Update: After some investigation, I found out that The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch contains a few minor misquotes of Popper, Turing and others. Nevertheless, it is an excellent book.

Background

As I read through Rationality: A-Z, I kept seeing similarities to David Deutsch's worldview. Deutsch pioneered quantum computation in the 1970s, motivated by the possibility of gaining a deeper grasp of quantum physics and as a potential way to test many-worlds.

This post is adapted from my review of The Beginning of Infinity. I read it a couple of years ago, and it is among the most formative books I have read.

Overview

We have a great deal of knowledge about the vast and unfamiliar reality that causes our observations and the elegant, universal laws governing that reality. This knowledge consists of explanations: assertions about what is out there beyond appearances and how it works. Where do explanations come from? The source of our knowledge is a process of conjectures alternating with criticism. Humans possess the capacities for creativity and rationality, enabling them to actively pursue error correction through creating, combining, altering and criticising ideas in the quest for good explanations.

Good Explanations

The role of experiment and observation is to choose among the ideas we come up with. We interpret experiences through explanatory theories, but good explanations are not obvious. Fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but acknowledging that we may always be mistaken and that no belief can ever be rationally supported or justified conclusively. Always, there remains a possible doubt as to the truth of the belief. What distinguishes science from other belief systems is that scientific beliefs are always defeasible and never final. We ought to continuously be correcting errors and updating beliefs in the quest for knowledge. We correct errors by seeking good explanations.

Good explanations in science are hard-to-vary assertions about reality. They are hard-to-vary because they provide specific details that fit together so tightly that changing them ruins the explanation. This criterion helps to eliminate bad explanations that keep adding justifications in light of refutations and counterevidence to avoid falsification. An explanation that is hard-to-vary but does not survive a critical test can be considered falsified.

We can expla...

Reductionism

See also