The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. David Deutsch. Penguin Books. 2011.
Paperback. Glued. 487 pages. Bibliography (2 pages). Index. 1.0 pounds. Found at Eureka Springs Carnegie Library; Purchased at Alibris.com
Mr. David Deutsch,
I enjoyed your book. So much that I have scores of sticky notes splattered across its pages with my inscriptions highlighting and responding to passages you’ve written. I’ve been so piqued by your book that I think about it while working, while walking to and from work, and even while cooking my dinner. I’ve written in my book journal reactions to it; I’ve talked to people about some of its concepts. In short, the book has achieved that desired end for all books: to move a person in some way over time.
You are a physicist, and much of your book discusses physics with your book’s contentions based on the physics you describe. I will not mention this part of your book in this letter to you; there are other concepts I wish to explore with you. Other readers of this Letter Review will have to read your book to appreciate your depth of knowledge and how you apply the concepts of physics to the broader concepts you address.
It seems you are a Platonist: Ideas are real. Your word for ideas is “explanations.” To you, appearances are deceptive but human explanations about those appearances have universal reach. Like all philosophers, every word you use is laden with meaning: explanations, fallibilism, criticism, justificationism, reality, reach, infinity, stagnation, progress, and more.
Your book is admirable for including at the end of each chapter a summary list with definitions of the important words introduced, another listing the concepts you covered that directly relate to your book’s title The Beginning of Infinity, and a brief Summary of the chapter. As such, your summaries are also laden with meaning. I cannot do this book justice in this short Book Review Letter. Instead, I will mention some of the words and explanations you give that moved me in some way and then ask you just one of the many questions this book posed for me.
Explanations. There can be bad ones, and there can be good ones. As an example, one explanation we humans had for a long time about the lights we saw in the night sky is that Earth was stationary and surrounded by a larger celestial sphere that had holes in it. What was behind those holes was another explanation, but often invoked some sort of god or gods hanging out with the lights on, and a little of that light shone through the holes. Overall, this explanation was geocentric: the Earth was at the center of the universe.
Then, with the invention of the telescope, a better explanation came along and Galileo interpreted the new evidence he observed into a heliocentric explanation: the Earth is revolving around the sun, just as the moon is revolving around the Earth. And the lights are stars.
You use the seasons to help explain your meaning of explanations. The Greeks explained the seasons with a myth about Demeter and Persephone; modern science has a better, more elegant explanation for the seasons that includes both the revolving of Earth around the sun but also the Earth’s tilt and its rotating motion.
Some explanations can be good for awhile, meaning they can help aid us in learning further truths; some explanations can become quite good over time in that they become hard to vary, “because all the details play a functional role.” All explanations, however, are fallible.
Your description of fallibilism is one of those concepts I pondered on while at work. It seems that it is the heart of The Enlightenment and modern science. Fallibilism is the assumption that even the best explanations are not perfect; it is the expectation that currently accepted ‘good’ explanations will eventually be replaced by better explanations once new knowledge is attained by testing the explanations in experiments. It is often stated that our modern era is built upon observation and experimentation; you clarify that the true crowning achievement of The Enlightenment was instead the tradition of criticism that is a necessary component of fallibilism.
In my job I do category management, in which I analyze the sales data of a current set of goods on a shelf. Then I must determine which goods to keep, which to stop bringing into the store, and what new items to try. Then I do a reset, in which I rearrange the goods on the shelf.
A set arrangement of goods on a store shelf can be like an ‘explanation’ of what is available for our store and how we interpret what our customers need and want. A reset is an improved explanation of the updated goods available to us and the changing desires of our customers.
I value the concept of fallibilism in this process because it assumes I will be correcting and improving on our offerings in the resets I do. It also keeps me humble: no reset is perfect. Do I display the canned tomatoes with the other canned vegetables or with the pasta sauces? Do I display the ground flours with other baking supplies or with the whole grains? Do I shelve the cooking oils with the vinegars or near the baking goods? There really are no perfect answers, just better explanations for the store and its customers.
This is nothing new, really, and I suspect most people engage in the scientific method throughout their days without realizing it by making a guess or conjecture, critiquing it to see if it makes sense, and if it does then testing it with an experiment.
But the idea of fallibilism goes further and assumes that even when tested and proven true, an idea is still subject to further critique and further modification, always. Even Einstein’s revolutionary conceptions of gravity that forever changed physics and modern science are fair game for fallibilism
Fallibilism also highlights its opposite concept: justificationism. Your explanation of this concept is helping me to better discern an argument’s weaknesses or strengths. “How do we know…?” is not the same question as “By what authority do we claim…?” This second question “converts the quest for truth into a quest for certainty (a feeling) or for endorsement (a social status).” But neither quest is a genuine search for truth. Justificationism seeks ways of securing ideas against any critique at all.
I just borrowed a book from the library that purported to explain physics…and, it turns out, to my dismay, astrology. The author had preconceived ideas on what “Truth” was, had done his research, and was now going to prove to me how astrophysics is enlightening us on the truths of astrology. He is justifying his pre-determined conclusions rather than taking me by the hand to walk down the path of discovery together.
You, on the other hand, very often in this book state quite simply you do not know the answer to a question you pose. You can conjecture an explanation, but you invite the obvious truth that your conjecture will be proven or disproven by experimentation and/or better explanations by others once new knowledge and new ways of thinking can adequately address the question.
I need that kind of thinking if I am to continue my own quest for a better understanding of the world and my place in it. I don’t want to defend my ideas blindly, but to be open to better and better explanations for what I see in the world around me.
But this questing for good explanations has another implication, which we need to appreciate more and more in today’s environment in which politicians criticize science as nonsense or post-modernist theorists claim everything is relative, including the truths science has brought to bear. You address, all too briefly, the implication that a tradition of seeking out the best explanations will, over time, create a criterion for reality that everyone can agree on. Good explanations are hard to vary for they best describe the details of any given situation.
That, to me, includes not only agreements that red means red, but also that evolution is the best explanation for biology and that astrophysics is the best explanation for what’s happening in the night sky.
You go to length in answering the question of “How do we know what we know?” The following quote of yours encapsulates for me the wonder of science: “One of the most remarkable things about science is the contrast between the enormous reach and power of our best theories and the precarious, local means by which we create them.”
That’s an acknowledgement that we humans know what we know not because of any one genius but because of many people over many times and many places who have sought out better and better explanations for what reality entails. And then many people in many times and many places experimented with those explanations to confirm and improve them.
My Question
Let’s remember that thought in the following critique:
Your thesis necessarily requires you to enter into the fray of arguments about trying to understand how history unfolded as it did. How did the backwater region of the world, Europe, become the dominant political, economic, and scientific force on the globe, starting in the 1600’s, when China had been, up to that point, the most populous, most advanced, wealthiest, and most innovative area of the globe until then?
You have a deeper question of history: how does a society enter The Beginning of Infinity, in which the culture celebrates fallibilism and critique?
You make what seem to be purposeful digs at the stagnation of cultures, meaning a lack of critical thinking and blind adherence to tradition. Europe’s culture was also stagnant, until the Scientific Revolution. It seems to me that these digs are overly provocative.
Just one example: “The post-Enlightenment West is the only society in history that for more than a couple of lifetimes has ever undergone change rapid enough for people to notice.”
It seems to me that a more productive way to address this is to instead acknowledge that some cultures at some time periods were not static from generation to generation. Dig deeply into what time periods and what cultures did have innovation, did accept new ideas, were open to change, and did value critical thinking. And then find out what influences led to these circumstances.
The authors of such books as 1777 B.C., The Vikings, Genghis Khan, and The Human Web, might have insights into what conditions could contribute to societies on the brink of infinity. Some influences that come to mind for me are: concentration of populations, increased trade, influx of material wealth, new food stuffs and sources, weather patterns, and other conditions that could support a valuation of progress.
But that is not, I believe, your main point nor your main purpose: to make digs at other cultures or time periods. You have a much more serious argument that needs attention. What I am saying, however, is that your bigger argument would be made stronger by inviting a more thorough historical review with your thesis in mind:
Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over generations occurs and is valued when groups of humans are engaged in the quest for better explanations supported by critical thinking.
And based on this historical interpretation you then posit for the future that good explanations can engender a progress that goes on for infinity, that is, indefinitely.
I believe we all might better explain human progress and dynamic societies by understanding the various conditions under which progress has happened in the past—including the various time periods and cultures— even if they did not last for longer than a ‘mini-enlightenment’, such as in Renaissance Italy.
This thought, that we humans have had time periods across cultures that promoted human progress, aligns with the notion of evolution as well. To me, there was no one sudden creation of a culture of progress; rather, the Enlightenment arose out of a long evolutionary process that included many cultures across time.
Those powerful thinkers of the Scientific Revolution were able to learn from many cultures the explorers encountered in their travels across the globe in the 1500’s and 1600’s by comparing and contrasting those cultures with Europe’s.
They also read books that were translated or written by Arab-speaking scientists from the Islamic Golden Era. They calculated math using the concept of zero that came from India. They took advantage of the many innovations of China that came to Europe by way of the wondrous realms along the Silk Road that the Mongols under Genghis Khan had set up.
They were all also newly exposed to a host of stimulants: caffeine from coffee, tea, and chocolate; nicotine from tobacco; and large amounts of pure sugar from sugar cane.
I’m proposing that science has enormous reach because of the world-wide, long-term influences upon it. Science and the culture of progress evolved from all of humanity’s locally precarious history.
But again, your central argument can only be enhanced by this exploration of our common history because what you state is ultimately true: The Enlightenment changed things, and things have continued to progress for the past 400 years. And in no other time in recorded history has there been such sustained progress over centuries. So what is different this time around?
Your answer: A culture of questing for better explanations through critical thinking.
What I’ve mentioned thus far is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the thoughts, conjectures, and questions this book has stimulated. I cannot do your arguments justice in this short article. Readers of this post will have to read the book for themselves to fully appreciate your many nuanced argumentations.
So let me now cut to the question I wish to pose to you. It goes back to your valuation of progress and your dismissal of “static” or traditional cultures. Should we really be so contemptuous of traditional cultures? I’m not suggesting that traditional cultures by definition value critical thinking; nor that all of them progress much over generations; nor that they are (or were) how I personally would want to live now.
I’m suggesting something broader: that Progress is not the only moral value to cherish.
For you, progress “has included improvement not only in scientific understanding, but also in technology, political institutions, moral values, art, and every aspect of human welfare.” And continuing on that same page: “Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it [progress] was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful.”
I’m not an influential thinker. I do value the concept of progress; I desire it; and I see it as meaningful. But I also doubt it is an overarching moral goal automatically above all other morals.
There is, in fact, a need for traditional culture in human history. Jonathan Haidt, an experimental psychologist, in his book The Righteous Mind, sees a role in present-day American politics for both conservative and liberal ideologies. Both contribute to the overall fabric of American society and both have morals that are admirable and valuable. And both are present, in varying degrees, in us all.
Our conservative nature, while not immune to progress, is by definition traditional. Conservativism sustains our cultures, our traditions, our self-understandings, and helps us keep our history.
To disparage a whole necessary segment of the human condition is to cut off one’s own limb; I’d rather find a way to include a necessary part of our human experience in the theory.
Darwin suggested that evolution needs both natural selection and sexual selection, and that what this really means in the big picture is a crab-walk, a ladder-walk evolution between random mutation and choice. Humans evolved because we have two natures: static and dynamic. The static does evolve, albeit too slowly for any one generation to know, due to mutation. The dynamic is full of optimistic choice. Both are necessary to be human and to progress.
And either one can become too dominant for our own good. We need both progress and tradition, both new and old, both evolution and stability. This thought is one of the many that your book has inspired.
My questions: what is the overall role of stability in progress? Can we evolve without the presence of static or traditional cultures alongside progressive cultures?
What would a world without static cultures look like? Would we really value such a life without tradition?
Other reviews that mention this post: Quantum Physics Part I, Quantum Physics Part III, The Ministry For The Future, The Dawn of Everything, Essay based on The Science of Storytelling, Essay on Perception,