The Beginning of Infinity

by David Deutsch

  Similar champagne bottles are stored in other laboratories. The popping of each such cork signals a discovery about something significant in the cosmic scheme of things. Thus the study of the behaviour of champagne corks and other proxies for what people do is logically equivalent to the study of everything significant. It follows that humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.

  Finally, consider the enormous difference between how an environment will behave spontaneously (that is to say, in the absence of knowledge) and how it behaves once a tiny sliver of knowledge, of just the right kind, has reached it. We would normally regard a lunar colony, even after it has become self-sufficient, as having originated on Earth. But what, exactly, will have originated on Earth? In the long run, all its atoms have originated on the moon (or the asteroids). All the energy that it uses has originated in the sun. Only some proportion of its knowledge came from Earth, and, in the hypothetical case of a perfectly isolated colony, that would be a rapidly dwindling proportion. What has happened, physically, is that the moon has been changed – initially only minimally – by matter that came from the Earth. And what made the difference was not the matter, but the knowledge that it encoded. In response to that knowledge, the substance of the moon reorganized itself in a new, increasingly extensive and complex way, and started to create an indefinitely long stream of ever-improving explanations. A beginning of infinity.

  Similarly, in the intergalactic thought experiment, we imagined ‘priming’ a typical cube, and as a result intergalactic space itself began to produce a stream of ever-improving explanations. Notice how different, physically, the transformed cube is from a typical one. A typical cube has about the same mass as any of the millions of nearby cubes, and that mass barely changes over many millions of years. The transformed cube is more massive than its neighbours, and its mass is increasing continuously as the inhabitants systematically capture matter and use it to embody knowledge. The mass of a typical cube is spread thinly throughout its whole volume; most of the mass of the transformed cube is concentrated at its centre. A typical cube contains mostly hydrogen; the transformed cube contains every element. A typical cube is not producing any energy; the transformed cube is converting mass to energy at a substantial rate. A typical cube is full of evidence, but most of it is just passing through, and none of it ever causes any changes. The transformed cube contains even more evidence, most of it having been created locally, and is detecting it with ever-improving instruments and changing rapidly as a result. A typical cube is not emitting any energy; the transformed cube may well be broadcasting explanations into space. But perhaps the biggest physical difference is that, like all knowledge-creating systems, the transformed cube corrects errors. You would notice this if you tried to modify or harvest the matter in it: it would resist!

  It appears, nevertheless, that most environments are not yet creating any knowledge. We know of none that is, except on or near the Earth, and what we see happening elsewhere is radically different from what would happen if knowledge-creation were to become widespread. But the universe is still young. An environment that is not currently creating anything may do so in the future. What will be typical in the distant future could be very different from what is typical now.

  Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark.

  TERMINOLOGY

  Person An entity that can create explanatory knowledge.

  Anthropocentric Centred on humans, or on persons.

  Fundamental or significant phenomenon: One that plays a necessary role in the explanation of many phenomena, or whose distinctive features require distinctive explanation in terms of fundamental theories.

  Principle of Mediocrity ‘There is nothing significant about humans.’

  Parochialism Mistaking appearance for reality, or local regularities for universal laws.

  Spaceship Earth ‘The biosphere is a life-support system for humans.’

  Constructor A device capable of causing other objects to undergo transformations without undergoing any net change itself.

  Universal constructor A constructor that can cause any raw materials to undergo any physically possible transformation, given the right information.

  MEANINGS OF ‘THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY’ ENCOUNTERED IN THIS CHAPTER

  – The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’

  – The ‘perspiration’ phase can always be automated.

  – The knowledge-friendliness of the physical world.

  – People are universal constructors.

  – The beginning of the open-ended creation of explanations.

  – The environments that could create an open-ended stream of knowledge, if suitably primed – i.e. almost all environments.

  – The fact that new explanations create new problems.

  SUMMARY

  Both the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth idea are, contrary to their motivations, irreparably parochial and mistaken. From the least parochial perspectives available to us, people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not ‘supported’ by their environments, but support themselves by creating knowledge. Once they have suitable knowledge (essentially, the knowledge of the Enlightenment), they are capable of sparking unlimited further progress.

  Apart from the thoughts of people, the only process known to be capable of creating knowledge is biological evolution. The knowledge it creates (other than via people) is inherently bounded and parochial. Yet it also has close similarities with human knowledge. The similarities and the differences are the subject of the next chapter.

  4

  Creation

  The knowledge in human brains and the knowledge in biological adaptations are both created by evolution in the broad sense: the variation of existing information, alternating with selection. In the case of human knowledge, the variation is by conjecture, and the selection is by criticism and experiment. In the biosphere, the variation consists of mutations (random changes) in genes, and natural selection favours the variants that most improve the ability of their organisms to reproduce, thus causing those variant genes to spread through the population.

  That a gene is adapted to a given function means that few, if any, small changes would improve its ability to perform that function. Some changes might make no practical difference to that ability, but most of those that did would make it worse. In other words good adaptations, like good explanations, are distinguished by being hard to vary while still fulfilling their functions.

  Human brains and DNA molecules each have many functions, but among other things they are general-purpose information-storage media: they are in principle capable of storing any kind of information. Moreover, the two types of information that they respectively evolved to store have a property of cosmic significance in common: once they are physically embodied in a suitable environment, they tend to cause themselves to remain so. Such information – which I call knowledge – is very unlikely to come into existence other than through the error-correcting processes of evolution or thought.

  There are also important differences between those two kinds of knowledge. One is that biological knowledge is non-explanatory, and therefore has limited
reach; explanatory human knowledge can have broad or even unlimited reach. Another difference is that mutations are random, while conjectures can be constructed intentionally for a purpose. Nevertheless, the two kinds of knowledge share enough of their underlying logic for the theory of evolution to be highly relevant to human knowledge. In particular, some historic misconceptions about biological evolution have counterparts in misconceptions about human knowledge. So in this chapter I shall describe some of those misconceptions in addition to the actual explanation of biological adaptations, namely modern Darwinian evolutionary theory, sometimes known as ‘neo-Darwinism’.

  Creationism

  Creationism is the idea that some supernatural being or beings designed and created all biological adaptations. In other words, ‘the gods did it.’ As I explained in Chapter 1, theories of that form are bad explanations. Unless supplemented by hard-to-vary specifics, they do not even address the problem – just as ‘the laws of physics did it’ will never win you a Nobel prize, and ‘the conjurer did it’ does not solve the mystery of the conjuring trick.

  Before a conjuring trick is ever performed, its explanation must be known to the person who invented it. The origin of that knowledge is the origin of the trick. Similarly, the problem of explaining the biosphere is that of explaining how the knowledge embodied in its adaptations could possibly have been created. In particular, a putative designer of any organism must also have created the knowledge of how that organism works. Creationism thus faces an inherent dilemma: is the designer a purely supernatural being – one who was ‘just there’, complete with all that knowledge – or not? A being who was ‘just there’ would serve no explanatory purpose (in regard to the biosphere), since then one could more economically say that the biosphere itself ‘just happened’, complete with that same knowledge, embodied in organisms. On the other hand, to whatever extent a creationist theory provides explanations about how supernatural beings designed and created the biosphere, they are no longer supernatural beings but merely unseen ones. They might, for instance, be an extraterrestrial civilization. But then the theory is not really creationism – unless it proposes that the extraterrestrial designers themselves had supernatural designers.

  Moreover, the designer of any adaptation must by definition have had the intention that the adaptation be as it is. But that is hard to reconcile with the designer envisaged in virtually all creationist theories, namely a deity or deities worthy of worship; for the reality is that many biological adaptations have distinctly suboptimal features. For instance, the eyes of vertebrates have their ‘wiring’ and blood supply in front of the retina, where they absorb and scatter incoming light and so degrade the image. There is also a blind spot where the optic nerve passes through the retina on its way to the brain. The eyes of some invertebrates, such as squids, have the same basic design but without those design flaws. The effect of the flaws on the efficiency of the eye is small; but the point is that they are wholly contrary to the eye’s functional purpose, and so conflict with the idea that that purpose was intended by a divine designer. As Charles Darwin put it in The Origin of Species, ‘On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility . . . should so frequently occur.’

  There are even examples of non-functional design. For instance, most animals have a gene for synthesizing vitamin C, but in primates, including humans, though that gene is recognizably present, it is faulty: it does not do anything. This is very difficult to account for except as a vestigial feature that primates have inherited from non-primate ancestors. One could retreat to the position that all these apparently poor design features do have some undiscovered purpose. But that is a bad explanation: it could be used to claim that any poorly designed or undesigned entity was perfectly designed.

  Another assumed characteristic of the designer according to most religions is benevolence. But, as I mentioned in Chapter 3, the biosphere is much less pleasant for its inhabitants than anything that a benevolent, or even halfway decent, human designer would design. In theological contexts this is known as ‘the problem of suffering’ or ‘the problem of evil’, and is frequently used as an argument against the existence of God. But in that role it is easily brushed off. Typical defences are that perhaps morality is different for a supernatural being; or perhaps we are too limited intellectually to be able to understand how moral the biosphere really is. However, here I am concerned not with whether God exists, only with how to explain biological adaptations, and in that regard those defences of creationism have the same fatal flaw as the Haldane–Dawkins argument (Chapter 3): a world that is ‘queerer than we can suppose’ is indistinguishable from a world ‘tricked out with magic’. So all such explanations are bad.

  The central flaw of creationism – that its account of how the knowledge in adaptations could possibly be created is either missing, supernatural or illogical – is also the central flaw of pre-Enlightenment, authoritative conceptions of human knowledge. In some versions it is literally the same theory, with certain types of knowledge (such as cosmology or moral knowledge and other rules of behaviour) being spoken to early humans by supernatural beings. In others, parochial features of society (such as the existence of monarchs in government, or indeed the existence of God in the universe) are protected by taboos or taken so uncritically for granted that they are not even recognized as ideas. And I shall discuss the evolution of such ideas and institutions in Chapter 15.

  The prospect of the unlimited creation of knowledge in the future conflicts with creationism by undercutting its motivation. For eventually, with the assistance of what we would consider stupendously powerful computers, any child will be capable of designing and implementing a better, more complex, more beautiful, and also far more moral biosphere than the Earth’s, within a video game – perhaps by placing it in such a state by fiat, or perhaps by inventing fictional laws of physics that are more conducive to enlightenments than the actual laws. At that point, a supposed designer of our biosphere will seem not only morally deficient, but intellectually unremarkable. And the latter attribute is not so easy to brush aside. Religions will no longer want to claim the design of the biosphere as one of the achievements of their deities, just as today they no longer bother to claim thunder.

  Spontaneous generation

  Spontaneous generation is the formation of organisms not as offspring of other organisms, but entirely from non-living precursors – for example, the generation of mice from a pile of rags in a dark corner. The theory that small animals are being spontaneously generated like that all the time (in addition to reproducing in the normal way) was part of unquestioned conventional wisdom for millennia, and was taken seriously until well into the nineteenth century. Its defenders gradually retreated to ever smaller animals as knowledge of zoology grew, until eventually the debate was confined to what are now called micro-organisms – things like fungi and bacteria that grow on nutrient media. For those, it proved remarkably difficult to refute spontaneous generation experimentally. For instance, experiments could not be done in airtight containers in case air was necessary for spontaneous generation. But it was finally refuted by some ingenious experiments conducted by the biologist Louis Pasteur in 1859 – the same year in which Darwin published his theory of evolution.

  But experiment should never have been needed to convince scientists that spontaneous generation is a bad theory. A conjuring trick cannot have been performed by real magic – by the magician simply commanding events to happen – but must have been brought about by knowledge that was somehow created beforehand. Similarly, biologists need only have asked: how does the knowledge to construct a mouse get to those rags, and how is it then applied to transform the rags into a mouse?

  One attempted explanation of spontaneous generation, which was advocated by the theologian St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), was that all life comes from ‘seeds’, some of which are carried by living organi
sms and others of which are distributed all over the Earth. Both kinds of seed were created during the original creation of the world. Both could, under the right conditions, develop into new individuals of the appropriate species. Augustine ingeniously suggested that this might explain why Noah’s Ark did not have to carry impossibly large numbers of animals: most species could regenerate after the Flood without Noah’s help. However, under that theory organisms are not being formed purely from non-living raw materials. That distributed kind of seed would be a life form, just as a real seed is: it would contain all the knowledge in its organism’s adaptations. So Augustine’s theory – as he himself stressed – is really just a form of creationism, not spontaneous generation. Some religions regard the universe as an ongoing act of supernatural creation. In such a world, all spontaneous generation would fall under the heading of creationism.

  But, if we insist on good explanations, we must rule out creationism, as I have explained. So, in regard to spontaneous generation, that leaves only the possibility that the laws of physics might simply mandate it. For instance, mice might simply form under suitable circumstances, like crystals, rainbows, tornadoes and quasars do.