A review by brannigan
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World by David Deutsch
3.0
While it started engagingly enough - a promising, heady mix of science and slightly idiosyncratic enlightenment philosophy - as the chapters wore on, I began to rapidly lose faith in Deutsch.
The first few chapters introduced me to some really interesting (and slightly iconoclastic) arguments that turned on their heads concepts I had previously treated as axiomatic, such as the value of empiricism as the engine of scientific progress, the relative insignificance of the human experience relative to the scope of the universe. However, I eventually found the real scientific meat of the book to be lacking. In a nutshell, Deutsch should really stick to physics. His chapters dealing with politics and aesthetics in particular lack nuance, and his disdain for traditional philosophy in general comes across as a little arrogant and unjustly dismissive. Particularly laughable were his unambiguous conclusions that a) electoral systems based on a plurality principle are superior to proportional representation systems, because compromise is inherently bad, and b) objective standards of beauty undoubtedly exist because everybody likes flowers.
(I should lay my cards on the table here - my undergrad degree is in Philosophy & Politics, so I may be getting a little territorial over this jumped-up physicist's intrusion into my intellectual patches.)
I was also slightly bothered by his habit of presenting certain scientific theories as canon, e.g. in his chapters on evolutionary biology where he offers no plausible alternative to the Selfish Gene model (even though I subscribe to this model, it is by no means unanimously accepted among mainstream biologists). Slightly worrying too was Deutsch's misrepresentation of this theory on p.384: "...while organisms are nothing but the slaves of their genes..." - this is emphatically not what Dawkins had in mind.
Still, I did engage with the unifying theme of enlightened infinity in all of its guises, and the optimistic message that sees science not as something passive (as in the empiricist notion of scientists as mere observers of knowledge that is already 'out there' in the world), but a process of active knowledge creation. If anything, it sure makes me feel a bit better to be human.
The first few chapters introduced me to some really interesting (and slightly iconoclastic) arguments that turned on their heads concepts I had previously treated as axiomatic, such as the value of empiricism as the engine of scientific progress, the relative insignificance of the human experience relative to the scope of the universe. However, I eventually found the real scientific meat of the book to be lacking. In a nutshell, Deutsch should really stick to physics. His chapters dealing with politics and aesthetics in particular lack nuance, and his disdain for traditional philosophy in general comes across as a little arrogant and unjustly dismissive. Particularly laughable were his unambiguous conclusions that a) electoral systems based on a plurality principle are superior to proportional representation systems, because compromise is inherently bad, and b) objective standards of beauty undoubtedly exist because everybody likes flowers.
(I should lay my cards on the table here - my undergrad degree is in Philosophy & Politics, so I may be getting a little territorial over this jumped-up physicist's intrusion into my intellectual patches.)
I was also slightly bothered by his habit of presenting certain scientific theories as canon, e.g. in his chapters on evolutionary biology where he offers no plausible alternative to the Selfish Gene model (even though I subscribe to this model, it is by no means unanimously accepted among mainstream biologists). Slightly worrying too was Deutsch's misrepresentation of this theory on p.384: "...while organisms are nothing but the slaves of their genes..." - this is emphatically not what Dawkins had in mind.
Still, I did engage with the unifying theme of enlightened infinity in all of its guises, and the optimistic message that sees science not as something passive (as in the empiricist notion of scientists as mere observers of knowledge that is already 'out there' in the world), but a process of active knowledge creation. If anything, it sure makes me feel a bit better to be human.