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A review by ashrafulla
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
4.0
This is a tough read, which is why it's not 5 stars for me. You have to work through the chapters in this book because Deutsch often careens off the path of teaching into the path of thought. The path of thought is where nerds like me start using big words like "autoregressive" and "ergodicity" and lose everyone they're talking to.
I had to keep highlighted notes so I could remember all the things I wanted to pull from this book. It is at its core an attempt to demonstrate the rigors of explanation. In Deutsch's view, explanations are creative, hard-to-vary issues that not only fit the data given but provide a way to test predictive power. For example, if you see a stock price and it is wavy, you can't use that waviness to predict stock price. If, instead, you had a model for that waviness, then you could test that model and as long as it was decent it would provide a good explanation of the data.
On those train tracks, Deutsch's main critcism is against fatalism. Whether it is "we've solved all the easy problems" or "we are at peak capacity" or "we're going to be dumber than new robots" there is always this sense of dread about the future from pessimists. Deutsch attacks them by providing a historical parallel; that parallel is almost every episode of innovation starting with the Enlightenment. In every case, we had these nagging thoughts that we were stagnating, only to see something amazing happen next (interchangeable parts, industry, computing, etc.). It is thus inappropriate to expect that we will not innovate in the future; this is a message that I really liked from Deutsch and plan to resonate with.
The "infinity" title is a reference to knowledge, its growth and its increasing velocity. However, Deutsch does side-track to a great chapter or two on what infinity means. For example, by being at a finite time from 0 on this infinite time journey, we are by definition at the beginning of infinity and always will be. That is the point of Deutsche's title (no matter what, we've only just started) but I really enjoyed his Infinity Hotel and all its oddities.
This led to a tough part for me in the book. He describes probability in this way: rather than a coin having a 50% chance of being heads on this coin flip, we are in a multiverse where 50% of the universes have the coin come up heads. This allows him to continue to enforce the determinism of physics while trying to explain the randomness of this universe. Using Infinity Hotel allows him to skirt by statistics, basically. I obviously agree with the premise of the multiverse, but I am not convinced that this shakes my faith in randomness. It is just as explainable that all universes are instances with random processes as well; why must the multiverse be deterministic? Is it because it is the current best explanation? If so, I understand, but then I'm convinced it will be disproven.
This leads to another key takeaway that I agree with: all current "laws" of science are mutable. Each law is simply an explanation that can currently solve a problem. Deutsch's quote is best here: "Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have a conflict." Since all laws are explanations, they are easily scuttled when a better explanation comes along.
The political aspects of this book are very very deep and I used or will use them in a blog post. Essentially, his concept is that compromise does not exist as an optimal solution. If two ideas are explanations, they are hard to vary; as a result anything between the two is a bad explanation. Bad explanations mean bad things, which means compromise is bad. This also leads to some opining about the parliamentary system, which I found myself agreeing with more and more to the distaste of my libertarian side.
In general, this is a very good book with many concepts that does provide some insight into the newest iterations of philosophy in science. It will change bits of you, be it the infinity part or the politics part or (hopefully) the idea of what an explanation must be. For that, it is worth reading, but make sure you set aside the time between each chapter to think about what you just read (and maybe read that chapter again before moving on).
I had to keep highlighted notes so I could remember all the things I wanted to pull from this book. It is at its core an attempt to demonstrate the rigors of explanation. In Deutsch's view, explanations are creative, hard-to-vary issues that not only fit the data given but provide a way to test predictive power. For example, if you see a stock price and it is wavy, you can't use that waviness to predict stock price. If, instead, you had a model for that waviness, then you could test that model and as long as it was decent it would provide a good explanation of the data.
On those train tracks, Deutsch's main critcism is against fatalism. Whether it is "we've solved all the easy problems" or "we are at peak capacity" or "we're going to be dumber than new robots" there is always this sense of dread about the future from pessimists. Deutsch attacks them by providing a historical parallel; that parallel is almost every episode of innovation starting with the Enlightenment. In every case, we had these nagging thoughts that we were stagnating, only to see something amazing happen next (interchangeable parts, industry, computing, etc.). It is thus inappropriate to expect that we will not innovate in the future; this is a message that I really liked from Deutsch and plan to resonate with.
The "infinity" title is a reference to knowledge, its growth and its increasing velocity. However, Deutsch does side-track to a great chapter or two on what infinity means. For example, by being at a finite time from 0 on this infinite time journey, we are by definition at the beginning of infinity and always will be. That is the point of Deutsche's title (no matter what, we've only just started) but I really enjoyed his Infinity Hotel and all its oddities.
This led to a tough part for me in the book. He describes probability in this way: rather than a coin having a 50% chance of being heads on this coin flip, we are in a multiverse where 50% of the universes have the coin come up heads. This allows him to continue to enforce the determinism of physics while trying to explain the randomness of this universe. Using Infinity Hotel allows him to skirt by statistics, basically. I obviously agree with the premise of the multiverse, but I am not convinced that this shakes my faith in randomness. It is just as explainable that all universes are instances with random processes as well; why must the multiverse be deterministic? Is it because it is the current best explanation? If so, I understand, but then I'm convinced it will be disproven.
This leads to another key takeaway that I agree with: all current "laws" of science are mutable. Each law is simply an explanation that can currently solve a problem. Deutsch's quote is best here: "Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have a conflict." Since all laws are explanations, they are easily scuttled when a better explanation comes along.
The political aspects of this book are very very deep and I used or will use them in a blog post. Essentially, his concept is that compromise does not exist as an optimal solution. If two ideas are explanations, they are hard to vary; as a result anything between the two is a bad explanation. Bad explanations mean bad things, which means compromise is bad. This also leads to some opining about the parliamentary system, which I found myself agreeing with more and more to the distaste of my libertarian side.
In general, this is a very good book with many concepts that does provide some insight into the newest iterations of philosophy in science. It will change bits of you, be it the infinity part or the politics part or (hopefully) the idea of what an explanation must be. For that, it is worth reading, but make sure you set aside the time between each chapter to think about what you just read (and maybe read that chapter again before moving on).