The Beginning of Infinity (2011), by David Deutsch
David Deutsch is a physicist at the University of Oxford, a pioneer of the field of quantum computation and an extremely powerful thinker. He’s one of the better-known proponents of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The Beginning of Infinity is an extremely dense, yet accessible, book. Deutsch packs huge, sprawling ideas into a couple of sentences and proceeds to unpack them piece by piece. If I’m honest, it took some serious thinking on my part to even get my head around some of the concepts he discusses. Some I feel I totally understand and agree with, some I understand and don’t really agree with, but a fair proportion I just don’t fully understand enough to know whether or not I agree with them. I struggled with his arguments against the anthropic principle, and his discussions of artificial intelligence (he seems to disagree with some of Nick Bostrom’s arguments).
Deutsch’s primary thesis centres around the power and reach of knowledge and explanation. He spends most of the first chapter discussing and dismissing the various philosophical ideas on how knowledge is obtained and justified (inductivism, empiricism). Throughout the book, he arrives at the conclusion that knowledge creation by people begins via an internal creative process, consisting of conjecture and criticism.
The exponential growth in knowledge in modern times is because of the British Enlightenment, which culturally enshrined a “tradition of criticism”, something which flew in the face of previous cultural approaches to knowledge, which primarily consisted of attempting to prevent existing ideas from decay.
His view on memes is that they consist of two “types”: rational, and anti-rational.
Rational memes survive and propagate by virtue of their ability to survive error correction, they can do this because they (in some sense) match up with an external reality. The idea that “snow is white” survives scrutiny because of it’s accuracy as a description of external reality. Rational memes consist of good explanation, and being able to explain something effectively also confers the ability to control it (to some degree).
Anti-rational memes are contrasted with this, they survive by shutting down the critical faculties of the host (ie. a person) and simply avoiding criticism. He believes that, short of a few mini-Enlightenments which were quickly snuffed out (Athens of Ancient Greece, for example), static societies consisting of anti-rational memes (a static culture) had been the norm since the dawn of humanity. He sees the Enlightenment as the starting of our ability to create unlimited knowledge and growth, by allowing rational memes to thrive.
This ties into his account of the evolution of creativity, which I found the most interesting part of the book. He posits that creativity evolved as a mechanism to effectively mimic and maintain the existing cultural standards. The ability for us to effectively generate knowledge through creativity, paradoxically, arose by the process of evolution giving us better and better cognitive equipment with which to understand the memes of the static societies we found ourselves in and conform to them better than anyone else.
There’s far more in the book than I’ve covered: I’d definitely recommend reading it for yourself. He has other fascinating ideas: beauty as something objective, the unlimited reach of certain types of explanation/knowledge, some mind-melting discussions of infinity, and more than I’ll attempt to list here.