David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity" is one of the more thought-provoking books I've read in the past few years. Its scope is incredibly broad - from epistemology and quantum fungibility to environmental ethics and societal evolution. Deutsch is a physicist (of self-admittedly fringe beliefs in regards to some quantum theory) and I'm always a bit skeptical when subject-matter experts try to extrapolate outside of their areas of speciality - particularly when they do so on as massive a scale as Deutsch does in this book. And "quantum" anything always puts me on high alert.

Yet I found much of the book to be very compelling. Deutsch takes a deep dive into the nature of knowledge and human understanding, raising a profound question: is there a limit to what can be understood? Deutsch claims that no, our understanding is always at the "beginning of infinity" and there will always be an infinite amount more left to understand. If true, this has deep implications for how we organize society and how we think about life. I'm reminded of Shelly Kagan's claim in his "Death" Open Yale Course that we should hope there is no life after death because there is a finite amount of stuff to do and infinite heaven is actually infinite repetitive hell. Deutsch would disagree. I need to go back and re-read this book to really follow his reasoning though - it was a bit subtle.

Another important claim Deutsch makes is that there is only one type of knowledge (that defined by rationality). Again, I'd have to re-read to really understand his logic, but the implications are equally profound. For example, Deutsch says that we should not fear the Singularity because an Artificial Intelligence is no different than human intelligence. We are both "universal explainers" and there is nothing that an AI could understand that humans could not. This position rings much truer to me than Bostrom's in his Superintelligence book.

One of the major distinctions that Deutsch draws is that between "static"/"sustainable"/"precautionary" and "dynamic" societies. Static societies are those which adhere rigidly to traditional values and suppress creativity to maintain the status quo. On the other hand, dynamic societies encourage an atmosphere of creativity and criticism which leads to ongoing scientific progress and represents a "beginning of infinity." Deutsch is very pro-Westernization and is unabashedly critical of what he views as the repressive and miserable conditions of life in non-Western "static" societies.

In that vein - Deutsch makes some very interesting comments about his environmental ethic. He sets up Jared Diamond (the Guns, Germs, and Steel guy) as his opposition. Diamond claims that the Easter Island civilization collapsed because of poor environmental management and the deforestation of their island. Deutsch agrees that that may have been the proximate cause of their demise, but that's like saying that "Caesar died because of improper iron management" when he got stabbed. Deutsch says that the real reason that Easter Island collapsed was because they were a static society that was unable to solve existential problems when they came up. Had they simply had the knowledge needed to reforest their island or make ocean-going voyages to relocate, their society would have survived. I've always had a tough time stomaching Diamond, and Deutsch puts his finger on the exact reason why. One of Deutsch's observations that I really liked was that with the correct knowledge, anything is possible unless it is prohibited by the laws of physics. In our own time, Deutsch recommends that we realize that there is no such thing as "sustainability." Things are sustainable until they're not. There will always be problems and we will always need to come up with new solutions.

Incidentally, Deutsch also claims that we shouldn't worry about alien invasions either. If an alien civilization was advanced enough to build spaceships to reach our planet, we would likely understand each other very well because we would share much of the same knowledge (because there is only one type of knowledge). Furthermore, they would clearly be smart enough to teach us how to understand them and their technology (after all, they educate their own young). And there would be no need to mine the Earth for resources or any other classic sci-fi trope - the universe is so large that they could easily afford to leave us alone.

Overall, this book forced me to think about a lot of different areas of life and the universe from a highly rational and integrating perspective. Still trying to figure out what I actually believe from this book... probably worth a re-read at some point in the future.

Full review with highlights here: http://books.max-nova.com/the-beginning-of-infinity/

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