The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch, NYT review, David Albert: Rich Murray 2011.08.14

[Rich Murray-2]

The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World,
David Deutsch, NYT review, David Albert: Rich Murray 2011.08.14


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/books/review/the-beginning-of-infinity-by-david-deutsch-book-review.html?_r=2&ref=science

Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only.
You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your
colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that
appears next to any article.
Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information.
Order a reprint of this article now.

August 12, 2011
Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe
By DAVID ALBERT

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY
Explanations That Transform the World
By David Deutsch
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch ]
Illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30.

David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and
exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything:
art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future,
infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it
anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted
here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.

It hardly seems worth saying (to begin with) that the chutzpah of this
guy is almost beyond belief, and that any book with these sorts of
ambitions is necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure, or a
fraud, or a joke, or madness. But Deutsch (who is famous, among other
reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum
computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so
inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is
a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his
head. He writes as if what he is giving us amounts to a tight, grand,
cumulative system of ideas -- something of almost mathematical rigor
-- but the reader will do much better to approach this book with the
assurance that nothing like that actually turns out to be the case. I
like to think of it as more akin to great, wide, learned, meandering
conversation --  something that belongs to the genre of, say, Robert
Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” -- never dull, often startling and
fantastic and beautiful, often at odds with itself, sometimes
distasteful, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes (even,
maybe, secondarily) true.

The thought to which Deutsch’s conversation most often returns is that
the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, or
something like it, may turn out to have been the pivotal event not
merely of the history of the West, or of human beings, or of the
earth, but (literally, physically) of the universe as a whole.

Here’s the sort of thing he has in mind: The topographical shape and
the material constitution of the upper surface of the island of
Manhattan, as it exists today, is much less a matter of geology than
it is of economics and politics and human psychology. The effects of
geological forces were trumped (you might say) by other forces --
forces that proved themselves, in the fullness of time, physically
stronger. Deutsch thinks the same thing must in the long run be true
of the universe as a whole. Stuff like gravitation and dark energy are
the sorts of things that determine the shape of the cosmos only in its
earliest, and most parochial, and least interesting stages. The rest
is going to be a matter of our own intentional doing, or at any rate
it’s going to be a matter of the intentional doings of what Deutsch
calls “people,” by which he means not only human beings, and not all
human beings, but whatever creatures, from whatever planets, in
whatever circumstances, may have managed to absorb the lessons of the
Scientific Revolution.

There is a famous collection of arguments from the pioneering days of
computer science to the effect that any device able to carry out every
one of the entries on a certain relatively short list of elementary
logical operations could, in some finite number of steps, calculate
the value of any mathematical function that is calculable at all.
Devices like that are called “universal computers.” And what interests
Deutsch about these arguments is that they imply that there is a
certain definite point, a certain definite moment, in the course of
acquiring the capacity to perform more and more of the operations on
that list, when such a machine will abruptly become as good a
calculator as anything, in principle, can be.

Deutsch thinks that such “jumps to universality” must occur not only
in the capacity to calculate things, but also in the capacity to
understand things, and in the closely related capacity to make things
happen. And he thinks that it was precisely such a threshold that was
crossed with the invention of the scientific method. There were plenty
of things we humans could do, of course, prior to the invention of
that method: agriculture, or the domestication of animals, or the
design of sundials, or the construction of pyramids. But all of a
sudden, with the introduction of that particular habit of concocting
and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do
anything. The capacities of a community that has mastered that method
to survive, and to learn, and to remake the world according to its
inclinations, are (in the long run) literally, mathematically,
infinite. And Deutsch is convinced that the tendency of the world to
give rise to such communities, more than, say, the force of
gravitation, or the second law of thermodynamics, or even the
phenomenon of death, is what ultimately gives the world its shape, and
what constitutes the genuine essence of nature. “In all cases,” he
writes, “the class of transformations that could happen spontaneously
-- in the absence of knowledge -- is negligibly small compared with
the class that could be effected artificially by intelligent beings
who wanted those transformations to happen. So the explanations of
almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would
be applied to bring those phenomena about.” And there is a beautiful
and almost mystical irony in all this: that it was precisely by means
of the Scientific Revolution, it was precisely by means of accepting
that we are not the center of the universe, that we became the center
of the universe.

This is all definitely incredibly cool. But I have no idea how one
might go about investigating whether it is true or false. It seems
more to the point to think of it as something emotive -- as the
expression of a mood. An incredibly cool mood. A mood that (maybe) no
human being could ever have been in before right now. A mood informed
by profound and imaginative reflection on the best and most advanced
science we have. But not exactly, not even remotely, a live scientific
hypothesis.

Anyway, it’s that mood, or conceit, or whatever it is, that gives “The
Beginning of Infinity” its name. But a lot of the meat of this book is
in its digressions. And of those (alas) I can only, hastily, randomly,
mention a few.

Deutsch is interested in neo-­Darwinian accounts of the evolution of
culture. Such accounts treat cultural items -- languages, religions,
values, ideas, traditions -- in much the way that Darwinian theories
of biological evolution treat genes. They are called “memes,” and are
treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with
the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully
replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how
the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are
going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.

He also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for
meme-­replication, one he calls “rational” and the other he calls
“anti-rational.” Rational memes -- the sort that Deutsch imagines will
replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies -- are
simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific
scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more
rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world
actually works. Irrational memes -- which are more interesting, and
more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the
essential character of pre-­Enlightenment societies -- reproduce
themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of
fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and
inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent
new ideas. And one particular subcategory of memes -- about which
Deutsch has very clever things to say -- succeeds precisely by
pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: “Children who asked
why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem
functional would be told ‘because I say so,’ and in due course they
would give their children the same reply to the same question, never
realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a
curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its
holders do not believe it.)”

Another chapter is devoted entirely to the evolution of creativity. At
first glance, the ability to come up with new and better ways of doing
things would appear to confer an obvious survival advantage. But if
that’s how it worked -- or so Deutsch argues -- then the
archaeological record ought to contain evidence of the accumulation of
such better ways of doing things that are contemporaneous with the
time when the human brain was actually in the process of evolving. And
it doesn’t, which would seem to amount to a puzzle. Deutsch has a cute
proposal for solving it. The thought is that the business of merely
passing on complicated memes, without any thought of innovation,
requires considerable creativity on the part of their recipients.
Learning a language, for instance, is a matter of inferring, from a
small number of examples, a collection of general rules, each with a
potentially infinite number of applications, governing the uses of the
words involved. In Deutsch’s view, the work of keeping such complex
memes in place, from generation to generation, is no less a creative
business than the work of improving them.

This, as I said, is cute, and typical of the dexterity of Deutsch’s
mind, but it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. Wouldn’t it be a
reproductive advantage to have a heritable capacity to think on your
feet, and outside the box, in a sticky situation, whether or not any
particular thought you have ends up getting preserved, and passed down
to your children, and enshrined in the practice of a whole society?
And isn’t it possible that creativity was never selected for at all,
but arose as a byproduct of the selection of something else? As to the
business of learning a language -- well, gosh, haven’t linguists been
thinking about these sorts of questions very hard, and very
systematically, and along very different lines, for decades now? If
Deutsch has reasons for thinking that all of that is somehow on the
wrong track, he ought to tell us what those reasons are. As it is,
none of that gets so much as a mention in his book.

And there are, in some places, explicit and outrageous falsehoods.
Deutsch insists again and again, for example, that the only
explanation we have for the observed behaviors of subatomic particles
is a famous idea of Hugh Everett’s to the effect that the universe of
our experience is one of an infinite and endlessly branching
collection of similar universes -- and that what resistance there is
to this idea is attributable to the influence of this or that fancy,
misguided philosophical critique of good, solid, old-­fashioned
realistic attitudes toward what scientific theories have to tell us
about the world. This is simply, wildly, wrong. Most of the good,
solid, old-fashioned scientific realists who take an interest in
questions of the foundations of physics -- like me, for example -- are
deeply skeptical of Everett’s picture. And that’s because there are
good reasons to be worried that Everett’s picture cannot, in fact,
explain those behaviors at all -- and because there are other, much
more reasonable-­looking proposals on the table, that apparently can.

Deutsch’s enthusiasm for the scientific and technological
transformation of the totality of existence naturally brings with it a
radical impatience with the pieties of environmentalism, and cultural
relativism, and even procedural democracy -- and this is sometimes
exhilarating and sometimes creepy. He attacks these pieties, with
spectacular clarity and intelligence, as small-­minded and cowardly
and boring. The metaphor of the earth as a spaceship or life-­support
system, he writes, “is quite perverse. . . . To the extent that we are
on a ‘spaceship,’ we have never merely been its passengers, nor (as is
often said) its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its
designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was
not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous raw materials.” But it’s
hard to get to the end of this book without feeling that Deutsch is
too little moved by actual contemporary human suffering. What moves
him is the grand Darwinian competition among ideas. What he adores,
what he is convinced contains the salvation of the world, is, in every
sense of the word, The Market.

And there are moments when you just can’t imagine what the deal is
with this guy. Deutsch --  notwithstanding his open and
anti-authoritarian and altogether admirable ideology of inquiry -- is
positively bubbling over with inviolable principles: that everything
is explicable, that materialist interpretations of history are morally
wrong, that “the only uniquely significant thing about humans . . . is
our ability to create new explanations,” and on and on. And if the
reader turns to Pages 64 and 65, she will find illustrations depicting
two of them, literally, carved in stone. I swear.

Never mind. He is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to
know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.

David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author
of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.”

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Russ Abbott]

The author of the review is an interesting guy.  After reading the review I attempted to find some recent publications, but I couldn't.  The best I could find is this Blogging Heads TV discussion between him and Sean Carroll recorded 3 years ago. It's worth watching. If you watch it at 1.4 speed, Albert sounds like he is talking at a normal pace, but Carroll sounds quite speeded up.

 

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105
  blog: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/
  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Rich Murray <[hidden email]> wrote:

The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World,
David Deutsch, NYT review, David Albert: Rich Murray 2011.08.14


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/books/review/the-beginning-of-infinity-by-david-deutsch-book-review.html?_r=2&ref=science

Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only.
You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your
colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that
appears next to any article.
Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information.
Order a reprint of this article now.

August 12, 2011
Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe
By DAVID ALBERT

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY
Explanations That Transform the World
By David Deutsch
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch ]
Illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30.

David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and
exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything:
art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future,
infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it
anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted
here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.

It hardly seems worth saying (to begin with) that the chutzpah of this
guy is almost beyond belief, and that any book with these sorts of
ambitions is necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure, or a
fraud, or a joke, or madness. But Deutsch (who is famous, among other
reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum
computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so
inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is
a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his
head. He writes as if what he is giving us amounts to a tight, grand,
cumulative system of ideas -- something of almost mathematical rigor
-- but the reader will do much better to approach this book with the
assurance that nothing like that actually turns out to be the case. I
like to think of it as more akin to great, wide, learned, meandering
conversation --  something that belongs to the genre of, say, Robert
Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” -- never dull, often startling and
fantastic and beautiful, often at odds with itself, sometimes
distasteful, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes (even,
maybe, secondarily) true.

The thought to which Deutsch’s conversation most often returns is that
the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, or
something like it, may turn out to have been the pivotal event not
merely of the history of the West, or of human beings, or of the
earth, but (literally, physically) of the universe as a whole.

Here’s the sort of thing he has in mind: The topographical shape and
the material constitution of the upper surface of the island of
Manhattan, as it exists today, is much less a matter of geology than
it is of economics and politics and human psychology. The effects of
geological forces were trumped (you might say) by other forces --
forces that proved themselves, in the fullness of time, physically
stronger. Deutsch thinks the same thing must in the long run be true
of the universe as a whole. Stuff like gravitation and dark energy are
the sorts of things that determine the shape of the cosmos only in its
earliest, and most parochial, and least interesting stages. The rest
is going to be a matter of our own intentional doing, or at any rate
it’s going to be a matter of the intentional doings of what Deutsch
calls “people,” by which he means not only human beings, and not all
human beings, but whatever creatures, from whatever planets, in
whatever circumstances, may have managed to absorb the lessons of the
Scientific Revolution.

There is a famous collection of arguments from the pioneering days of
computer science to the effect that any device able to carry out every
one of the entries on a certain relatively short list of elementary
logical operations could, in some finite number of steps, calculate
the value of any mathematical function that is calculable at all.
Devices like that are called “universal computers.” And what interests
Deutsch about these arguments is that they imply that there is a
certain definite point, a certain definite moment, in the course of
acquiring the capacity to perform more and more of the operations on
that list, when such a machine will abruptly become as good a
calculator as anything, in principle, can be.

Deutsch thinks that such “jumps to universality” must occur not only
in the capacity to calculate things, but also in the capacity to
understand things, and in the closely related capacity to make things
happen. And he thinks that it was precisely such a threshold that was
crossed with the invention of the scientific method. There were plenty
of things we humans could do, of course, prior to the invention of
that method: agriculture, or the domestication of animals, or the
design of sundials, or the construction of pyramids. But all of a
sudden, with the introduction of that particular habit of concocting
and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do
anything. The capacities of a community that has mastered that method
to survive, and to learn, and to remake the world according to its
inclinations, are (in the long run) literally, mathematically,
infinite. And Deutsch is convinced that the tendency of the world to
give rise to such communities, more than, say, the force of
gravitation, or the second law of thermodynamics, or even the
phenomenon of death, is what ultimately gives the world its shape, and
what constitutes the genuine essence of nature. “In all cases,” he
writes, “the class of transformations that could happen spontaneously
-- in the absence of knowledge -- is negligibly small compared with
the class that could be effected artificially by intelligent beings
who wanted those transformations to happen. So the explanations of
almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would
be applied to bring those phenomena about.” And there is a beautiful
and almost mystical irony in all this: that it was precisely by means
of the Scientific Revolution, it was precisely by means of accepting
that we are not the center of the universe, that we became the center
of the universe.

This is all definitely incredibly cool. But I have no idea how one
might go about investigating whether it is true or false. It seems
more to the point to think of it as something emotive -- as the
expression of a mood. An incredibly cool mood. A mood that (maybe) no
human being could ever have been in before right now. A mood informed
by profound and imaginative reflection on the best and most advanced
science we have. But not exactly, not even remotely, a live scientific
hypothesis.

Anyway, it’s that mood, or conceit, or whatever it is, that gives “The
Beginning of Infinity” its name. But a lot of the meat of this book is
in its digressions. And of those (alas) I can only, hastily, randomly,
mention a few.

Deutsch is interested in neo-­Darwinian accounts of the evolution of
culture. Such accounts treat cultural items -- languages, religions,
values, ideas, traditions -- in much the way that Darwinian theories
of biological evolution treat genes. They are called “memes,” and are
treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with
the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully
replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how
the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are
going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.

He also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for
meme-­replication, one he calls “rational” and the other he calls
“anti-rational.” Rational memes -- the sort that Deutsch imagines will
replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies -- are
simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific
scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more
rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world
actually works. Irrational memes -- which are more interesting, and
more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the
essential character of pre-­Enlightenment societies -- reproduce
themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of
fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and
inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent
new ideas. And one particular subcategory of memes -- about which
Deutsch has very clever things to say -- succeeds precisely by
pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: “Children who asked
why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem
functional would be told ‘because I say so,’ and in due course they
would give their children the same reply to the same question, never
realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a
curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its
holders do not believe it.)”

Another chapter is devoted entirely to the evolution of creativity. At
first glance, the ability to come up with new and better ways of doing
things would appear to confer an obvious survival advantage. But if
that’s how it worked -- or so Deutsch argues -- then the
archaeological record ought to contain evidence of the accumulation of
such better ways of doing things that are contemporaneous with the
time when the human brain was actually in the process of evolving. And
it doesn’t, which would seem to amount to a puzzle. Deutsch has a cute
proposal for solving it. The thought is that the business of merely
passing on complicated memes, without any thought of innovation,
requires considerable creativity on the part of their recipients.
Learning a language, for instance, is a matter of inferring, from a
small number of examples, a collection of general rules, each with a
potentially infinite number of applications, governing the uses of the
words involved. In Deutsch’s view, the work of keeping such complex
memes in place, from generation to generation, is no less a creative
business than the work of improving them.

This, as I said, is cute, and typical of the dexterity of Deutsch’s
mind, but it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. Wouldn’t it be a
reproductive advantage to have a heritable capacity to think on your
feet, and outside the box, in a sticky situation, whether or not any
particular thought you have ends up getting preserved, and passed down
to your children, and enshrined in the practice of a whole society?
And isn’t it possible that creativity was never selected for at all,
but arose as a byproduct of the selection of something else? As to the
business of learning a language -- well, gosh, haven’t linguists been
thinking about these sorts of questions very hard, and very
systematically, and along very different lines, for decades now? If
Deutsch has reasons for thinking that all of that is somehow on the
wrong track, he ought to tell us what those reasons are. As it is,
none of that gets so much as a mention in his book.

And there are, in some places, explicit and outrageous falsehoods.
Deutsch insists again and again, for example, that the only
explanation we have for the observed behaviors of subatomic particles
is a famous idea of Hugh Everett’s to the effect that the universe of
our experience is one of an infinite and endlessly branching
collection of similar universes -- and that what resistance there is
to this idea is attributable to the influence of this or that fancy,
misguided philosophical critique of good, solid, old-­fashioned
realistic attitudes toward what scientific theories have to tell us
about the world. This is simply, wildly, wrong. Most of the good,
solid, old-fashioned scientific realists who take an interest in
questions of the foundations of physics -- like me, for example -- are
deeply skeptical of Everett’s picture. And that’s because there are
good reasons to be worried that Everett’s picture cannot, in fact,
explain those behaviors at all -- and because there are other, much
more reasonable-­looking proposals on the table, that apparently can.

Deutsch’s enthusiasm for the scientific and technological
transformation of the totality of existence naturally brings with it a
radical impatience with the pieties of environmentalism, and cultural
relativism, and even procedural democracy -- and this is sometimes
exhilarating and sometimes creepy. He attacks these pieties, with
spectacular clarity and intelligence, as small-­minded and cowardly
and boring. The metaphor of the earth as a spaceship or life-­support
system, he writes, “is quite perverse. . . . To the extent that we are
on a ‘spaceship,’ we have never merely been its passengers, nor (as is
often said) its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its
designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was
not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous raw materials.” But it’s
hard to get to the end of this book without feeling that Deutsch is
too little moved by actual contemporary human suffering. What moves
him is the grand Darwinian competition among ideas. What he adores,
what he is convinced contains the salvation of the world, is, in every
sense of the word, The Market.

And there are moments when you just can’t imagine what the deal is
with this guy. Deutsch --  notwithstanding his open and
anti-authoritarian and altogether admirable ideology of inquiry -- is
positively bubbling over with inviolable principles: that everything
is explicable, that materialist interpretations of history are morally
wrong, that “the only uniquely significant thing about humans . . . is
our ability to create new explanations,” and on and on. And if the
reader turns to Pages 64 and 65, she will find illustrations depicting
two of them, literally, carved in stone. I swear.

Never mind. He is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to
know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.

David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author
of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.”

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[michael barron]

R:

Look at what I wrote, then look at Mr. Carrol wrote, and see the differences! 

NO I do not want to be a Philosopher, but I might have to be. 

with metta, M

PS: how is the paper sorting going or not?

On Sun, Aug s14, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

The author of the review is an interesting guy.  After reading the review I attempted to find some recent publications, but I couldn't.  The best I could find is this Blogging Heads TV discussion between him and Sean Carroll recorded 3 years ago. It's worth watching. If you watch it at 1.4 speed, Albert sounds like he is talking at a normal pace, but Carroll sounds quite speeded up.

 

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105
  blog: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/
  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Rich Murray <[hidden email]> wrote:

The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World,
David Deutsch, NYT review, David Albert: Rich Murray 2011.08.14


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/books/review/the-beginning-of-infinity-by-david-deutsch-book-review.html?_r=2&ref=science

Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only.
You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your
colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that
appears next to any article.
Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information.
Order a reprint of this article now.

August 12, 2011
Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe
By DAVID ALBERT

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY
Explanations That Transform the World
By David Deutsch
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch ]
Illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30.

David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and
exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything:
art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future,
infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it
anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted
here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.

It hardly seems worth saying (to begin with) that the chutzpah of this
guy is almost beyond belief, and that any book with these sorts of
ambitions is necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure, or a
fraud, or a joke, or madness. But Deutsch (who is famous, among other
reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum
computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so
inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is
a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his
head. He writes as if what he is giving us amounts to a tight, grand,
cumulative system of ideas -- something of almost mathematical rigor
-- but the reader will do much better to approach this book with the
assurance that nothing like that actually turns out to be the case. I
like to think of it as more akin to great, wide, learned, meandering
conversation --  something that belongs to the genre of, say, Robert
Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” -- never dull, often startling and
fantastic and beautiful, often at odds with itself, sometimes
distasteful, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes (even,
maybe, secondarily) true.

The thought to which Deutsch’s conversation most often returns is that
the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, or
something like it, may turn out to have been the pivotal event not
merely of the history of the West, or of human beings, or of the
earth, but (literally, physically) of the universe as a whole.

Here’s the sort of thing he has in mind: The topographical shape and
the material constitution of the upper surface of the island of
Manhattan, as it exists today, is much less a matter of geology than
it is of economics and politics and human psychology. The effects of
geological forces were trumped (you might say) by other forces --
forces that proved themselves, in the fullness of time, physically
stronger. Deutsch thinks the same thing must in the long run be true
of the universe as a whole. Stuff like gravitation and dark energy are
the sorts of things that determine the shape of the cosmos only in its
earliest, and most parochial, and least interesting stages. The rest
is going to be a matter of our own intentional doing, or at any rate
it’s going to be a matter of the intentional doings of what Deutsch
calls “people,” by which he means not only human beings, and not all
human beings, but whatever creatures, from whatever planets, in
whatever circumstances, may have managed to absorb the lessons of the
Scientific Revolution.

There is a famous collection of arguments from the pioneering days of
computer science to the effect that any device able to carry out every
one of the entries on a certain relatively short list of elementary
logical operations could, in some finite number of steps, calculate
the value of any mathematical function that is calculable at all.
Devices like that are called “universal computers.” And what interests
Deutsch about these arguments is that they imply that there is a
certain definite point, a certain definite moment, in the course of
acquiring the capacity to perform more and more of the operations on
that list, when such a machine will abruptly become as good a
calculator as anything, in principle, can be.

Deutsch thinks that such “jumps to universality” must occur not only
in the capacity to calculate things, but also in the capacity to
understand things, and in the closely related capacity to make things
happen. And he thinks that it was precisely such a threshold that was
crossed with the invention of the scientific method. There were plenty
of things we humans could do, of course, prior to the invention of
that method: agriculture, or the domestication of animals, or the
design of sundials, or the construction of pyramids. But all of a
sudden, with the introduction of that particular habit of concocting
and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do
anything. The capacities of a community that has mastered that method
to survive, and to learn, and to remake the world according to its
inclinations, are (in the long run) literally, mathematically,
infinite. And Deutsch is convinced that the tendency of the world to
give rise to such communities, more than, say, the force of
gravitation, or the second law of thermodynamics, or even the
phenomenon of death, is what ultimately gives the world its shape, and
what constitutes the genuine essence of nature. “In all cases,” he
writes, “the class of transformations that could happen spontaneously
-- in the absence of knowledge -- is negligibly small compared with
the class that could be effected artificially by intelligent beings
who wanted those transformations to happen. So the explanations of
almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would
be applied to bring those phenomena about.” And there is a beautiful
and almost mystical irony in all this: that it was precisely by means
of the Scientific Revolution, it was precisely by means of accepting
that we are not the center of the universe, that we became the center
of the universe.

This is all definitely incredibly cool. But I have no idea how one
might go about investigating whether it is true or false. It seems
more to the point to think of it as something emotive -- as the
expression of a mood. An incredibly cool mood. A mood that (maybe) no
human being could ever have been in before right now. A mood informed
by profound and imaginative reflection on the best and most advanced
science we have. But not exactly, not even remotely, a live scientific
hypothesis.

Anyway, it’s that mood, or conceit, or whatever it is, that gives “The
Beginning of Infinity” its name. But a lot of the meat of this book is
in its digressions. And of those (alas) I can only, hastily, randomly,
mention a few.

Deutsch is interested in neo-­Darwinian accounts of the evolution of
culture. Such accounts treat cultural items -- languages, religions,
values, ideas, traditions -- in much the way that Darwinian theories
of biological evolution treat genes. They are called “memes,” and are
treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with
the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully
replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how
the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are
going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.

He also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for
meme-­replication, one he calls “rational” and the other he calls
“anti-rational.” Rational memes -- the sort that Deutsch imagines will
replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies -- are
simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific
scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more
rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world
actually works. Irrational memes -- which are more interesting, and
more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the
essential character of pre-­Enlightenment societies -- reproduce
themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of
fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and
inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent
new ideas. And one particular subcategory of memes -- about which
Deutsch has very clever things to say -- succeeds precisely by
pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: “Children who asked
why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem
functional would be told ‘because I say so,’ and in due course they
would give their children the same reply to the same question, never
realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a
curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its
holders do not believe it.)”

Another chapter is devoted entirely to the evolution of creativity. At
first glance, the ability to come up with new and better ways of doing
things would appear to confer an obvious survival advantage. But if
that’s how it worked -- or so Deutsch argues -- then the
archaeological record ought to contain evidence of the accumulation of
such better ways of doing things that are contemporaneous with the
time when the human brain was actually in the process of evolving. And
it doesn’t, which would seem to amount to a puzzle. Deutsch has a cute
proposal for solving it. The thought is that the business of merely
passing on complicated memes, without any thought of innovation,
requires considerable creativity on the part of their recipients.
Learning a language, for instance, is a matter of inferring, from a
small number of examples, a collection of general rules, each with a
potentially infinite number of applications, governing the uses of the
words involved. In Deutsch’s view, the work of keeping such complex
memes in place, from generation to generation, is no less a creative
business than the work of improving them.

This, as I said, is cute, and typical of the dexterity of Deutsch’s
mind, but it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. Wouldn’t it be a
reproductive advantage to have a heritable capacity to think on your
feet, and outside the box, in a sticky situation, whether or not any
particular thought you have ends up getting preserved, and passed down
to your children, and enshrined in the practice of a whole society?
And isn’t it possible that creativity was never selected for at all,
but arose as a byproduct of the selection of something else? As to the
business of learning a language -- well, gosh, haven’t linguists been
thinking about these sorts of questions very hard, and very
systematically, and along very different lines, for decades now? If
Deutsch has reasons for thinking that all of that is somehow on the
wrong track, he ought to tell us what those reasons are. As it is,
none of that gets so much as a mention in his book.

And there are, in some places, explicit and outrageous falsehoods.
Deutsch insists again and again, for example, that the only
explanation we have for the observed behaviors of subatomic particles
is a famous idea of Hugh Everett’s to the effect that the universe of
our experience is one of an infinite and endlessly branching
collection of similar universes -- and that what resistance there is
to this idea is attributable to the influence of this or that fancy,
misguided philosophical critique of good, solid, old-­fashioned
realistic attitudes toward what scientific theories have to tell us
about the world. This is simply, wildly, wrong. Most of the good,
solid, old-fashioned scientific realists who take an interest in
questions of the foundations of physics -- like me, for example -- are
deeply skeptical of Everett’s picture. And that’s because there are
good reasons to be worried that Everett’s picture cannot, in fact,
explain those behaviors at all -- and because there are other, much
more reasonable-­looking proposals on the table, that apparently can.

Deutsch’s enthusiasm for the scientific and technological
transformation of the totality of existence naturally brings with it a
radical impatience with the pieties of environmentalism, and cultural
relativism, and even procedural democracy -- and this is sometimes
exhilarating and sometimes creepy. He attacks these pieties, with
spectacular clarity and intelligence, as small-­minded and cowardly
and boring. The metaphor of the earth as a spaceship or life-­support
system, he writes, “is quite perverse. . . . To the extent that we are
on a ‘spaceship,’ we have never merely been its passengers, nor (as is
often said) its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its
designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was
not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous raw materials.” But it’s
hard to get to the end of this book without feeling that Deutsch is
too little moved by actual contemporary human suffering. What moves
him is the grand Darwinian competition among ideas. What he adores,
what he is convinced contains the salvation of the world, is, in every
sense of the word, The Market.

And there are moments when you just can’t imagine what the deal is
with this guy. Deutsch --  notwithstanding his open and
anti-authoritarian and altogether admirable ideology of inquiry -- is
positively bubbling over with inviolable principles: that everything
is explicable, that materialist interpretations of history are morally
wrong, that “the only uniquely significant thing about humans . . . is
our ability to create new explanations,” and on and on. And if the
reader turns to Pages 64 and 65, she will find illustrations depicting
two of them, literally, carved in stone. I swear.

Never mind. He is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to
know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.

David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author
of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.”

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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org