David Deutsch on optimism & progress
Deutsch's optimism is not a prediction that things will go well but an explanation of failure: whatever goes wrong is due to knowledge we have not yet created, and claiming something impossible requires an explanation of why. Our civilization is the first with a lasting tradition of criticism, which makes it more stable and safer than any before it, though progress is never guaranteed. Doom is not inevitable, because what we think and do changes the odds.
16 points · 5 appearances · 2021–2026
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2021–2026
“That's right. Knowledge isn't just a matter of belief, and it's not just a matter of human psychology. It is information that has causal power.”
2021–2026
“And my rather heterodox answer to that is that it didn't evolve for the purpose for which we now use it. It evolved for something else, namely for the transmission, or better put, for the reception of cultural knowledge, memes, cultural knowledge. So, many animals have cultural knowledge, but it's very hard to transmit. It involves things like mirror neurons or something where if you do this, then the ape can also do that. But if you do a purposeful thing, then as soon as you get to any kind of complex purpose, apes can't copy it.”
2024–2025
“Now the thing that tells us conclusively that there are parallel universes, wait for it, is that if you look at that, there are certain points on the screen where photons — let's say you have one slit open — you have where photons are arriving, and if you open the second slit, they stop arriving there. So how come? Well, obviously they must stop arriving because they know that there are two slits open now and not just one. And if you look at the mathematics of this, what determines whether they arrive or not depends on whether — how many slits are open there, 1, 2, 5, 17, they all give a different pattern, and the mathematics tells us when opening a new slit will stop light arriving at a given point.”
2022–2026
“So when I say any, I'm — what I mean is that we're not limited in the programs we can run apart from by speed and memory capacity. So all limitations on us, hardware limitations on us, boil down to speed and memory capacity. And both those can be augmented to the level of any other entity that is in the universe. Because, you know, if somebody builds a computer that can think faster than the brain, then we can use that very computer or that very technology to make our thinking go just as fast as that.”