History is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible. ― David Deutsch.
Sparta has no philosophers. That’s because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don’t want it. Another difference: they don’t honor living poets, only dead ones. Why? Because dead poets don’t write anything new, but live ones do. A third difference: their education system is insanely harsh; ours is famously lax. Why? Because they don’t want their kids to dare to question anything so that they won’t ever think of changing anything.
― David Deutsch
The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people the power to transform nature, which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.
― David Deutsch
As the physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are ‘just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that’s in orbit around a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy’. The proviso ‘in the cosmic scheme of things’ is necessary because the chemical scum evidently does have a special significance according to values that it applies to itself, such as moral values. But the Principle says that all such values are themselves anthropocentric: they explain only the behavior of the scum, which is itself insignificant. ― David Deutsch
The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone and not by pure mathematics.
― David Deutsch
Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there for eons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality, and reach that is inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark.
― David Deutsch
All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact. ― David Deutsch
We do not experience time flowing or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences correctly as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them incorrectly as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time.
― David Deutsch
In principle, there is a fundamental connection built into the laws of physics between understanding and affecting. -David Deutsch
If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it. -David Deutsch
The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species being tested for viability in that niche. ― David Deutsch
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal. ― David Deutsch
Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes.
Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better. -David Deutsch
There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. -David Deutsch
Problems are inevitable &
Problems are soluble. -David Deutsch
