Book Review of David Deutsch: The Beginning of Infinity
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/books/review/the-beginning-of-infinity-by-david-deutsch-book-review.html
Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe
By DAVID ALBERT
THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY
Explanations That Transform the World
By David Deutsch
Illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30.
David Deutsch's "Beginning of Infinity" is a brilliant and
exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It's about everything:
art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the
future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of
giving it anything like the attention it deserves, in the small
space allotted here, is out of the question. But I will do what I
can.
It hardly seems worth saying (to begin with) that the chutzpah of
this guy is almost beyond belief, and that any book with these sorts
of ambitions is necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure, or a
fraud, or a joke, or madness. But Deutsch (who is famous, among
other reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of
quantum computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative,
and so inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive,
that it is a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to
spend time in his head. He writes as if what he is giving us amounts
to a tight, grand, cumulative system of ideas--something of almost
mathematical rigor--but the reader will do much better to approach
this book with the assurance that nothing like that actually turns
out to be the case. I like to think of it as more akin to great,
wide, learned, meandering conversation--something that belongs to
the genre of, say, Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"--never
dull, often startling and fantastic and beautiful, often at odds
with itself, sometimes distasteful, sometimes unintentionally
hilarious, sometimes (even, maybe, secondarily) true.
The thought to which Deutsch's conversation most often returns is
that the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, or
something like it, may turn out to have been the pivotal event not
merely of the history of the West, or of human beings, or of the
earth, but (literally, physically) of the universe as a whole.
Here's the sort of thing he has in mind: The topographical shape and
the material constitution of the upper surface of the island of
Manhattan, as it exists today, is much less a matter of geology than
it is of economics and politics and human psychology. The effects of
geological forces were trumped (you might say) by other forces--
forces that proved themselves, in the fullness of time, physically
stronger. Deutsch thinks the same thing must in the long run be true
of the universe as a whole. Stuff like gravitation and dark energy
are the sorts of things that determine the shape of the cosmos only
in its earliest, and most parochial, and least interesting stages.
The rest is going to be a matter of our own intentional doing, or at
any rate it's going to be a matter of the intentional doings of what
Deutsch calls "people," by which he means not only human beings, and
not all human beings, but whatever creatures, from whatever planets,
in whatever circumstances, may have managed to absorb the lessons of
the Scientific Revolution.
There is a famous collection of arguments from the pioneering days
of computer science to the effect that any device able to carry out
every one of the entries on a certain relatively short list of
elementary logical operations could, in some finite number of steps,
calculate the value of any mathematical function that is calculable
at all. Devices like that are called "universal computers." And what
interests Deutsch about these arguments is that they imply that
there is a certain definite point, a certain definite moment, in the
course of acquiring the capacity to perform more and more of the
operations on that list, when such a machine will abruptly become as
good a calculator as anything, in principle, can be.
Deutsch thinks that such "jumps to universality" must occur not only
in the capacity to calculate things, but also in the capacity to
understand things, and in the closely related capacity to make
things happen. And he thinks that it was precisely such a threshold
that was crossed with the invention of the scientific method. There
were plenty of things we humans could do, of course, prior to the
invention of that method: agriculture, or the domestication of
animals, or the design of sundials, or the construction of pyramids.
But all of a sudden, with the introduction of that particular habit
of concocting and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in
which we could do anything. The capacities of a community that has
mastered that method to survive, and to learn, and to remake the
world according to its inclinations, are (in the long run)
literally, mathematically, infinite. And Deutsch is convinced that
the tendency of the world to give rise to such communities, more
than, say, the force of gravitation, or the second law of
thermodynamics, or even the phenomenon of death, is what ultimately
gives the world its shape, and what constitutes the genuine essence
of nature. "In all cases," he writes, "the class of transformations
that could happen spontaneously--in the absence of knowledge--is
negligibly small compared with the class that could be effected
artificially by intelligent beings who wanted those transformations
to happen. So the explanations of almost all physically possible
phenomena are about how knowledge would be applied to bring those
phenomena about." And there is a beautiful and almost mystical irony
in all this: that it was precisely by means of the Scientific
Revolution, it was precisely by means of accepting that we are not
the center of the universe, that we became the center of the
universe.
This is all definitely incredibly cool. But I have no idea how one
might go about investigating whether it is true or false. It seems
more to the point to think of it as something emotive--as the
expression of a mood. An incredibly cool mood. A mood that (maybe)
no human being could ever have been in before right now. A mood
informed by profound and imaginative reflection on the best and most
advanced science we have. But not exactly, not even remotely, a live
scientific hypothesis.
Anyway, it's that mood, or conceit, or whatever it is, that gives
"The Beginning of Infinity" its name. But a lot of the meat of this
book is in its digressions. And of those (alas) I can only, hastily,
randomly, mention a few.
Deutsch is interested in neo-Darwinian accounts of the evolution of
culture. Such accounts treat cultural items--languages, religions,
values, ideas, traditions--in much the way that Darwinian theories
of biological evolution treat genes. They are called "memes," and
are treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and
selection, with the most successful memes being those that are the
most faithfully replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and
insight about how the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and
selection of memes are going to have to differ, in all sorts of
ways, from those of genes.
He also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies
for meme-replication, one he calls "rational" and the other he calls
"anti-rational." Rational memes--the sort that Deutsch imagines
will replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies--
are simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous
scientific scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or
safer or more rewarding because they tell us something useful about
how the world actually works. Irrational memes--which are more
interesting, and more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as
summing up the essential character of pre-Enlightenment societies--
reproduce themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by
means of fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of
naturalness and inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to
evaluate or invent new ideas. And one particular subcategory of
memes--about which Deutsch has very clever things to say--
succeeds precisely by pretending not to tell the truth. So, for
example: "Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous
behaviors that did not seem functional would be told 'because I say
so,' and in due course they would give their children the same reply
to the same question, never realizing that they were giving the full
explanation. (This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content
is true even though its holders do not believe it.)"
Another chapter is devoted entirely to the evolution of creativity.
At first glance, the ability to come up with new and better ways of
doing things would appear to confer an obvious survival advantage.
But if that's how it worked--or so Deutsch argues--then the
archaeological record ought to contain evidence of the accumulation
of such better ways of doing things that are contemporaneous with
the time when the human brain was actually in the process of
evolving. And it doesn't, which would seem to amount to a puzzle.
Deutsch has a cute proposal for solving it. The thought is that the
business of merely passing on complicated memes, without any thought
of innovation, requires considerable creativity on the part of their
recipients. Learning a language, for instance, is a matter of
inferring, from a small number of examples, a collection of general
rules, each with a potentially infinite number of applications,
governing the uses of the words involved. In Deutsch's view, the
work of keeping such complex memes in place, from generation to
generation, is no less a creative business than the work of
improving them.
This, as I said, is cute, and typical of the dexterity of Deutsch's
mind, but it's hard to know how seriously to take it. Wouldn't it be
a reproductive advantage to have a heritable capacity to think on
your feet, and outside the box, in a sticky situation, whether or
not any particular thought you have ends up getting preserved, and
passed down to your children, and enshrined in the practice of a
whole society? And isn't it possible that creativity was never
selected for at all, but arose as a byproduct of the selection of
something else? As to the business of learning a language--well,
gosh, haven't linguists been thinking about these sorts of questions
very hard, and very systematically, and along very different lines,
for decades now? If Deutsch has reasons for thinking that all of
that is somehow on the wrong track, he ought to tell us what those
reasons are. As it is, none of that gets so much as a mention in his
book.
And there are, in some places, explicit and outrageous falsehoods.
Deutsch insists again and again, for example, that the only
explanation we have for the observed behaviors of subatomic
particles is a famous idea of Hugh Everett's to the effect that the
universe of our experience is one of an infinite and endlessly
branching collection of similar universes--and that what
resistance there is to this idea is attributable to the influence of
this or that fancy, misguided philosophical critique of good, solid,
old-fashioned realistic attitudes toward what scientific theories
have to tell us about the world. This is simply, wildly, wrong. Most
of the good, solid, old-fashioned scientific realists who take an
interest in questions of the foundations of physics--like me, for
example--are deeply skeptical of Everett's picture. And that's
because there are good reasons to be worried that Everett's picture
cannot, in fact, explain those behaviors at all--and because there
are other, much more reasonable-looking proposals on the table, that
apparently can.
Deutsch's enthusiasm for the scientific and technological
transformation of the totality of existence naturally brings with it
a radical impatience with the pieties of environmentalism, and
cultural relativism, and even procedural democracy--and this is
sometimes exhilarating and sometimes creepy. He attacks these
pieties, with spectacular clarity and intelligence, as small-minded
and cowardly and boring. The metaphor of the earth as a spaceship or
life-support system, he writes, "is quite perverse.... To the
extent that we are on a 'spaceship,' we have never merely been its
passengers, nor (as is often said) its stewards, nor even its
maintenance crew: we are its designers and builders. Before the
designs created by humans, it was not a vehicle, but only a heap of
dangerous raw materials." But it's hard to get to the end of this
book without feeling that Deutsch is too little moved by actual
contemporary human suffering. What moves him is the grand Darwinian
competition among ideas. What he adores, what he is convinced
contains the salvation of the world, is, in every sense of the word,
The Market.
And there are moments when you just can't imagine what the deal is
with this guy. Deutsch--notwithstanding his open and
anti-authoritarian and altogether admirable ideology of inquiry--
is positively bubbling over with inviolable principles: that
everything is explicable, that materialist interpretations of
history are morally wrong, that "the only uniquely significant thing
about humans ... is our ability to create new explanations," and
on and on. And if the reader turns to Pages 64 and 65, she will find
illustrations depicting two of them, literally, carved in stone. I
swear.
Never mind. He is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to
know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.
David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author
of "Quantum Mechanics and Experience."
