ToKCast Ep: 99 David Deutsch‘s ”The Beginning of Infinity” - a retrospective in 99 minutes
Knowledge Creation
- Knowledge creation involves guessing and criticizing those guesses, not simply observing.
- Good explanations are hard to vary, with each part serving a purpose.
Closer to Reality
- Knowledge growth involves identifying and correcting errors in existing explanations.
- We use tools and prior explanations to better understand reality.
The Spark
- Humans are special because of explanatory knowledge, enabling progress.
- Earth is special because of us; we can make any environment hospitable.
This is episode 99 of ToKCast. More than any other work, the contents of "The Beginning of Infinity" (BoI) have informed the content of this podcast, so in celebration of Episode 99 I set myself the challenge of taking on each chapter in sequence, retelling the main points of it in my own words (no readings from the actual book itself this time) and construct an episode as close as possible to 99 minutes long. Obviously this required quite some editing - this episode now holds the record for time-taken-to-edit. As much was left on the virtual "cutting room floor" and extended "directors cut" is available for Patreons and other supporters of ToKCast. Become a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/tokcast (per episode support) or https://www.patreon.com/BrettRHall (monthly donation).
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:10:10 Chapter 1 The Reach of Explanations
00:15:21 Chapter 2 Closer to Reality
00:19:50 Chapter 3 The Spark
00:24:14 Chapter 4 Creation
00:29:06 Chapter 5 The Reality of Abstractions
00:34:14 Chapter 6 The Jump to Universality
00:38:51 Chapter 7 Artificial Creativity
00:43:58 Chapter 8 A Window on Infinity
00:49:01 Chapter 9 Optimism
00:53:47 Chapter 10 A Dream of Socrates
00:58:20 Chapter 11 The Multiverse
01:03:26 Chapter 12 A Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy
01:08:36 Chapter 13 Choices
01:13:42 Chapter 14 Why are Flowers Beautiful?
01:18:00 Chapter 15 The Evolution of Culture
01:22:56 Chapter 16 The Evolution of Creativity
01:28:23 Chapter 17 Unsustainable
01:33:24 Chapter 18 The Beginning
01:37:43 Concluding Remarks