the peaceful birth of a society that saw liberty and reason as its principal characteristics? The Royal Society, for instance, was founded in 1660 – a development that would hardly have been conceivable a generation earlier. Roy Porter marks 1688 as the beginning of the English Enlightenment. That is the date of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, the beginning of predominantly constitutional government along with many other rational reforms which were part of that deeper and astonishingly rapid shift in the prevailing world view.
Also, the time beyond which scientific prediction has no access is different for different phenomena. For each phenomenon it is the moment at which the creation of new knowledge may begin to make a significant difference to what one is trying to predict. Since our estimates of that, too, are subject to the same kind of horizon, we should really understand
all
our predictions as implicitly including the proviso ‘unless the creation of new knowledge intervenes’.
Some explanations do have reach into the distant future, far beyond the horizons that make most other things unpredictable. One of them is that fact itself. Another is the infinite potential of explanatory knowledge – the subject of this book.
To attempt to predict anything beyond the relevant horizon is futile – it is prophecy – but
wondering
what is beyond it is not. When wondering leads to conjecture, that constitutes
speculation
, which is not irrational either. In fact it is vital. Every one of those deeply unforeseeable new ideas that make the future unpredictable will begin as a speculation. And every speculation begins with a problem:
problems
in regard to the future can reach beyond the horizon of prediction too – and problems have solutions.
In regard to understanding the physical world, we are in much the same position as Eratosthenes was in regard to the Earth: he could measure it remarkably accurately, and he knew a great deal about certain aspects of it – immensely more than his ancestors had known only a few centuries before. He must have known about such things as seasons in regions of the Earth about which he had no evidence. But he also
knew
that most of what was out there was far beyond his theoretical knowledge as well as his physical reach.
We cannot yet measure the universe as accurately as Eratosthenes measured the Earth. And we, too,
know
how ignorant we are. For instance, we know from universality that AI is attainable by writing computer programs, but we have no idea how to write (or evolve) the right one. We do not know what qualia are or how creativity works, despite having working examples of qualia and creativity inside all of us. We learned the genetic code decades ago, but have no idea why it has the reach that it has. We know that both of the deepest prevailing theories in physics must be false. We know that
people
are of fundamental significance, but we do not know whether we are among those people: we may fail, or give up, and intelligences originating elsewhere in the universe may be the beginning of infinity. And so on for all the problems I have mentioned and many more.
Wheeler once imagined writing out all the equations that might be the ultimate laws of physics on sheets of paper all over the floor. And then:
Stand up, look back on all those equations, some perhaps more hopeful than others, raise one’s finger commandingly, and give the order ‘Fly!’ Not one of those equations will put on wings, take off, or fly. Yet the universe ‘flies’.
C. W. Misner, K. S. Thorne and J. A.Wheeler,
Gravitation
(1973)
We do not know why it ‘flies’. What is the difference between laws that are instantiated in physical reality and those that are not? What is the difference between a computer simulation of a person (which must
be
a person, because of universality) and a recording of that simulation (which cannot be a person)? When there are two identical simulations under way, are there two sets of qualia or one? Double the moral value or not?
Our world, which is so much larger, more unified, more intricate and more beautiful than that of Eratosthenes, and which we understand and control to an extent that would have seemed godlike to him, is nevertheless just as mysterious, yet open, to us now as his was to him then. We have lit only a few candles here and there. We can cower in their parochial light until something beyond our ken snuffs us out, or we can resist. We already see that we do not live in a senseless world. The laws of physics make sense: the world is explicable. There are higher levels of emergence and higher levels of explanation. Profound abstractions in mathematics, morality and aesthetics are accessible to us. Ideas of tremendous reach are possible. But there is also plenty in the world that does not and will not make sense until we ourselves work out how to rectify it. Death does not make sense. Stagnation does not make sense. A bubble of sense within endless senselessness does not make sense. Whether the world ultimately does make sense will depend on how
people
– the likes of us – chose to think and to act.
Many people have an aversion to infinity of various kinds. But there are some things that we do not have a choice about. There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What lies ahead of us is in any case infinity. All we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, wrong or right, death or life.
Jacob Bronowski,
The Ascent of Man
(BBC Publications, 1973)
Jacob Bronowski,
Science and Human Values
(Harper & Row, 1956)
Richard Byrne, ‘Imitation as Behaviour Parsing’,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
B358 (2003)
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
(Oxford University Press, 1976)
David Deutsch, ‘Comment on Michael Lockwood, “‘Many Minds’ Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics”’,
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
47, 2 (1996)
David Deutsch,
The Fabric of Reality
(Allen Lane, 1997)
Karl Popper,
Conjectures and Refutations
(Routledge, 1963)
Karl Popper,
The Open Society and Its Enemies
(Routledge, 1945)
John Barrow and Frank Tipler,
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
(Clarendon Press, 1986)
Susan Blackmore,
The Meme Machine
(Oxford University Press, 1999)
Nick Bostrom, ‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?’,
Philosophical Quarterly
53 (2003)
David Deutsch, ‘Apart from Universes’, in S. Saunders, J. Barrett, A. Kent and D. Wallace, eds.,
Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory, and Reality
(Oxford University Press, 2010)
David Deutsch, ‘It from Qubit’, in John Barrow, Paul Davies and Charles Harper, eds.,
Science and Ultimate Reality
(Cambridge University Press, 2003)
David Deutsch, ‘Quantum Theory of Probability and Decisions’,
Proceedings of the Royal Society
A455 (1999)
David Deutsch, ‘The Structure of the Multiverse’,
Proceedings of the Royal Society
A458 (2002)
Richard Feynman,
The Character of Physical Law
(BBC Publications, 1965)
Richard Feynman,
The Meaning of It All
(Allen Lane, 1998)
Ernest Gellner,
Words and Things
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)
William Godwin,
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793)
Douglas Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
(Basic Books, 1979)
Douglas Hofstadter,
I am a Strange Loop
(Basic Books, 2007)
Bryan Magee,
Popper
(Fontana, 1973)
Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’
Plato,
Euthyphro
Karl Popper,
In Search of a Better World
(Routledge, 1995)
Karl Popper,
The World of Parmenides
(Routledge, 1998)
Roy Porter,
Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
(Allen Lane, 2000)
Martin Rees,
Just Six Numbers
(Basic Books, 2001)
Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’,
Mind
, 59, 236 (October 1950)
Jenny Uglow,
The Lunar Men
(Faber, 2002)
Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’,
Whole Earth Review
, winter 1993
Entries in
bold
refer to defining or principal occurrences.
641 argument (Hofstadter)
115
–
18
,
185
see also
domino computer
abstractions
114
–
24
,
166
,
185
,
266
–
7
,
447
abstract replicators
95
,
114
,
266
–
7
abstraction from experience
16
,
128
,
129
confusions of abstract attributes with physical ones of the same name
182
–
8
,
343
people as abstract information
59
,
130
Achilles and the tortoise
182
–
3
adaptation
creationism and the designers of
79
–
81
of creativity
see
creativity
by humans as universal constructors
58
–
60
and knowledge
55
,
56
–
65
,
78
–
81
,
88
;
see also
creation of knowledge
the reach of human adaptations
56
–
65
through technology
57
–
60
,
61
,
436
;
see also
automation
Adleman, Leonard
145
Aeschylus
216
aesthetics
367
human appreciation of beauty
353
–
4
,
356
–
8
,
359
,
362
–
7
the objectivity of beauty
122
,
353
–
68
see also
art
see also
old age
agriculture
48
,
50
,
57
,
207
,
234
,
320
,
422
,
431
,
437
,
438
,
440
evolutionary
160
see also
computer programs
Alhazen
220
Amadeus
(Shaffer)
353
see also
equivocation
analogue computers
140