Back in March, I saw that Naval had put out a new podcast episode. I immediately streamed the two-minute snippet. The title of the episode was called “Science is the Engine That Pulls Humanity Forward”. It was the beginning of a new podcast series, The Beginning of Infinity, which you can find here. Naval and guest Brett Hall would release many episodes over the coming months. These would be some of the most formative months of my life.
The ideas in this podcast are so important that I know I must commit them to understanding. I have listened to it many times. I have tweeted about it. And now this blog is to serve as a way for me to better cement these concepts in my mind.
In this podcast, Naval and Brett provide us with a summary of the book The Beginning of Infinity by British physicist David Deutsch. The Beginning of Infinity discusses explanations. It tries to answer the question of “What is a good explanation?” It provides us with a framework for understanding of science’s role for life. It tells us that humans are knowledge creating machines and there’s not telling what we will do next.
This blog is merely a repackaging of other people’s ideas that I agree with. If you want to truly understand these concepts, listen to the podcast. And if you really want to understand these concepts, do what I haven’t yet done and read ‘The Beginning of Infinity’. But while you’re here, you may as well get the For Dummies version of things.
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
Richard Feynman
As humans, we are constantly seeking answers. Since we could draw on cave walls, we postulated about why we are here and where we are going. Unfortunately, it will be an impossibility for you to know everything, even if everything was available for you to know. But that doesn’t limit you ability to understand everything.
The goal for everyone should be understanding. And it turns out there isn’t too much you need to understand to have access to all the knowledge ever created by humans. In Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality, he argues you only need to understand four fundamental theories to understand all that is to know about the universe. Those theories are:
· Quantum Physics
· The Theory of Evolution
· The Theory of Computation
· Epistemology
You might be rolling your eyes right now. You might be thinking about how much you hated high school physics class and don’t plan on revisiting that ‘electron cloud theory bullshit’ ever again. You also might be thinking Deutsch is wrong. What about politics? What about love? What about, like, social sciences? I understand and appreciate your apprehension. The goal here is to understand the absolute fundamentals. The first principles upon which everything is derived.
We want to be in possession of nature’s longest threads.
“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”
Karl Popper
What is Knowledge?
With knowledge, we will be able to shape our planet, our solar system, and even the galaxy. Heck, why stop there? We might be able to have an impact on the universe, and even the multiverse through knowledge.
What is knowledge, anyway? A good way to figure that out is to describe how it is created and what becomes of it afterwards.
According to David Deutsch, knowledge is built by good explanations. Good explanations are fundamental to the creation of knowledge, whether that knowledge be scientific or philosophic.
Good explanations have some defining characteristics. One of which is that good explanations are testable and falsifiable. You should be able to run an experiment in the real world to determine if your good explanation is true or not.
Good explanations, according to Deutsch, should be hard to vary. That means they must be very precise. And there must be good reason for this precision.
We can think of a few examples of this. One is the seasons on Earth. The Ancient Greeks used to theorize that the seasons came from their many gods and goddesses. After Hades kidnaps Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, Zeus must step in and make negotiations. Hades ends up with custody of Persephone for half the year, while Demeter gets Persephone for the other. Since the quality of the harvest was dependent on the moods of Demeter, the months which she doesn’t have her daughter, Fall and Winter, bring bad harvests. The months when she does have Persephone, Spring and Summer, bring good harvests.
Now of course this is a messed-up situation. The moral questions of should a kidnapper get legal guardianship of a child to split the difference seems like a big one that the Greeks should have had figured out. But the more important thing here is that this would not be a good explanation of the seasons. It’s easy to vary. Persephone could have been kidnapped by any other of the gods. We don’t know what else might cause Demeter’s mood swings. There are many moving pieces that aren’t grounded in anything substantial.
It’s clearly not precise. But if the Greeks are certain this is a precise account of why the seasons occur, the precision doesn’t have good reason. Beyond that, you can’t test the validity of the stories. There are no gods to observe, measure, and draw predictions from. There is no experiment you could run to prove the explanation.
The better explanation of the seasons is the Axis Tilt Theory. It states that the Earth sits on its axis between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees. As our blue planet orbits around the sun, certain parts of the Earth get more direct sunlight than others. This causes hemispheric changes in temperature, or seasons. This is a testable, falsifiable, and very narrow prediction as to why we have seasons on Earth.
Good explanations, like this Axis Tilt Theory, are also creative explanations. Of course, the mad story of Persephone’s guardianship is creative, but that’s not what Deutsch alludes to. He means creative as in it makes a leap. It takes a non-obvious path to explain a phenomenon.
Good explanations have tremendous reach. Understanding the seasons relationship with the tilt of the axis of Earth made predicting weather patterns much easier. The fluctuations in the tilt of the Earth allowed us to better understand climate change. We can now better predict when the next ice age will hit us. (1,500 years from now for those of you that were worrying.)
Good explanations don’t last. We first had the good explanation that the Earth had seasons at regular intervals. Then we had the good explanations that the tilt of the Earth was to blame for them. But, before we had that good explanation, we had the bad explanation involving Persephone. Of course, the Greeks did not think it was a bad explanation. They probably thought it was good as well.
That means a good explanation was replaced with a better explanation. That means knowledge is ever progressing.
Knowledge is progressing even in the fields that we are most solidly sure about. Take geometry. Back in the days Euclid of Alexandria, father of geometry, geometry was done in two dimensions. Geometric theories were devised with pen and paper. It’s hard to find flaws in many of Euclid’s claims about geometry. A square has four sides. All the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. Basic stuff.
But even the basics must be questioned. Here’s a thought experiment for you:
Take a piece of paper. You got one? Good. Now draw two dots on it with a pen. Now create as many unique lines as you can between those two dots. How many were you able to create? If your answer was only one, I want you to think differently. I want you to stop thinking in two dimensions.
Bend the paper. Now stick your pen through the two dots. Now you have two unique lines. You have the line you drew, and the line created by your pen.
This creative thinking is what formed the basis of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which is currently our best explanation of how gravity works. Instead of thinking space was a flat sheet, Einstein thought that it could be curved, just like your paper with the dots on it.
To summarize, good explanations are testable, falsifiable, hard to vary, precise, and creative. They are also what knowledge is built by. But how do you create good explanations like Einstein?
How do you create knowledge?
Many people will point to two possible ways to create good explanations. Induction and Bayesian reasoning.
Induction is the process of predicting into the future what has happened in the past. A good example of this is Moore’s Law. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubled about every two years. That means the processing speed in your computer, phone, and other devices doubles about every two years. This was true for a while. Until about 2010. There are a few reasons this stopped being true. One of them is simple: your devices got smaller. Space is limited. And as much as those smarties who build processors try, they simply keep running out of room for more transistors.
Moore’s Law was not a physical law. It was an observational law. And proof that induction is fallible. It also didn’t account for the fact that now we are creating computers using quantum mechanics. These may far outpace the advancement that Moore’s Law anticipated.
Using induction to create good explanations is error prone. It doesn’t account for human creativity. Creativity can produce nonlinear outputs, like quantum computing.
Former Wall Street trader Nassim Taleb coined the term ‘black swan event’ in his book Fooled by Randomness. A black swan event is any event that is unpredictable, has a large impact, and is later assumed through hindsight to be predicted by induction. Prior to 1967, no Westerner had seen a black swan. They assumed all swans were white. That was until black swans were observed in Australia that year.
Just like a Westerner couldn’t have predicted based on their population of swans that black swans existed, nobody can use induction to theorize the many events that have happened because of human creativity. The emergence of the internet is a great example. If you lived in society pre-1983, the birth year of the internet, your estimates on what society would look like in 2021 would be wildly incorrect if you based it all on induction. You wouldn’t have predicted Facebook, Google, and Amazon would be the some of the biggest companies in the world. They didn’t exist yet.
Bayesian reasoning is reasoning based on Bayes theorem in statistics. The theorem helps us determine the likelihood of an event based on another event occurring. I wrote about this in my blog on Why You Shouldn’t Believe in Heaven. To understand Bayes theorem, we can play a simple game.
Let’s say I were to give you the option to choose one of three closed doors. Behind one of the doors is a sports car. Behind the other two are lava lamps. You get to keep whichever object is behind the door you choose. I know what’s behind the doors, you don’t. Before I allow you to open your door to see if you were lucky and got the car on the first try, I open one of the doors to reveal a lava lamp.
I give you a choice. You can keep your door or switch the other door I have not yet opened. Your odds might seem the same, but they aren’t. Your odds of getting the car in this scenario double to sixty-six percent if you change doors, where they previously would have been thirty-three percent.
The premise here then is that if you are going through life, you should continue your path until given new information, such as me opening one of the doors to reveal a lava lamp. Then, you must alter your path in accordance with the new information.
The issue with Bayesian reasoning and induction for creating good explanations is they are only good with closed, finite sets of information. They don’t account for black swans. As Karl Popper said, there is an infinite number of things that we do not know. We must be willing to accept that the infinite number of things that we do not know may affect the finite number of things that we do.
That means there are also an infinite number of ways that one can create a good explanation.
If there are an infinite number of things that we do not know, then there can be no certainties. There can be no final truth. There are just good explanations replaced by more good explanations.
As a result, knowledge creation is inherently unpredictable. We can’t use the known laws of nature to predict the existence of Manhattan. We must invoke something other then the physical laws. We must invoke the presence of humans and their ability to create knowledge.
Knowledge transforms our world. With our understanding of nuclear fission, we can take a seemingly innocuous element like uranium and turn it into plentiful energy. With our understanding of conduction, we can send that energy to every home in the world using another seemingly innocuous element, copper. Before humans, these elements would have stayed in the ground as part of the Earth’s crust. Now, they allow us to communicate with each other. We can share ideas and stories. We can improve our quality of life. We can maybe even get off this planet in search of a new.
“Science is the engine that pull humanity forward.”
Naval Ravikant
Mainstream View of Science
We take progress for granted. Many people today wish that some of our greatest technological advancements never existed. We demonize progress for fear that it will destroy humanity. We demonized the car for fear it would put the horse salesman out of business. We demonized, and still do, nuclear reactors for fear that one-thousand Chernobyl’s are bound to happen.
This demonization of progress limits our ability to make more. We have all heard the saying ‘What would the world look like if we stopped flying after the first plane crash?’ Another good way of framing this is ‘What would the world look like if we continued progress of nuclear energy instead of stopping after Chernobyl?’
We are hypocrites. We demonize progress, which has been greatly thanks to science, and then turn around and say, ‘Believe in Science!’ The COVID-19 Pandemic is a great example of this. You see many shouting that we must believe in the science behind the vaccine and the dangers of the disease. The same is true with climate change. Anyone who questions the root cause of climate change is called a ‘Science Denier.’ But many fail to realize is that there is not science with a capital ‘S’. Science is not a religion. It is not based in faith. It is based in doubt.
Academic culture teaches us a skewed reality of how to perceive knowledge. It teaches us that mathematics is certain, science is mostly certain, and that philosophy is based in opinion. As a recent college graduate, I can concede that this way my thinking until I listened to The Beginning of Infinity.
What is science?
Science is not something to have faith in. It is not even mostly certain. According to Deutsch, science is “a special case of good explanations. It’s good explanations applied to the physical world.”
I claimed that there is no final truth when it comes to knowledge. And if knowledge is built by good explanations and science is built by good explanations of the physical world, then whatever scientific laws and theories we have today will one day be replaced. They will be replaced by new, better ones that will be replaced again.
We have recent examples of this that have completely transformed how we create technology. Isaac Newton formed his original theory of gravitation in 1687. It stated that particles attract each other proportionate to their masses and distance. That is why people have a hard time jumping off the Earth, he assumed. The Earth is big, people are small, and people are really close to the Earth when they try to jump off of it.
That seemed like a reasonable idea. However, it didn’t tell us how gravity works. To prove how it works, Einstein came up with his theory of relativity. His theory stated that objects bend the fabric of spacetime. The larger the object, the larger the indentation in space, the larger the field of gravity and effect it will have on other objects.
In this light, science is an error correcting mechanism. Trial-and-error is the way that complex systems improve themselves over time. When we stop believing in science and utilize it more as a process for explaining the natural world, our horizons open. We are freer to create and conjecture. We never know where the next good idea is going to come from.
Science has it’s limitations. It is limited to the physical world. There are many things, like human morality, that we can’t explain with science. We can, however, explain it with reason. Reason is not limited in the way science is. Philosophy allows us to explain all the things that science can’t using good explanations beyond the physical world.
But just because things can’t be explained by science today, doesn’t mean they won’t tomorrow. A common pathway for knowledge is that it begins as theology, then becomes philosophy, then it becomes science. A good example of this is cosmology, or the study of the origin and chronology of the universe. Cosmology was often treated, and still is, by religion. In Christianity, God created the Earth and universe 6,000 years ago. As knowledge advanced, we realized the universe may have been created another way. Many ancient philosophers postulated the origins of our universe and how we got here.
Today, science has provided us some physical explanations of our universe’s origins. Our observations have told us that some event 13.77 billion years ago provided everything we currently see. We call it the Big Bang.
What is mathematics?
If theology is knowledge before explanation, philosophy is knowledge before explanation in the physical world, and science is explanations of the physical world, what is mathematics?
In school, we are taught that mathematics is the study of numbers. Often, mathematics is applied to science. Math is supposedly the bedrock. The certain thing that we can count on being true. What’s 1+1? You guessed it, 2. And it’s always 2 and that’s irrefutable.
But according to mathematician Kurt Gödel, mathematics may not be as certain as we think. In the early twentieth century, Gödel became fascinated by a seemingly simple paradox. The paradox was a sentence: This statement is false.
It seems simple. It’s just a false statement, right? Maybe not so. If the statement itself was false, as it says that it is, that would make it true. However, if it were true, that would make the statement itself false. By referring to it’s own falsehood, it becomes an unprovable paradox.
Kurt Godel’s obsession with this paradox would lead him to change mathematics forever. It would also change many of our greatest thinkers mindsets around knowledge.
Godel applied this self-referential system to mathematical equations. He created coded variations of equations using a computer system. Since the equations were coded and referred to the original mathematical variation, they would encounter the same problem as the paradox he was trying to solve for. He used his coding system to create a true equation that stated, ‘This statement cannot be proven.’ Just like the simple self-referential statement, it created a mathematical paradox.
This was more groundbreaking than just creating a silly equation that made itself seem stupid. It uncovered a deeper reality of mathematics. It showed mathematicians that if something is provably true, it is built upon an axiom that is unprovable.
This is called Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. If we go back to our original 1+1=2 equation, we can show these axioms in effect. If we agree that 1+1=2, we can then ask: Why is that true? The answer would be that adding two numbers sums them together to get a new total. But if we ask why addition causes us to combine the numbers, the answer would be because that’s the rule of addition. That’s as far as the proof goes. The axiom is that addition just is, and you must accept that.
All mathematical certainties are built on unprovable axioms, such as the rule of addition. And when you make a new axiom because you have learned a new proof, that proof is now the new unprovable axiom in the chain. That means that no statement in mathematics can be both complete and true.
I might have just really confused you or shattered your faith in mathematics. I hope I only did the latter. But that does not make mathematics bad. It allows us to open our mind to the reality that what we think are the fundamentals might just be built on a foundation we haven’t discovered yet. And that makes life more fun. If we had all the answers already, what’s the point in continuing?
It also provides us with the opportunity to see creativity in mathematics. If we would just accept the axioms, we wouldn’t try to find the underlying explanations that might change our current understanding of the whole system. Mathematics becomes an art with this new worldview. It is made by people. And people are error prone. There may be errors in the axioms that are ours to uncover and derive new good explanations from.
“The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.”
David Deutsch
What is the universe?
In our quest for knowledge, what humans keep doing is uncovering more and more about the universe that we inhabit. And the universe is a fascinating place, really. In my blog on the Fermi Paradox, I discuss the scale of the universe. It’s big. 92 billion light years in diameter. That might not be all. According to Deutsch and many other physicists. It might be infinite. It might be so infinite that there are other universes just like ours. And an infinite number of them.
Although we know the universe is big, we haven’t seen how big it is. Most of the universe is unobserved by humans. And even the things we say we have observed, only instruments have seen, not us.
Take particles. Before we find the next fundamental particle, the smallest particle we currently know about is the quark. Quarks are what make up protons and neutrons. Although we have images of atoms using light microscopes, we don’t have images of quarks. We are pretty sure they exist because of other instruments that we have. But they aren’t directly observed.
Almost nothing we see in science is the result of direct observation. Dinosaurs are a good example. We have fossils that could be bones of dinosaurs. We don’t have actual dinosaur bones. We have created this narrative that dinosaurs are these reptile-like creatures that roamed the Earth 75 million years ago. That is just a creative explanation for what these bone-like rocks should be based on our current understanding of life.
Although we can’t directly observe everything in our universe today, that doesn’t stop scientists from trying to figure out how it all came to be. Today, we have two competing theories for how the universe works. Those theories are Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and quantum mechanics.
To have two competing theories is a rarity for science. If we are trying to find mother nature’s longest threads, having two threads to say the same thing means we are flawed somewhere. So why the two threads?
The reason Einstein’s theory is still relevant today is because it is the best possible explanation for gravity that we have. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a great job at predicting the behavior of subatomic particles. Enter: quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics helps us understand the way really small things behave. It has made really accurate predictions about these really small things. Quantum mechanics has made the most accurate predictions in physics that we currently have. The issue with quantum mechanics is we can’t explain gravity with it. Herein lies the rub.
These two theories differ from each other in major ways. There are these concepts in theoretical physics called the Planck length, the Planck mass, and the Planck time. They represent the fundamental piece of each of their eponymous units. In quantum mechanics, we use these values to create accurate predictions about the universe. Super String Theory, the theoretical model of the universe that we are trying to use to unify physics, also uses these values.
Our friend Kurt Gödel wouldn’t be happy if he heard us speaking this way. To say something is fundamental also means that it should be incomplete. It is an axiom. There must be more to uncover. Einstein would agree. In his Theory of General Relativity, he hypothesizes that the universe is infinitely divisible. There are no Planck things. It’s particles all the way down.
This is the problem we are currently stuck on. Is there discreteness in the universe, or is it continuous? We just don’t know right now. And if quantum mechanics has it’s way, life could be a whole lot weirder than we think.
Of course, it’s fun to think about multiple universes. What if you were alive in another universe where you had won the lottery? What if you were a movie star? Or what if you never existed at all? Quantum mechanics argues that all these universes may exist.
The Search for Multiple Universes
In 1801, Thomas Young shot a beam of light at a couple of slits. His goal was to prove the wave nature of light. What he got on the other side confirmed his suspicion. The light didn’t just show up in two beams, one for each slit. He got a pattern on the other side that looked much more like what would happen if you sent a wave of water through the slits and measured the peaks of the waves.
It wasn’t until over 100 years later, in 1927, that Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer would try the same experiment with electrons instead of light. What they found was that when they shot electrons through their double slit apparatus, they got the same wave pattern as Young. This would be fine if electrons were light and could be expected to behave like a wave. But electrons are particles.
If I lost you, imagine this. If you loaded a Nerf gun with paint-tipped Nerf bullets and fired them through two slits in cardboard to a wall further away, what would you expect to see on the other side? You would expect to see paint in two lines on the wall, correct? One line of paint behind one slit, and one line of paint behind the other. Your Nerf bullets are made of solid matter. And we didn’t say there was anything interfering with their path. If your accuracy was decent and you could shoot through the slit, your Nerf bullet would find its way to the wall on the other side in the direction you expected it to go.
But what if this didn’t happen? What if your Nerf bullets were making paint lines where you didn’t expect them to appear? What if you saw paint lines on the wall between the slits? What would you think then? Would you think some mysterious force was knocking your Nerf bullets in a different direction?
That is what happened to Davisson and Germer’s electrons. At the subatomic level, particles don’t just act like particles. They also act like waves. The wave-like pattern that they got is called an interference pattern. The pattern confirmed particle-wave duality and sparked the creation of quantum mechanics. We even proved that light acts like a particle sometimes. That’s how we realized that the photon exists.
But this conclusion that particles are sometimes particles and sometimes waves isn’t good enough for some scientists. They can’t accept that particles and light just change their state depending on their mood. Or that the particles and light somehow realize when they are going through a certain number of slits and create a wave pattern just to confuse researchers. Researchers believe there must be more going on.
This is how we get the conclusion that there must be multiple universes. Quantum mechanics tells us that to create the interference pattern that we see behind the slits, there must be another particle that we can’t see causing the interference. These other particles must exist in other universes.
This might seem like a stretch. But with this understanding, we have made very accurate predictions about the physical world. We keep confirming the multiple-universes hypothesis through our experiments. It also provides us new ways of looking at seemingly uncertain things.
Like the probability of landing on black when you play roulette.
When I first turned twenty-one, my parents took me to a casino. The only experience I had gambling was when I lost all my Snickers learning how to play Blackjack with one of my friends at summer camp when I was twelve. Needless to say, I was lost.
They gave me $100 dollars and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. Do I play the slots? Roulette? I had forgotten the rules of Blackjack by this point and losing my Snickers didn’t prepare me well for losing real money. My Dad and I headed over to the roulette table and he taught me how to play.
I lost almost all my money immediately. Down to my last twenty bucks and with a win-or-go-home mentality, I started betting aggressively. I clawed my way back to break-even. Then, I put it all on black. The odds are fifty-fifty that I lose it all or go home with money in my pocket.
Black hits. I go home a winner.
But were the odds fifty-fifty? Of course, you’re going to say because there is a ‘00’ that the odds are less than fifty-fifty. That’s not the point. The question I am asking is whether the universe is uncertain or are we the ones who are uncertain?
According to Deutsch, probability is subjective. There is no uncertainty in the universe. Whatever can happen, will happen. When the dealer spun the roulette wheel, two universes showed themselves. There was the one that we are living in where black hit, and I went home with my pockets full. And there was another universe where red hit and the guy next to me won.
To be clear, in Deutsch’s worldview, the universes didn’t split. Both universes, the one in which I would win and the one in which I would lose, always existed. It was just in this moment where a decision had to be made that their differences became apparent.
It also should be noted that the differences aren’t that big. In one universe, I am $200 richer. In the other, I am short $100 dollars that was gifted to me. In that universe, I might still be writing this same blog about Deutsch’s multiple-universe theory with a slightly more bitter tone.
In some universes, the differences that our decisions make might cause drastic changes. We might be so different from ourselves in that universe, it might not be worth calling that version of ourselves by our own name. We might not even have the same name. We might never have existed at all.
That means that you occupy this universe. But the result of your actions may occupy many.
A Special Place to Be
The laws of physics are incredible. Our conflict over the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics proves that we don’t understand them yet.
We do know that the laws of physics have allowed life to exist. Which is pretty cool. Without the laws of physics, there would be no complex chemistry, no galaxies and planets, and no thinking people. Since knowledge if infinite, the laws of physics are infinitely special.
What makes the laws of physics so special? Many things. Many things we understand. And an infinite number of things we don’t. But the reality of its specialness creates a problem: The Fine-Tuning Problem.
We have twenty-six fundamental constants in our universe (that we know of). These constants are incredibly precise. Changing any of these constants by even a fraction of their value disrupts the entire universe. They must be exact or the whole shebang doesn’t work. With this many variables having this much precision, we must ask:
How exactly can the universe be so finely tuned as to create thinking humans?
There are a couple of theories out there to explain the Fine-Tuning Problem. One of them is the weak anthropic principle. It uses the multiple universe theory we already discussed to solve it. It states that if there are multiple universes, then each of the infinite number of universes may have its own laws of physics. We just happen to be in one of the universes where its laws of physics permit our existence.
The problem with this theory is it doesn’t compute with our particle-wave duality situation. If there are other particles in other universes affecting particles in this universe, then these particles must obey our laws of physics. If they didn’t, how could they operate here?
Another solution to the Fine-Tuning Problem is God. Deutsch argues against the existence of an axiomatic creator. His argument is just like Godel’s argument for any equation in mathematics. For a creator to exist, that creator must also experience the Fine-Tuning Problem. The conditions must be just right for the creator’s existence. It doesn’t solve the Fine-Tuning Problem. It just kicks it up a level.
Deutsch’s argument is that the Fine-Tuning Problem’s solution is a law of physics. A law of physics is any testable regularity in nature. The testable regularity in this situation is the emergence of the laws of physics that permit multiple universes that we know of to exist. Through further study of the laws of physics, we might be able to determine where the laws came from.
We can compare this to other emergent principles such as computation or evolution. These two principles exist because of the laws of physics. They aren’t explained by them. You can’t create the laws of physics and expect computers and life to come up as a result. But you couldn’t have computers and life without the laws of physics. Maybe there is some law above the laws of physics that permit the laws of physics to exist without explaining them?
Everything in our known universe is created by the laws of physics. Any theory or mathematical problem is bound to these laws. Deutsch claims that as “we push forward, we either make progress or find new laws of physics that constrain us.”
“Rational optimism is the way out.”
Naval Ravikant
An optimistic worldview
What causes pessimism? How can people look upon all that there is in the universe, all the progress that humans have made, and still think that we are doomed?
We discussed induction as a bad way to create new, good explanations. Inductive reasoning is also an underlying cause for pessimistic worldviews. If you just take every negative trend occurring today and multiply it over many years, you’d be pessimistic too.
Take climate change and human’s carbon footprint. If you assume humans are going to have the same technology into the future with the same linearly increasing carbon footprint, you must assume that man-made climate change is going to continue to get much worse. You aren’t accounting for future knowledge creation that will be able to solve this problem.
Inductive reasoning, as we said, is a bad predictor of future knowledge creation. If you could use inductive reasoning for knowledge creation, everything we could possibly invent would have been invented already. But this is not true. As a result, the pessimist suffers from the inability to see future trends.
Naval stated that it’s simply just easier to be a pessimist than an optimist. It’s easy to linearly extrapolate how the world is going to get worse. It’s hard to see nonlinear creativities ability to transform the world.
If you want to keep using inductive reasoning, at least use it for good. One thing you can see is massive spikes of progress due to a few massive leaps in knowledge creation. The ability to raise crops on a consistent basis that caused, for the first time in human history, food surpluses. The industrial revolution that elevated our efficiency to provide more products to more people at less cost. The internet age which allowed cheap and ubiquitous communication and is also decentralizing the workplace.
Based on these leaps, you can assume somewhere in the future that humans will make greater leaps to solve more problems and make more progress faster than before. We are a young species. Only about 70,000 years old. However, we are seven billion strong and the only species able to leave this planet.
Fears of pollution and loss of species at the expense of our long-term vision misses the point. Any child born tomorrow can be the next Einstein, Gödel, or Deutsch.
Humans are problem solves. We can solve all problems. To our knowledge, we are unique in our ability to understand things.
This is an incredibly optimistic worldview that Deutsch espouses. And we keep proving it true. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe. Now we know we are just another planet spinning around a star in one of 2 trillion galaxies. We used to think that gods controlled the seasons because of a kidnapped child, now we understand the tilt of the Earth. We used to think our universe was the only one. Now we are pretty sure there might be an infinite number of them.
And there’s no end in sight. We are on our way to be able to do anything that is not limited by the laws of physics.
“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
Albert Einstein
David Deutsch’s Book, The Beginning of Infinity, on Kindle.