DAVID DEUCH
Beginning of infinity. Explanations that change the world
translated by Rosalie Sinopoulou
ed. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2022, p. 520.

Although there are more astrologers than astronomers, as David Deutsch points out, science does not waste time in contests based only on some quantitative or size criterion, and for centuries, especially since the Enlightenment, has maintained its tendency to progress by correcting errors. , changing perceptions, changing people’s lives and changing the world. After all, the right mind, the arbiter of ideas, has no limits – as, ultimately, with infinity.

Science progresses, and the better it understands the world, the further it moves away from everyday experience.

Deutsch, a physicist at the University of Oxford, painstakingly and painstakingly expounds his own view of the scientific understanding of the world as a whole in this landmark book, creating an epistemology that, he notes, “still remains a minority view, even among theoretical physicists.”

The world is “the totality of physical reality”, the planet, the galaxy and the entire universe, with an amazing coincidence in the corner of infinity that humanity has developed. Humanity, which early turned its gaze to the sky and began to try to understand what it sees, what the world is. And through conjecture, through imagination, as well as through the critical spirit and method of testing, he began to form theories, test them, and finally produce knowledge.

“Today, astronomers never look into the sky and almost never look through a telescope,” because science is advancing, and the better it understands the world, the further it moves away from everyday experience. And if there are things that he cannot understand or reproduce, such as the movement of water in a kettle, then with the help of knowledge and scientific rules, he can explain the reasons for this seemingly unexpected impossibility. The better our understanding becomes, the more complex science becomes.

But Deutsch knows that within the limits of scientific knowledge we inevitably return to philosophical questions and epistemological problems. And it is at these points that all sciences work together to transcend the limits of existing knowledge and produce new, better explanations of the world. Such transcendences cannot be achieved either by experiment, experience, or empirically, as he claims. A necessary component of these transcendences is the faculty of questioning and the exercise of creative imagination. And the author insists that any problem we pose is solvable. The possible difficulty with an answer merely demonstrates the limits of our own understanding, not that the problem itself is unsolvable.

The principle of infinity indicates for Deutsch the possibility of infinite progress, the possibility of an infinite increase in knowledge, the use of an infinite amount of ideas. Intuitively, it may often seem to us that knowledge goes beyond logic, but even the concept of infinity, the thought of which confuses the human mind, obeys logical rules. Quantum theory, with its multiple universes, is a good example of this opposition to common sense and intuitive understanding of the world, as it considers both existing and potentially existing. However, for the writer, whether it is the philosophical foundations of science, science, technology, or even politics or individual action, the epistemological basis is common. A good explanation—scientific, social, political, etc.—will always add new knowledge, correct old cognitive errors, and advance human progress.

A bad explanation may prevail for a while, but one way or another it will be gradually replaced and corrected by a better explanation. It can be understood that we are faced with a bad explanation when it is used as a general principle for everything, when it touches only superficially on the issues it deals with, when it does not explain but justifies, when in order to justify it it needs to refer to some then authority is ideas, experts, institutions. Or, finally, when he insists on freeing himself from the jurisdiction of criticism.

This book is the manifesto of an optimistic physicist, a modern universalist, a supporter of the concept of progress and science. He touches on astronomy, astrophysics, mathematics, the history of philosophy, technology, the philosophy of science, epistemology, and even political theory in a way that is understandable to the persistent and diligent reader. Its goal is to create and establish a holistic, universal method of knowledge production. For the author, the end of pessimism marks our openness to the beginning of infinity, the optimism of knowledge.