David Deutsch

“Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in the history of our species.”

“It is only when a theory is a good explanation, hard to vary, that it even matters whether it is testable. Bad explanations are equally useless whether they are testable or not.”

“The Enlightenment. The beginning of, a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations, instead of reliance on authority.”

“A single unexpected or misunderstood phenomenon anywhere in the chain can, and often does, render the resulting sensory experience arbitrarily misleading.”

“Each layer of indirectness, through its associated theory, corrects errors, illusions, misleading perspectives, and gaps.”

“conclude that a particular thing is real if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something.”

“could do so only because they brought knowledge with them about such things as tools, weapons, fire, and clothing.”

“Problems are inevitable. It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable.”

“The Continental Enlightenment was impatient for the perfected state, state, which led to intellectual dogmatism, political violence and new forms of tyranny.”

“the fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable Given the right knowledge”

“such information which i call knowledge is very unlikely to come into existence other than through the error-correcting processes of evolution or thought.”

“biological knowledge is non-explanatory, and therefore has limited reach. Explanatory human knowledge can have broad or even unlimited reach.”

“Thus, in the case of most memes, the real replicator is abstract. It is the knowledge itself.”

“All knowledge creation depends on, and physically consists of, emergent phenomena.”

“Reductionism and holism are both mistakes. In reality, explanations do not form a hierarchy with the lowest level being the most fundamental.”

“Without error correction, all information processing, and hence all knowledge creation, is necessarily bounded. Error correction is the beginning of infinity.”

“Because of the necessity of error correction, all jumps to universality occur in digital systems.”

“Universal computers cannot really be universal unless there are people present to provide energy and maintenance, indefinitely.”

“Programs written today, a further 26 years later, are still no better at the task of seeming to think than Eliza was.”

“But, in reality, judging whether something is a genuine AI will always depend on explanations of how it works.”

“Every room is at the beginning of infinity. That is one of the attributes of the unbounded growth of knowledge too. We are only just scratching the surface and shall never be doing anything else.”

“the unpredictability of the content of future knowledge is a necessary condition for the unlimited growth of that knowledge.”

“No good explanation can predict the outcome or the probability of an outcome of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge.”

“Very few, if any, could have been saved by greater caution about innovation. In fact, most had enthusiastically implemented the precautionary principle.”

“Even if our civilization moves out into space in order to hedge its bets, as Reese and Hawking both rightly advise, a gamma ray burst in our galactic vicinity would still wipe us all out.”

“systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.”

“The Principle of Optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success.”

“their moral education enjoins them to hold their most important ideas immune from criticism, not to be open to suggestions, not to criticize certain ideas such as their traditions or their conceptions of the gods, not to seek the truth because they claim that they already have it.”

“the default assumption should be that misunderstandings are ubiquitous and that neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate is any guarantee against them.”

“All this holds as much for knowledge written down as for knowledge spoken in person.”

“The second half of the answer is that the reason why scientists are trying to learn the theory and also why they have such disregard for faithfulness to the original is that they want to know how the world is. Crucially, this is the same objective that the originator of the theory had.”

“We should not be surprised that good fictional science is hard to invent. It is a variant of real science, and real scientific knowledge is very hard to vary.”

“Since the growth of knowledge is a process of error correction, and since there are many more ways of being wrong than right, knowledge-creating entities rapidly become more alike in different histories than other entities.”

“Bad philosophy is philosophy that denies the possibility, desirability, or existence of progress. And progress is the only effective way of opposing bad philosophy. If progress cannot continue indefinitely, bad philosophy will inevitably come again into the ascendancy.”

“the main impact of bad philosophy has been through the idea of separating a scientific theory into explanationless predictions and arbitrary interpretation”

“to justify systematic equivocation and to immunize themselves from criticism”

“They are choosing which experiments are to be attempted next and, principally, which are to be abandoned because there is no longer a good explanation for why they are best. The politicians and their policies are those experiments.”

“Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.”

“It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula.”

“That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.”

“The code had to be, on the one hand, easily recognizable by the right insects, and on the other, difficult to forge by other species of flower.”

“Thus, Both the criterion and the means of meeting it had to be hard to vary.”

“Those convergent criteria of beauty solve the problem of creating hard-to-forge signals where prior shared knowledge is insufficient to provide them.”

“There are only two basic strategies of meme replication. To help prospective holders, or to disable the holders' critical faculties.”

“Western civilization is in an unstable transitional period between stable, static societies, consisting of anti-rational means, and a stable, dynamic society, consisting of rational means.”

“They are created afresh by the recipient. They are conjectural explanations, which are then subjected to criticism and testing before being tentatively adopted.”

“Meme evolution took place, and, like all evolution, this was always in the direction of greater faithfulness. This meant becoming ever more anti-rational.”

“Consequently, all those increases in creativity never produced streams of innovations.”

“Complex memes do not mandate specific bodily actions, but rules. We can see the actions, but not the rules. So how do we replicate them. We replicate them by creativity.”

“Caesar had taken vigorous steps to ensure that he could not be removed without violence”

“Problems are inevitable, but why they failed to correct them.”

“But note that this lifestyle did not, when it was tried, prevent the Black Death. Nor would it cure cancer.”

“There is a saying that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that is only when one knows what to prevent. No precautions can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee.”

“To prepare for those, there is nothing we can do but increase our ability to put things right, if they go wrong.”

“the desirable future is one where we progress from misconception to ever better, less mistaken, misconception.”

“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.”