The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? ~ John Archibald Wheeler,

1: The Reach of Explanations

Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from experience’ is.

Inductivism

The conventional wisdom was that the key is repetition: if one repeatedly has similar experiences under similar circumstances, then one is supposed to ‘extrapolate’ or ‘generalize’ that pattern and predict that it will continue.

Misconception in Inductivism

• Inductivism purports to explain how science obtains predictions about experiences. But most of our theoretical knowledge simply does not take that form. Scientific explanations are about reality, most of which does not consist of anyone’s experiences. Example is Astrophysics.
• Inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and that ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. (Or that it ‘probably’ will.) But in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen.

‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.’ ~ Heraclitus

Conan Doyle came much closer to the truth when, during ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, he had Holmes remark that ‘circumstantial evidence’ (evidence about unwitnessed events) is ‘a very tricky thing... It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different... There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.’

The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge. Thus ‘how do we know…?’ is transformed into ‘by what authority do we claim…?’ The latter question is a chimera that may well have wasted more philosophers’ time and effort than any other idea. It converts the quest for truth into a quest for certainty (a feeling) or for endorsement (a social status). This misconception is called justificationism.

Fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but instead acknowledging that we may always be mistaken, and trying to correct errors.

I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children . . .

~ Karl Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science (1983)

Resources:

The Beginning of Infinity by Naval Ravikant:

• https://nav.al/infinity

David Deutsch and Naval Ravikant — The Fabric of Reality And Much More | The Tim Ferriss Show

• https://youtu.be/FfWbcrObpUY

"The Beginning of Infinity" Chapter explorations:

• https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsE51P_yPQCRzJItkoRzu9HOGjYeFkfSB

David Deutsch: Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars

• https://youtu.be/gQliI_WGaGk

PDF Link:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ite79LjlPc19PAO3Xs2GABuXXpaSO9vB/view?usp=share_link