Book Review

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World

by David Deutsch

     Theoretical physicist David Deutsch presents us with an onslaught of ideas. The Beginning of Infinity is an attempt at combining various branches of science with the branch of philosophical epistemology. While a wide range of explication and analysis is contained here, the quality of his ideas shifts from good to bad and back again.

     The core idea of this book is that humans are a unique species of beings on our planet and what makes us unique is our ability to generate knowledge; what makes this knowledge so significant is that we create explanations and because of this ability, problem solving has become the skill that ensures our chances of survival as well as the capacity to make infinite progress in our ability to understand. Every advance in knowledge is a beginning of infinity, an entryway into a string of continuously improving explanations of what reality is. This process starts with statements of conjecture that get analyzed and modified; every problem that gets solved leads to a giant leap in knowledge but also opens us up to new problems as well, in an infinite series of solutions and dilemmas that can never be complete. Europe’s Age of Enlightenment saw the beginning of an explosion of science and rationality that is still in the process of unfolding now.

     The importance of forming explanations is at the core of this core idea. Explanations can be good or bad and scientific knowledge advances when bad explanations are replaces by good explanations. Examples of bad explanations are mystical or religious forms of causality, vague or inaccurate observations, and the conflation of ideas that have no bearing or relation on one another such as the position of stars and the occurrence of terrestrial events promoted by astrologers. Even more important is that the details of bad explanations can be altered without having to make any alterations in the claims they support. Good explanations, on the other hand, can not be varied without significantly changing their claim. The thesis and sub-thesis of this book are provocative and worthy of consideration.

     In the process of analyzing and testing conjectures, humans are prone to making errors and inaccurate judgments. Deutsch does an adequate job of identifying and defining these impediments to accurate knowledge. Some of them, like anthrocentrism and relativism seem right on the mark while others like inductivism and empiricism appear to be somewhat problematical. Empiricism, or the idea that we derive knowledge from our senses, can not be so easily written off. Deutsch explains that our senses deceive us; we can not see that the Earth is round from our vantage point and we can not feel it rotating. Instead, he claims we learn this information indirectly through the use of scientific instruments like telescopes, satellites, computers, and Foucault’s pendulum. It can be accepted that some forms of data are experienced indirectly but this does not disprove empiricism because we depend on our senses to observe and analyze the information gathered by theses instruments; without the sense of sight, any images captured in a telescope would be useless. Telescopes and satellites extend, amplify, and enhance our senses and without empiricism they would be impossible to construct or use. Empiricism is the reason that blind people do not become surgeons. Just because the empiricist philosopher David Hume made some inaccurate statements in his writings does not mean that all of empiricism has to be abandoned. We do not obtain scientific knowledge through inspiration, telepathy, divine revelation, or mystical communion. The information has to be communicated to us somehow and that process takes place because of empirical experience even if that merely means using our sight to read a graph or using our hearing to listen to another scientist explaining mathematics. Deutsch scores some big victories from the start of his book but also makes some horribly problematic claims as well.

     The book proceeds into the use of these ideas as tools to explain various branches of science like cosmology, space exploration, and evolution. These chapters are interesting, clearly written, and accessible to the lay-person, though a non-scientist may have some trouble judging the soundness of Deutsch’s arguments if they do not have enough background knowledge. One chapter explains the mathematics of infinity in challenging but comprehensible terms that can be grasped by people who are not mathematically inclined. The most imaginative chapter involves Socrates engaging in a dialogue with Hermes during a dream. They discuss the need for epistemology and the conflict between static and dynamic societies, a key concept that permeates the rest of the book. Static societies believe themselves to be perfect, are resistant to change or creativity, and depend on authoritarian rule. A dynamic society strives eternally for an open-ended perfection and so engages in a never ending quest to improve on what is already known. By strictly contrasting the two, Deutsch relies on a false dilemma fallacy and an oversimplification that could easily have been avoided if he had followed his own advice and generated a good explanation for his claim. Besides, it seems most societies combine both stasis and dynamism and even thrive because of the tension between the two. Societies need to have some degree of stasis to remain stable but they also need to be dynamic enough to adapt to inevitable change. Leaning too far in one direction or the other can cause a society to collapse.

     This is where The Beginning of Infinity completely falls apart. Deutsch leaves science behind and launches into a chapter about the fallibilty of representative democracy in America. A reader may get a couple pages into this chapter and wonder why it was even included in the book. It appears that Deutsch is trying to demonstrate that Western nations are more progressive because they embrace the idea of improvement and auto-correction. It seems that he is also trying to show that his concept of good explanation and infinite progress have reach outside of science and into other areas of human endeavor. These messages get buried in a dull and muddled mess about the shortcomings of coalition governments and why a representative democracy is mathematically impossible but still superior to other forms of government.

     Another confusing chapter is one where Deutsch attempts to demonstrate the existence of objective beauty. Genetically speaking, flowers and bees evolved simultaneously so that their symbiotic relationship would ensure the survival of both species. This is quite interesting but he tries to make a logistical leap and explain that flowers look beautiful because human genes adapted to find them attractive in a similar way. But he does not give a complete answer as to how humans benefited from this adaptation. He also does not take into account that there are vast numbers of people who are indifferent to whether flowers are actually beautiful or not. Some people even hate them. But this leads into a discussion on how humans evolved to find objective beauty in music and art, specifically the orchestral works of Mozart. He points out that musical expression reached a peak in Mozart’s day because he lived in a dynamic society that valued change and innovation and a static society could never have produced such a genius. This is probably true but his concept of objective perfection in aesthetics is entirely Eurocentric which qualifies it as a subject form of beauty rather than an objective one. Besides, in the entire world’s population, the people who actively listen to and enjoy Mozart are a minority. Professional wrestling is more popular internationally than classical music. Even worse, the example of Mozart contradicts his claim that in dynamic societies the process of analysis, modification, and correction lead us along an eternal path of getting closer to truth; it can only be stated as an opinion that classical music has developed into forms that are more complex, superior, and perfect than Mozart. Deutsch never even takes into account that Mozart’s The Magic Flute has never been considered to be much of anything but junk by most his listeners which might make the case that Mozart was the peak of aesthetic realization a little weaker.

     If aesthetics have evolved, classical music may or may not have gotten better but what about other forms of art and entertainment that came post-Mozart? We not only have John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix but there is are also aesthetic forms like the bad taste films of John Waters, death metal, industrial music and power electronics, niche and fetish categories of pornography, the Cinema of Transgression, the art of Hermann Nitzsch, the Viennese Actionists, and Paul McCarthy, all of which embrace an aesthetic of ugliness, offensiveness, or disturbing content. Adherents to these forms of aesthetics might willingly admit that Mozart is artistically superior but they probably would not spend much time listening to his music either. So how do these art forms fit in with the optimistic view of human progress held by David Deutsch? Maybe the concepts of progress and evolution need to be separated? In any case, his examples of flowers and Mozart do not sufficiently make the case that objective beauty exists.

     By far, the worst chapter in the book is the one describing the multiverse theory of quantum mechanics. He starts off with some stuff about transporter technology in the Star Trek tv series, veers off into some other stuff about writing a science fiction novel about a man and woman who fall in love on a spaceship, then mashes all this up with explanations of parallel universes and alternate threads of history. It is a confusing, disjointed mess. Ironically, the most poorly written chapter is also about Deutsch’s pet theory and area of expertise, one he admittedly says is not popular with other theoretical physicists. He says his theory of the multiverse is the most correct and condemns its critics for using instrumentalism and bad explanations to disprove it; other than that he never gives any details as to why they are wrong. He just states that hey are and moves on. He is capable of describing these things too; if you look him up on Youtube you will find his videos where he clearly explains these concepts. Even worse, this chapter seems entirely arbitrary; it does not fit snugly in with the main thesis of the book and does nothing to enhance the other concepts he presents either.

The Beginning of Infinity picks up again with a good section on the evolution and replication of genes and memes that is rooted in the work of Richard Dawkins. Deutsch ruins himself, though, as he takes up the idea of static and dynamic societies again. He makes the claim that Native American societies were static and post-Enlightenment white people were dynamic then dives headfirst into Social Darwinist territory by claiming that Native Americans failed because they never taught themselves how to domesticate animals. So their cultural evolution “failed” because they did not arrive at the same endpoint as Europeans? For the most part, the indigenous people of the Americas were not only surviving but thriving on their own terms until the Europeans showed up with their guns and their syphilis and tried to ethnically cleanse them. If left alone, they could very well have developed some form of science or industry, possibly even something entirely different that Europeans could never have conceived of. We will never know because the invaders decimated them.

     Deutsch attributes this “failure” to the inability of Native American people to use their imaginations. So the people who crossed the Baring Strait from Russia and migrated throughout the entire continents of North and South America as well as the Caribbean Islands were incapable of imagination? How does that lack of imagination account for the pictographic writing system of the Mayans or the empire built by the Aztecs? How about the Aztec pyramids? How did people with no imagination develop a rich tapestry of mythology, folklore, and shamanic practices? What about the Navajo language that is considered to be one of the most semantically and syntactically complex languages in the world? These are products of people who had no imagination?

     Archaeology does not support the idea that Native Americans were static and incapable of innovation either. Some societies evolved from using bone tools to carving stone into tools and sometimes combining them with sharp minerals like obsidian. Southwestern pueblo architecture and pottery production showed clear signs of cultural evolution. Some tribes evolved from being bands of hunter-gatherer nomads into sedentary or semi-sedentary agricultural societies. Complex tribal federations created by the Cherokees and Iroquois show an ability to innovate politically as well.

Deutsch claims they were incapable of innovation because they never tried to domesticate the woolly mammoths or mastodons that existed in North America when they arrived and instead killed them off by over-hunting. But think for a minute. If you were a nomad in a band of fifty people or so and you encountered a woolly mammoth, wouldn’t it make sense to kill it? If your immediate need is food it would supply your band with enough to last a while and also provide skins for clothes and bones for tools and weapons. It seems like trying to catch a woolly mammoth, tame it, learn how to ride it and use it for work would not only be precarious and dangerous but also a tremendous waste of time and effort. A giant hairy elephant would not present itself as something easy to control and losing a person or two in the attempt could be devastating to a small society where all members would contribute to the band’s chances of survival. We also do not know what they thought. Maybe they imagined taming the animals but failed in their attempts to do so.

     Deutsch goes on to say that static societies are more like animals than dynamic societies. It gets worse when he says this is not a racist theory because static societies are not genetically inferior humans; they are psychologically inferior instead. As if that is not racist; transferring a racist concept from one domain to another does not make the concept not racist. He continues on with the idea that Western societies are psychologically superior because of their achievements in science and we can almost hear alt.right douschebags like Gavin McInnes and Steve Bannon cheering in the background. Deutsch’s entire explanation of Native Americans as a static society is based on cherry picking and hasty conclusions. He does not appear to know much about the history of indigenous people but that is probably because he spent his life in the laboratory and very little time learning about human societies or even being a social part of the modern world. Besides, Western ingenuity also gave the world garbage like the music of Kid Rock, the Jerry Springer tv show, cell phone addicts, Hitler, marmite, McDonald’s, telemarketing, and football hooligans. And isn't Eurocentric thinking only one step away from antrocentric thinking anyhow? But like he says, every problem that gets solved creates new problems. So on to infinity.

David Deutsch has some great ideas but unfortunately, the bad chapters in The Beginning of Infinity have a tendency to overshadow the better parts. He does a good job of writing and analyzing when he sticks to the hard sciences but when he goes outside his areas of expertise the results are disastrous. And for someone who promotes the idea of progress resulting from good explanations, he does provide an awful lot of bad explanations along the way. But according to him, all claims are fallible so he should be willing to own up to his own shortcomings in thinking. But maybe that is the point. This is a book of conjectures and by analyzing, modifying, and correcting their fallibilities we are making progress towards higher levels of truth. Maybe David Deutsch does not want to tell us what to think but would rather have us make an attempt at finding a beginning of infinity for ourselves. For that reason this book has some value despite all its flaws.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. Penguin Books, New York: 2011.