If optimism is true, the amount of progress achievable is infinite. This blog sums up the key ideas in the chapter ‘Optimism’ from David Deutsch’s book, The Beginning of Infinity.

Of all the ideas in this book, and Deutsch’s other book, The Fabric of Reality, ‘Optimism’ has had the most profound impact upon my attitude to the world. I now firmly believe that problems are inevitable, and all problems are indeed soluble. And good ideas are needed to solve these problems. Upon this philosophy rests, an infinite amount of civilisational advancement.

Some definitions are below, which may be useful when reading this blog.

Blind optimism: reckless confidence/over-confidence: the belief that bad outcomes will not happen.

Blind pessimism: avoiding everything not known to be safe (precautionary principle).

Principle of optimism: all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Blind optimism and blind pessimism are both wrong, at an explanatory level, because they purport to know unknowable things about the future of knowledge.

Alright, let’s dig into Deutsch’s take on Optimism:

Popper believed that we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. It is our duty to fight for a better world.

Doomers are rarely right

Martin Rees, the prominent cosmologist and physicist, was pessimistic about the future. Reese equates creating new forms of knowledge and experimentation to Russian roulette. But Rees’ falsely equates the human condition to Russian roulette. The future of civilisation depends on what we think and do. It’s not subject to random chance, as one is when playing Russian roulette. In short, we have agency. If civilisation survives, it will be because people succeed in solving the problems of survival, and that will not have happened by chance. Russian roulette is entirely random. Although we cannot predict the outcome, we know what the possible outcomes are, and the probability of each, provided that the rules of the game are obeyed.

By contrast, the future of civilisation is unknowable, because the knowledge that is going to affect it has to be created. Hence the possible outcomes are not yet known, let alone their probabilities. The growth of knowledge cannot change that fact. On the contrary, it contributes strongly to it.

Even a good explanation cannot predict all of its successors

The ability of scientific theories to predict the future depends on the reach of explanations, but no explanation has enough reach to predict the content of its own successors – or their effects, or those of other ideas that have not been thought of. e.g. Just as no one in 1900 could have foreseen the consequences of innovations made during the twentieth century – including whole new fields such as nuclear physics, computer science and biotechnology – so too our own future will be shaped by knowledge that we do not yet have. We cannot even predict most of the problems that we shall encounter, or most of the opportunities to solve them, let alone the attempted solutions and how they will affect events. For example, people in 1900 did not consider the [possible advent of the ] internet or nuclear power; they simply did not conceive [these ideas] of the them at all. In short, no good explanation can predict the outcomes, or the probability of an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge.

And many have failed at prophesying the future content of knowledge.

e.g. In 1894 the physicist Albert Michelson made the following prophesy about the future of physics (although it could just as easily have been made today!)

“The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”

Michelson was prophesying the future, on the basis of the best knowledge at the time. But of course, it [the established theories] was not capable of predicting the content of its own successors. i.e. general relativity and quantum theory.

Innovations: limited downside and unlimited upside

The harm that can flow from any innovation that does not destroy the growth of knowledge is always finite; the good can be unlimited.

Precautionary principle: seeks to ward off disaster by avoiding everything not known to be safe.

Our final century makes the case that the period since the mid-twentieth century has been the first in which technology has been capable of destroying civilisation. But that is not so. Many civilisations in history were destroyed by the simple technologies of fire and the sword.

Indeed, of all civilisations in history, the overwhelming majority have been destroyed, some intentionally, some as a result of plague or natural disaster.

Crucially, all of them could have averted the destruction if they had possessed a little additional knowledge, such as improved agricultural or military technology, better hygiene, or better political or economic institutions.

Simply, very few, if any, could have been saved by greater caution of innovation. Rather, most implemented the precautionary principle, at their peril.

More generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge and knowledge embodied in technological artefacts, namely sufficient wealth. Wealth can be defined as the repertoire of physical transformations one is capable of causing.

Before our ancestors learned how to make fire artificially, people must have died of exposure literally on top of the means of making the fires that would have saved their lives, because they did not how. Similarly, millions have died from cholera, when the hearths that they could have used to boil water, were within their sight.

So clearly, what is required is knowledge. And the only way to derive knowledge is from conjecture and criticism.

Problems are inevitable. Many civilisations have fallen. Even before the dawn of civilisation, all our sister species, such as the Neanderthals, became extinct through challenges with which they could easily have coped, had they known how.

Genetic studies suggest that our own species came close to extinction around 70,000 years ago, as a result of an unknown catastrophe which reduced its total numbers to only a few thousand.

Civilisations starved…because of what they though of as they ‘natural disasters’ of drought and [as a result] famine. But it was really because what we would now call poor methods of irrigation and farming – in other words, lack of knowledge.

The next asteroid is out there at this moment, speeding towards us with nothing to stop it except human knowledge. We know the probability of an object, such as an asteroid, hitting the Earth is about once in every 250,000 years or so, which is higher than the chance of dying in an plane crash.

So, it’s clear that knowledge is the key.

“We do not know the probability of a spontaneously occurring incurable plague, but we may guess that it is unacceptably high, since pandemics such as the Black Death in the 14th century have already shown us the sort of thing that can happen on a timescale of centuries. Should any of those catastrophe loom, we have now at least a chance of creating the knowledge required to survive, in time.” p.108

In short, we shall never be able to afford to sit back and hope for the best.

Even if our civilisation moves out into space in order to hedge its bets…a gamma-ray burst in our galactic vicinity could still wipe us out. Such an event is much rarer than an asteroid collision, but…our only defence against it is scientific knowledge and an enormous increase in our wealth. In terms of sources of knowledge, our best hope is, as Popper put it, to detect and eliminate errors. We can do this through applying a tradition of criticism, in which good explanations are sought i.e what has gone wrong, what would be better, what effect various policies have had in the past and would have in the future.

To apply the rule, detecting and eliminating errors, to political philosophy, we find that a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect and persuade others that a leader or a policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are. So, political systems should not make it hard to oppose rulers and policies, non-violently, and should embody traditions of peaceful, critical discussion of them and of the institutions themselves and everything else.

In short, systems of government should be judged…for their ability to remove bad leaders and policies.

Note: it assumes rulers and policies are flawed – that problems are inevitable. But it assumes that improving upon them is possible and that problems are soluble.

In the short run the only insuperable evils are parochial ones; in the long-run there are no insuperable evils.

At this point, you may be asking, what are our limitations to achieving progress? Well, the only ones are those placed upon us by the laws of physics.

E.g. a sick person is a physical object, and the task of transforming this object into the same person in good health is one that no law of physics rules out – hence a cure is possible. It is only a matter of knowing how. With wealth (resources + time), the evil can be defeated in time. The same must hold for the evil of death; that is death attributable to natural causes – disease or old age.

Optimism gazes at the future and means that, nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come.

The problem of aging, like disease, is complex but it is only finitely so; it is confined to a relatively narrow arena whose basic principles are already fairly well understood; knowledge in the field is increasing exponentially.

In sum:

• There are no fundamental limitations to the creation of new knowledge.

• Progress is made by seeking good explanations.

• An optimistic civilisation is one that is not afraid to innovate. Its institutions keep improving and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.

If optimism is true, the amount of progress achievable is infinite. This blog sums up the key ideas in the chapter ‘Optimism’ from David Deutsch’s book, The Beginning of Infinity.

Of all the ideas in this book, and Deutsch’s other book, The Fabric of Reality, ‘Optimism’ has had the most profound impact upon my attitude to the world. I now firmly believe that problems are inevitable, and all problems are indeed soluble. And good ideas are needed to solve these problems. Upon this philosophy rests, an infinite amount of civilisational advancement.

Some definitions are below, which may be useful when reading this blog.

Blind optimism: reckless confidence/over-confidence: the belief that bad outcomes will not happen.

Blind pessimism: avoiding everything not known to be safe (precautionary principle).

Principle of optimism: all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Blind optimism and blind pessimism are both wrong, at an explanatory level, because they purport to know unknowable things about the future of knowledge.

Alright, let’s dig into Deutsch’s take on Optimism:

Popper believed that we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. It is our duty to fight for a better world.

Doomers are rarely right

Martin Rees, the prominent cosmologist and physicist, was pessimistic about the future. Reese equates creating new forms of knowledge and experimentation to Russian roulette. But Rees’ falsely equates the human condition to Russian roulette. The future of civilisation depends on what we think and do. It’s not subject to random chance, as one is when playing Russian roulette. In short, we have agency. If civilisation survives, it will be because people succeed in solving the problems of survival, and that will not have happened by chance. Russian roulette is entirely random. Although we cannot predict the outcome, we know what the possible outcomes are, and the probability of each, provided that the rules of the game are obeyed.

By contrast, the future of civilisation is unknowable, because the knowledge that is going to affect it has to be created. Hence the possible outcomes are not yet known, let alone their probabilities. The growth of knowledge cannot change that fact. On the contrary, it contributes strongly to it.

Even a good explanation cannot predict all of its successors

The ability of scientific theories to predict the future depends on the reach of explanations, but no explanation has enough reach to predict the content of its own successors – or their effects, or those of other ideas that have not been thought of. e.g. Just as no one in 1900 could have foreseen the consequences of innovations made during the twentieth century – including whole new fields such as nuclear physics, computer science and biotechnology – so too our own future will be shaped by knowledge that we do not yet have. We cannot even predict most of the problems that we shall encounter, or most of the opportunities to solve them, let alone the attempted solutions and how they will affect events. For example, people in 1900 did not consider the [possible advent of the ] internet or nuclear power; they simply did not conceive [these ideas] of the them at all. In short, no good explanation can predict the outcomes, or the probability of an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge.

And many have failed at prophesying the future content of knowledge.

e.g. In 1894 the physicist Albert Michelson made the following prophesy about the future of physics (although it could just as easily have been made today!)

“The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.”

Michelson was prophesying the future, on the basis of the best knowledge at the time. But of course, it [the established theories] was not capable of predicting the content of its own successors. i.e. general relativity and quantum theory.

Innovations: limited downside and unlimited upside

The harm that can flow from any innovation that does not destroy the growth of knowledge is always finite; the good can be unlimited.

Precautionary principle: seeks to ward off disaster by avoiding everything not known to be safe.

Our final century makes the case that the period since the mid-twentieth century has been the first in which technology has been capable of destroying civilisation. But that is not so. Many civilisations in history were destroyed by the simple technologies of fire and the sword.

Indeed, of all civilisations in history, the overwhelming majority have been destroyed, some intentionally, some as a result of plague or natural disaster.

Crucially, all of them could have averted the destruction if they had possessed a little additional knowledge, such as improved agricultural or military technology, better hygiene, or better political or economic institutions.

Simply, very few, if any, could have been saved by greater caution of innovation. Rather, most implemented the precautionary principle, at their peril.

More generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge and knowledge embodied in technological artefacts, namely sufficient wealth. Wealth can be defined as the repertoire of physical transformations one is capable of causing.

Before our ancestors learned how to make fire artificially, people must have died of exposure literally on top of the means of making the fires that would have saved their lives, because they did not how. Similarly, millions have died from cholera, when the hearths that they could have used to boil water, were within their sight.

So clearly, what is required is knowledge. And the only way to derive knowledge is from conjecture and criticism.

Problems are inevitable. Many civilisations have fallen. Even before the dawn of civilisation, all our sister species, such as the Neanderthals, became extinct through challenges with which they could easily have coped, had they known how.

Genetic studies suggest that our own species came close to extinction around 70,000 years ago, as a result of an unknown catastrophe which reduced its total numbers to only a few thousand.

Civilisations starved…because of what they though of as they ‘natural disasters’ of drought and [as a result] famine. But it was really because what we would now call poor methods of irrigation and farming – in other words, lack of knowledge.

The next asteroid is out there at this moment, speeding towards us with nothing to stop it except human knowledge. We know the probability of an object, such as an asteroid, hitting the Earth is about once in every 250,000 years or so, which is higher than the chance of dying in an plane crash.

So, it’s clear that knowledge is the key.

“We do not know the probability of a spontaneously occurring incurable plague, but we may guess that it is unacceptably high, since pandemics such as the Black Death in the 14th century have already shown us the sort of thing that can happen on a timescale of centuries. Should any of those catastrophe loom, we have now at least a chance of creating the knowledge required to survive, in time.” p.108

In short, we shall never be able to afford to sit back and hope for the best.

Even if our civilisation moves out into space in order to hedge its bets…a gamma-ray burst in our galactic vicinity could still wipe us out. Such an event is much rarer than an asteroid collision, but…our only defence against it is scientific knowledge and an enormous increase in our wealth. In terms of sources of knowledge, our best hope is, as Popper put it, to detect and eliminate errors. We can do this through applying a tradition of criticism, in which good explanations are sought i.e what has gone wrong, what would be better, what effect various policies have had in the past and would have in the future.

To apply the rule, detecting and eliminating errors, to political philosophy, we find that a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect and persuade others that a leader or a policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are. So, political systems should not make it hard to oppose rulers and policies, non-violently, and should embody traditions of peaceful, critical discussion of them and of the institutions themselves and everything else.

In short, systems of government should be judged…for their ability to remove bad leaders and policies.

Note: it assumes rulers and policies are flawed – that problems are inevitable. But it assumes that improving upon them is possible and that problems are soluble.

In the short run the only insuperable evils are parochial ones; in the long-run there are no insuperable evils.

At this point, you may be asking, what are our limitations to achieving progress? Well, the only ones are those placed upon us by the laws of physics.

E.g. a sick person is a physical object, and the task of transforming this object into the same person in good health is one that no law of physics rules out – hence a cure is possible. It is only a matter of knowing how. With wealth (resources + time), the evil can be defeated in time. The same must hold for the evil of death; that is death attributable to natural causes – disease or old age.

Optimism gazes at the future and means that, nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come.

The problem of aging, like disease, is complex but it is only finitely so; it is confined to a relatively narrow arena whose basic principles are already fairly well understood; knowledge in the field is increasing exponentially.

In sum:

• There are no fundamental limitations to the creation of new knowledge.

• Progress is made by seeking good explanations.

• An optimistic civilisation is one that is not afraid to innovate. Its institutions keep improving and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.