The Beginning of Infinity
A fallible review with some inevitable problems
My colleague
has been bugging me for ages to read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. I eventually relented and I have to admit that he was completely right: I loved the book.It was a strange experience reading it, as it seemed to be expressing my own beliefs that I have long held but which I would previously have struggled to articulate, or even to realize needed articulation. Deutsch puts things so crisply that after reading this book it’s hard remember how my mental models worked before reading it, which to my mind is the sign of the best nonfiction — it becomes a part of you.
Deutsch gives us a philosophy of science and technology that I can’t stop thinking of as White Pill Popper. The central building block of science is the explanation, where a good explanation is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for. Science advances through conjecture and criticism, where conjecture is the inherently unpredictable and creative process of forming new explanations. Empirical testing is one form of criticism, but not the only or even the main one. Empericists, on the other hand, are gravely mistaken because they believe that that observation precedes explanation, when in fact every observation is ‘theory-laden’, i.e. depends on already existing explanations.
The twin maxims that “Problems are inevitable”, and “Problems are soluble” form a normative philosophy of technology. “That progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the Enlightenment.”
Preach!
He extends this into a grand theory of history and some very satisfying takedowns of mysticism, cultural relativism, ecodoomerism, and other deserving villains.
This all gets you the Beginning of Infinity: we humans are ‘universal constructors’, on the start of a never ending journey of scientific, moral, and technological progress — so long as we don’t get off the ride.1
Deutsch is wonderfully direct, so we get all the basics in the first three chapters and then the rest is full interesting variations on the theme. We hit up some number theory corollaries to all this Infinity talk, a tour of a multiversal interpretation of quantum mechanics whose justification one suspects may have motivated a lot of the Explanation talk in the first place, AI, Neo-Darwinism, a theory of aesthetics, and even some ancient Greece fan fiction.
My brief review will please both Mills and my new mimetic overlords: Read this book, or we can’t be friends anymore2.
HOWEVER!
My Confusion
I have some lingering problems with ya BOI. It’s nearly certain that these are my problems, and not Deutsch’s. I offer them here in the hope that Cunningham’s law3 applies and that one of my lovely readers will put me straight.
The first one is pretty basic: what the heck is explanation, exactly?
Deutsch says an explanation is a “Statement about what is there, what it does, and how, and why”, and talks a lot about making sense of things.
Now, I don’t want to overstate my confusion. I know what he means, at least in the sense that I feel like I can explain things with statements, and that I know the feeling of things making sense.
But this is a very subjective understanding. A statement is a series of words. Is the language I use load bearing? In what way? What is happening when things “make sense”? I guess what I’m saying is that I can’t explain explanation, and everything else in the book rests on this placeholder understanding for me.
That ain’t Wright
While dunking on Inductivism, Deutsch phrases apoint in a way that really sticks in my craw.
Science often predicts — and brings about — phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before. For millennia people dreamed about flying, but they experienced only falling. Then they discovered good explanatory theories about flying, and then they flew — in that order.
The key idea is that theory doesn’t always and directly follow from observation the way that empiricists said, which, fine. But the plain reading is that the reverse is true, that theory always runs out ahead of practice.
As an engineering minded person, this offends me. The history of technology is full of examples where our ability to build stuff ran out ahead of our ability to explain it. The steam engine preceded and motivated much of what we now know as thermodynamics. Here is Wikipedia on an early semiconductor:
Semiconductors had been used in the electronics field for some time before the invention of the transistor. Around the turn of the 20th century they were quite common as detectors in radios, used in a device called a "cat's whisker" developed by Jagadish Chandra Bose and others. These detectors were somewhat troublesome, however, requiring the operator to move a small tungsten filament (the whisker) around the surface of a galena (lead sulfide) or carborundum (silicon carbide) crystal until it suddenly started working.[7] Then, over a period of a few hours or days, the cat's whisker would slowly stop working and the process would have to be repeated. At the time their operation was completely mysterious.
[emphasis mine]
The Wright brothers based their ambition on some theory, of course, but a lot of what people thought they knew about how e.g. airfoils work turned out not to be true — but that didn’t matter, because those guys built a wind tunnel to see what actually worked.
I’m still not convinced we know how the heck bicycles work, and certainly throughout history most of the people building them (including also the Wright brothers) did not know.
Now, to be fair to Deutsch, I think that he knows all this. After all, a big part of the point of this chapter is that for most of the time we were doing science our theories about how we were doing it were badly wrong! In other words, practice outpaced theory.
We can square all of this by saying that very practical ideas for how to build things — like if you look at birds changing the angle of their wings to turn, and then decide to change the angle of your wings — count as explanations. Maybe even physical devices count. After all what is trial and error but conjecture and criticism?
Still, I wish that Deutsch acknowledged that while observation does not is not the prime mover of theory, building often runs out ahead of the limits of what theory can adequately explain. This matters to people who build things.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?4
A pragmatic solution?
I suspect the answer to my first problem might be lurking in the vicinity of my second. Deutsch says the fact that “Problems are soluble” implies '“everything that is not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.”
Maybe the fundamental property of an explanatory knowledge is not actually a statement in language, or a subjective feeling of sense, but the ability to transform the physical world. If this is not just a follow-on effect of explanation but it’s rather it’s definition, then I think my confusion melts away.
Knowledge is power, in this view. This also means that a machine that I’ve built that can do something, but for which I don’t yet have a far-reaching universal theory, still counts as explanatory knowledge. It may in turn prompt better theories, which allow further building.
That more closely matches how I think about science and technology, but I’m not at all certain that this is what Deutsch means. Do you know?
Finally, and selfishly: Deutsch is awesome on Twitter, and I would love to have him on Substack. Let me know if you have ideas on this front.
By which I mean we can definitely still be friends, but I might occasionally be annoying to you if we talk about related topics.
"The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.” — Ward Cunningham
As a musician trained in the mathematical analysis of music, but terrible at science, I’m not sure my insight will help.
But in my field, groundbreakers are sometimes theorists, and sometimes not. A lot of theorists wait for creative people to do the heavy lifting, and then they come along and explain what the innovator did. And with many innovators, the academics have been glacially slow to catch up. It’s typical for them to just dismiss or ignore innovations.
Book-length scholarly writing is in its infancy with artists like Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell, even though the last two are old, and the first is dead. And John Cage is widely derided as a joke, and his ideas mocked, even though he eloquently explained virtually everything he ever did. And i never even heard these names mentioned at all when I was getting a music degree in 2002.
So, I would guess that the world of physical innovation, or real-world problem-solving, wouldn’t be altogether different from what i’m describing. I assume it IS quite different, generally, but I also assume that while the ratio might be different, it would be likely in other fields that innovation and theory aren’t always coming from the same person, or in the same order. I also assume that some innovation, AND some theory, show up on the heels of both accidents and whims. And even following huge errors, too, I imagine.
If a scientist or engineer were to tell me my assumption is wrong, I would probably buy it. Mainly because I don’t have the energy to argue with a scientist. (I’d prefer to not even chat with an engineer.)
Until someone disabuses me of my wrongheaded notion, I’ll continue to suspect I’m correct.
Mysticism and mystics proceed/proceeded science.
People are mystified and then develop observational skills to catalog how things behave (science).
Inevitably as science has shown repeatedly throughout its history existing explanations fail and then we’re mystified again and start a new part of the scientific process over, to replace or expand beyond the failed ‘fact.’
Art rarely suffers from this phenomenon because artists are natural born mystics. And remain free of the annoying, know-it-all hubris that science often foments.