2011-08-18 WBUR On Point David Deutsch and The Beginning of Infinity
Duration: 00:45:34
Transcript
On Point sponsor
Major funding for On Point is provided by Liberty Mutual for all your auto, home, life, and business insurance needs. Liberty Mutual, responsibility. What’s your policy?
Tom Ashbrook
From WBUR Boston, I’m Tom Ashbrook and this is On Point. David Deutsch made his name in the high science of quantum computing, theoretical computers so powerful they could master the secrets of the universe. And that is the scale he works on in his new book, The Beginning of Infinity. Since the scientific revolution, he says, human potential has become just that, infinite. We are a player, the player, in the universe. This hour on point, quantum physicist and philosopher David Deutsch on humanity’s place in the cosmos. Joining me now from Oxford, England is David Deutsch, fellow of the Royal Society and professor of physics at the University of Oxford, where he’s a member of their Center for Quantum Computation. He’s been called the founding father of quantum computing for his groundbreaking work in the field and is a champion of the theory of parallel universes, the multiverse. He’s author of several hugely bold, wide ranging books, including The Fabric of Reality and his latest, The Beginning of Infinity, explanations that transform the world. David Deutsch, it is wonderful to have you with us. Thank you so much for being here.
David Deutsch
Hi, Tom. Thanks for inviting me on the show.
Tom Ashbrook
You draw an enormous line through human history at the enlightenment and scientific revolution. Describe the before and after a little bit for us in broad strokes. We’ll dig in, but stepping back from it, what do you see?
David Deutsch
This line is the most important thing that’s ever happened because prior to it, the world was static in terms of ideas. That is to say, things did improve, but from the point of view, and sometimes they improved, sometimes they got worse, but always from the point of view of any individual, by the time they died, the technology, the economics, the ways of life, everything that they could notice about the world would not have changed, would not have improved. After the enlightenment, it was the exact opposite. We have learned to live with the fact that everything improves in every generation, and what’s more, previous ways of life become unviable as better ways of life appear. This staticity was a, I call it a horrible practical joke played on the human race by nature because for hundreds of thousands of years, we had the capacity to improve, to reduce human suffering, to increase our knowledge of the world, but almost none of that happened, and then suddenly there was this explosion where it has happened. And it’s not just a matter of us then going on to develop all kinds of technology from microwave ovens to high-speed cars, you name it.
Tom Ashbrook
You say that this change introduced us or created The Beginning of Infinity. The title of your book, what do you mean by that?
David Deutsch
The phrase The Beginning of Infinity primarily means the universal power of explanatory knowledge, but it turned out, and I didn’t really plan this when I wrote the book, but it turned out that in every chapter there were several different meanings, several different senses in which there was a beginning of infinity which hadn’t happened before, either a condition for unlimited progress or a way or a beginning of unlimited progress or the sense in which progress can be unlimited.
Tom Ashbrook
Well to tie it to the scientific revolution then, which you remind us, coming in with the Enlightenment, how does that produce The Beginning of Infinity?
David Deutsch
Well it’s like this. Science is about finding laws of nature which are testable regularities. And we discovered this method, the scientific method, which I think is essentially trying to find good explanations of what happens rather than bad explanations that could apply to absolutely anything. And once one has this method, which is the scientific method but it also ranges more broadly over other fields like philosophy, once one has this method the scope of both understanding and controlling the world has to be limitless. The reason it has to be limitless is basically everything that isn’t forbidden by laws of physics has to be possible because, this is the simplest argument in the book, if it weren’t possible then that would itself be a testable regularity in nature. For example, we can’t travel faster than the speed of light, that’s a limitation on our technology and it is a law of nature. If it were the case that we could, for example, never get off the earth and never survive on any other planet, that would also be a testable regularity, it would be a law of nature, but there is no such law of nature and therefore everything that isn’t forbidden by laws of nature must be possible. And that’s a momentous link between the laws of nature and the ability to control the universe.
Tom Ashbrook
You are just thrillingly bold in the way you think and the way you write. There’s a lot I want to dig into here, but if you take just that, what you’ve just shared with us David Deutsch, if that scientific revolution means, you know, with everything that comes with it, a tradition of criticism, willingness to conjecture and then test, discovery of how to make progress as you describe it, if that means that there is, in your words, no limit to understanding and controlling the world, I’m trying to get my mind around that. By the world you don’t just mean this earthly planet, you mean the universe, really? Humans, no limit to their understanding and controlling the universe?
David Deutsch
That’s right, both on the larger scale and in some ways more exciting, the smallest scale, as Richard Feynman said, there’s plenty of room at the bottom with the nanotechnology and then space exploration at the highest scale. The thing is there can’t be such a limit because, as I just said, any limit that, let’s say, confined us to the solar system or even to our galaxy, either would have to be imposed by the laws of physics or it would have to be an illusion.
Tom Ashbrook
But what gives you the, I don’t know, the nerve, the cojones to assert that? I mean, we, you know, the traditional human way of looking at ourselves is we’re so puny, we’re such a little speck in the vast cosmos. Yes. But you’re literally saying we can, without limit, understand and control that cosmos.
David Deutsch
Indeed. Well, it’s ironic that this idea that we’re puny and unimportant and the world isn’t here for our benefit and so on, this idea was, at the time when it was invented, about four hundred years ago, ironically, it was one of the driving forces of the scientific revolution because the previous world views had been anthropocentric. The idea was that the world was built around us, it was built either for our benefit or as a punishment or for us to obey its moral laws and so on. And this was tied in with traditional authoritarian modes of knowledge. And the part of the Enlightenment, the early part of the Enlightenment, was a rebellion against those ideas and we found that we’re not the center of the universe, the earth isn’t the center of the universe, and then later we found even the sun is not and so on. But I think that once we have got over this early anthropocentrism, we find that although humans are not central to the universe, explanatory knowledge is. And we have a choice. We don’t have to jump on this bandwagon of this built-in potential of the universe if we don’t want to. We could destroy ourselves, we could choose not to do it, but because we are capable of explanatory knowledge, we are also capable of unlimited progress if we so choose.
Tom Ashbrook
So if we don’t turn away from this path of the scientific revolution laid out and we don’t blow ourselves up, we’ll talk about both of those, but you’re picturing a future with those two very large ifs in which human beings, what, little by little come to get their hands on the levers of the universe? What would that mean?
David Deutsch
Certainly. The thing is that the idea that this isn’t possible is essentially a reversion to the archaic, supernatural view of the universe. The idea there would be that there are things that are beyond our understanding forever.
Tom Ashbrook
Let’s accept it for a moment. What would it mean if we do indeed achieve it?
David Deutsch
Well, the title of the book is The Beginning of Infinity, and that refers to an interesting property of all kinds of infinity, including this one, namely one is never nearly there. One is always just beginning to scratch the surface of infinity. So once there was a time when the earth was unimaginably huge, just the surface of the earth was unimaginably huge, and now we have learned to regard it as tiny and vulnerable. Stephen Hawking has said that we’d better get off it soon just so that we hedge our bets. There was a time when even the Northern Hemisphere was unimaginably hostile territory compared with where we evolved in Eastern Africa. So we have learned not only to conquer the Northern Hemisphere technologically with things like clothing and fire and so on, but having conquered it once and for all, we take that for granted and we then regard it as home.
Tom Ashbrook
David Deutsch walks in very high company both as a scientist and as a communicator of science and philosophy as well. Let’s hear just briefly here, David, if you’d be gracious enough, from a couple of others. Very, very briefly here’s the first, the late, you can hear the sort of early pre-echo maybe of David Deutsch’s infinity here. The late astronomer Carl Sagan spoke evocatively about the wonders of the cosmos. Here he is in the Cosmos series episode The Edge of Forever.
Carl Sagan clip
Every human generation has asked about the origin and fate of the cosmos. Ours is the first generation with a real chance of finding some of the answers. One way or another, we are poised at the edge of forever.
Tom Ashbrook
Or to put it another way, maybe at the beginning of infinity and here’s physicist Stephen Hawking who speaks through a voice synthesizer. Warning, and we’ll put this to David Deutsch, warning here, Stephen Hawking, that traits humans needed for survival may also lead to their downfall. Here he speaks at the online forum Big Think.
Stephen Hawking clip
If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. In the past, but may be a danger in the future.
Tom Ashbrook
David Deutsch, our listeners are paying close attention. We have lots of questions and comments coming in for you already. Here from online Lark writes, and let me put this to you, Professor, does Professor Deutsch see mankind as having sufficient wisdom and self-control, self-knowledge to make our potentially infinite influence on the universe positive rather than destructive? David Deutsch?
David Deutsch
We have the power to make mistakes as well as to get things right. In fact, as my old boss John Wheeler used to say, in a sense our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. There is no way of doing science, and indeed there is no way of life altogether that avoids mistakes. To try to do that is a recipe for disaster because one does not then build in error correction mechanisms. Science is one gigantic error correction mechanism where we try to find out all our misconceptions and we are expecting even our most cherished beliefs eventually to turn out to be flawed in some way or another. So we have to be open to that and we have to be ready to cope with the practical consequences of being wrong.
Tom Ashbrook
But what if the error is, let’s say to Stephen Hawking’s fear, the destruction of a planet that we very much need to live on?
David Deutsch
Well, okay, I entirely agree with Stephen Hawking that we should hedge our bets by moving away from the Earth and colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy and so on. I disagree with his reason. His list of reasons I think are all rooted in this rather ancient pre-scientific way of looking at the world, which has survived in certain prevailing attitudes. The idea, for example, that we are inherently selfish and aggressive and so on, that is an echo of many of the static society type bad ideas that used to inhibit progress, such as the original sin and the idea that everything that is worth knowing is already known. In other words, when your listener asked, do we have the wisdom, this kind of assumes that wisdom is a static thing, which you can have in advance. But that is not the case. The truth of the matter is that wisdom, like scientific knowledge, is also limitless and what we call wisdom today is going to be laughable silliness in centuries to come.
Tom Ashbrook
In that time, if I understand you correctly, centuries or eons to come, again, if all this rolls forward, it may look laughable because our understanding, our knowledge, our explanations, as you say, would be so much deeper and greater, and with that our power. But we have to be careful about that. Yes. It is hard to grapple with, but you seem to be talking about humans actually influencing big swaths of the universe or maybe even the multiverse as we have influenced Earth. Is that really what you are suggesting? Will we re-engineer the cosmos?
David Deutsch
Yes. This is not only desirable, as Stephen Hawking says, but it is really inevitable because suppose that for some reason we had not colonized Europe and had stayed in Africa until the present day and somehow our existing society, that is our existing state of knowledge, had formed. Well, then we would at that point colonize the Northern Hemisphere because we would want to, and there would be no reason not to because in this rather silly thought experiment we would see that we could easily make it our home. Unlike any other species on Earth, our home, our spaceship Earth, our life support system is entirely provided by our own knowledge. This is different from any other species. In other species, their way of life is determined by the knowledge embodied in their genes, in their biological makeup and given to them by evolution.
Tom Ashbrook
But we also do depend on some fundamentals that we don’t create with our minds. Oxygen, H2O.
David Deutsch
Well, in fact, that is not the case. Soon there will be a lunar colony and the oxygen and H2O that the people there will use will be entirely generated by human technology. The first people to arrive there will find that they have to think about this a lot. They have to make sure that their oxygen generators that will generate oxygen from the moon rock are reliable and that there is redundant capacity to avoid possible errors and things going wrong and so on. But then after a while, they will know more and the whole thing will be automated. It will become easy for them, so easy that they won’t think of oxygen as being something that has to be provided with great effort in order to make this inhospitable environment hospitable. They will just think that it’s there, just as we take for granted that water will come out of the tap.
Tom Ashbrook
Maybe I misunderstood you, but when you describe this almost infinite or infinitely expanding knowledge and with that control, I didn’t think simply of zipping around the universe or space travel. It seemed to me you were describing something even more profound than that, kind of almost the ability to reshape as we have in many ways reshaped earth.
David Deutsch
Yes, it’s all part of the same thing. We can go and visit the moon without reshaping it, but if we want to live on the moon, then we have to have an environment in which humans can not only survive, but thrive. And in order to thrive, there have to be facilities in place to create resources that people don’t have to think about. Just like most of the places that are inhabited on the planet Earth today were originally, at the time when human species evolved, death traps. In fact, as I argue in the book, and this is slightly more complicated, but even the great rift valley in East Africa where we did evolve was also a death trap. Our species came into existence already possessing technology that people had invented. I say people because I use that as a generic term for all entities that can create explanatory knowledge. And the species that were our predecessors already had explanatory knowledge. And the species that were our predecessors, most of those species by the way, were killed by the environment in which they evolved. It’s a terrible mistake to think that the environments in which we evolved are especially friendly to us. That is not the case. Environments usually kill their species. The overwhelming majority of species that have ever existed on Earth are killed by the very environment in which they evolved.
Tom Ashbrook
Of course, in no small number by human beings themselves, but that’s a very alternate view to the sort of cozy blue-green planet spaceship Earth view that’s out there. David Deutsch is with us from Oxford, England. His new book is The Beginning of Infinity. Professor Deutsch, David Deutsch, our listeners are very interested in this. Carlos on Facebook is thinking about somebody, something else out there, all-knowing, all-powerful, maybe. He writes, I recall the Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein argument. Albert Einstein saying, God does not play dice, i.e. we can know about things. Niels Bohr saying, quit telling God what to do. Are you describing humanity challenging the role of what was then seen as God?
David Deutsch
It’s funny you should mention the Bohr-Einstein debate because the context in which Bohr said to Einstein, don’t tell God what to do, was when basically Einstein was saying, the universe makes sense. Bohr was promoting an interpretation of quantum mechanics that tried to say that the universe doesn’t have to make sense, that there are certain questions we’re not allowed to ask, that if you think you have understood it, then you haven’t. That sort of blatant irrationalism. And when Einstein used that metaphor of God doesn’t play dice, Einstein was in fact an atheist, but what he meant by that metaphor was the universe makes sense. To say that the universe doesn’t make sense, that is a reversion to a supernaturalist view of the world. And your listener was saying, perhaps there’s some power out there greater than us and so on. Yes, this is the kind of thinking that prevented progress for millennia. If there is a power out in the universe that is greater than us, it is because it’s just people. It’s people who have more knowledge than us.
Tom Ashbrook
By people you don’t mean necessarily earthlings or human beings, but knowledge makers.
David Deutsch
Yes, broadly, exactly. Entities that can create explanatory knowledge. And there can’t possibly be more than one kind of those. There can only be ones that have made more progress or ones that have made less progress.
Tom Ashbrook
Why is that? We’ve all seen the science fiction movies. Some of them look green and scaly and act very bizarre. What do you mean there can only be one kind of knowledge creating entity like ourselves?
David Deutsch
The thing is that they, like we, would gain their ability to control matter and energy and motion and so on by understanding universal laws of physics. And those are the same for them and for us. So we have the ability to understand, because we are, among other things, universal computers. So we can understand anything. The only barrier to understanding things for us is the amount of memory or speed of computation that we have and we can always increase those with technology. And the same will be true for the aliens.
Tom Ashbrook
You say don’t fear them. Stephen Hawking says fear them.
David Deutsch
You say don’t. Yes. That is because we have to understand the lesson of universality. The lesson of universality is that there is only one set of laws of physics on our planet, in our solar system, in our galaxy, in the whole universe, past, present, future. It’s the same set of laws. And they provide the same set of opportunities for control and also the same set of barriers.
Tom Ashbrook
You were speaking about controlling the universe, but the statement is not that we can do anything we like, like gods.
David Deutsch
The statement is everything that isn’t forbidden by the laws of physics, we can do. And that limitation is common to us and to these advanced aliens that you’re thinking of.
Tom Ashbrook
David Deutsch, please stand by. Let me bring our listeners in. Dana in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. You’re on the air with David Deutsch in Oxford, England. Welcome, Dana. You’re on the air.
Dana
Hi, Tom. Mr. Deutsch, given our record of hubris and the resulting plunder of this planet, whether it’s pollution of our life-sustaining systems and pushing other animals and plants to the brink of extinction, I really hope your thesis is wrong. I really don’t want to see the footprint of humankind spread beyond the Earth. I really feel that humans need to learn humility in the face of the cosmos and nature before we attempt to even quote, colonize, unquote, another word with imperialist connotations, even the moon, let alone the galaxy.
Tom Ashbrook
Dana, I’ll put that to David Deutsch, but he’s kind of suggesting that with the scientific revolution, it is inevitable. We keep thinking. Our thinking figures things out. It pushes our footprint further and further into the universe, Dana.
Dana
Well, he’s handing a sword, then, to the religious fundamentalists who say, see, science has no ethics. As long as it’s possible, it’s permissible.
Tom Ashbrook
Dana, let us pick it up. David Deutsch, what do you say to these observations? He sees hubris, sees us as plunderers, says humility first, please.
David Deutsch
Yes. The avoidance of hubris and the glorification of humility is the thing that kept us suffering for hundreds of thousands of years. This guilt of which we are accused by this worldview, although it has some modern fashionable forms, is actually not a new idea. It is the prevailing idea throughout most of history. And ironically, as I said earlier, really the reverse is the case. It’s not that we have polluted the earth on balance. The earth was killing us with pollution from the moment our species began. The cholera bacillus evolved to do exactly that and killed millions of people. And before human beings existed, it killed the people that were our predecessors. The biosphere killed all our cousin species, like the Neanderthals and so on. And it has only been since the invention of human technology that we have managed to lift ourselves a little way out of this.
Tom Ashbrook
David Deutsch, let’s go straight to our listeners. Joe in Farmville, Virginia. Joe, you’re on the air with David Deutsch.
Joe
I have a question for Mr. Deutsch, but before that let me make a comment. He’s saying that man’s destiny is to come in peace. Well, actually the Bible says the same thing. In Psalm 8, it says that the moon and the stars are the work of God’s fingers. And then it says that God gives man dominion over the work of his fingers. And then it says what form that dominion will take. It says God will put all things under man’s feet. So that’s like saying that God will put the moon and the stars under man’s feet.
Tom Ashbrook
And you’ve got a specific question about that, Joe. Give it to us.
Joe
Yes. The idea is that because of the expansion of the universe, all the galaxies are going away from us. So it seems the further away they are, the faster they’re going. It seems to me we won’t be able to colonize. But that does leave our own galaxy with 300 billion stars. So my question is how can we get beyond?
Tom Ashbrook
Joe, you’re breaking up, but I think we’ve got it. If the universe is expanding and expanding rapidly, that means it’s moving away from us. David Deutsch, in that case, how do we get out there?
David Deutsch
Yes. I only heard part of that question, but I think I understood what it was. One of the great growth areas in fundamental physics in the last few years has been in cosmology. We have learned that all the cosmological models that anybody believed until, let’s say, 20 years ago are definitely wrong. But what we don’t yet know is the cosmological model that is in fact right. The prevailing one at the moment is that the universe is not only expanding, which we’ve known for nearly a century, but is expanding at an accelerating rate. We’re being torn apart by the same forces. And what we would have to do is put more and more information into a smaller and smaller volume. And whether that will be possible or not depends on the exact details that we don’t yet know. Now, all I can say is there are plenty of cosmological models in which progress can go on literally forever, that is, literally no upper bound. And there are some in which progress is forced to come to an end after a few trillion years. But with cosmological models currently changing on a time scale of a decade or so, I think it would be rash to build our plans for a trillion years on whatever the current theory of that is.
Tom Ashbrook
For any number of reasons, people are listening very closely here. We played the clip from Stephen Hawking. He talked about survival genes for aggression in humanity now holding us back. And she asked if you can address that. You said that was an artificial limitation. But what does that mean? Do human beings need to re-evolve, evolve into something where we don’t destroy one another for survival purposes?
David Deutsch
Yes, the idea of an aggression gene or a selfishness gene is a misunderstanding of what humans are. It’s a misunderstanding of the universality of humans. The thing is humans can decide that any pattern of behavior that they think best is best and then act according to it.
Tom Ashbrook
Well, so you say, but an awful lot of humans are hostage to violence and war for such a long time. Ask somebody with a spear in his back. It looks like it’s baked in the cake.
David Deutsch
Yes. You can’t really go by most of human history prior to the Enlightenment because those societies were all the same.
Tom Ashbrook
But our wars just got bigger after. Our wars just got larger, more deadly.
David Deutsch
If you think about the kind of things that are built into our genes, like the desire to eat food when we’re hungry or to have sex or to preserve our lives, if you think of any of those which are going to be much more deeply in our genes, if anything is, than let’s say aggression or selfishness, then you can easily see millions of examples of those things being violated just at a whim of culture or individual decisions. People become anorexic and don’t eat and people become pacifists and sacrifice their lives or suicide bombers to name an evil example. So if those things, the things which are most heavily built into our genes, can be swept away just by a little bit of culture, including very bad culture, then there is really no case to be made that more subtle things like selfishness are built in an irretrievable way.
Tom Ashbrook
If I may, you pull this view beyond science itself and you write very early on in the book that the scientific understanding, improvements in the way we do it, the scientific revolution also meant a revolution in technology. We’ve seen that. Political institutions, not so sure what that’s called, moral values, art, every aspect of human welfare. We have listeners who are wondering on that front. Greg says that you are talking about ability, not morality. Morality is the realm in which stories remain the relevant method of figuring things out. What do you say?
David Deutsch
It’s much more controversial that there is objective truth in things like morality and art than in things like mathematics and science. But the arguments are really the same in all cases. The fact is, before the Enlightenment, there was practically nobody in the world who thought that, say, slavery was morally wrong or that sexism was morally wrong or that parents didn’t have the right to beat their children. These were all things that had a virtually 100% acceptance, only lunatics, if anybody, disputed it. Whereas now it’s gone entirely the other way around. In other words, now there is an absolute consensus among thinking people that slavery is wrong and those other things I mentioned are also wrong. So we’ve gone from 100% to 0%, and I think that it doesn’t make sense to regard that change as arbitrary. In other words, it could have gone either way, just like skirt-length fashions or something.
Tom Ashbrook
You think it’s the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution that works there as well.
David Deutsch
Exactly. Yes. Well, the Scientific Revolution is just one facet of what I call the Enlightenment. And it reached into the morality as well, and these examples that I’ve given are cases where morality has improved objectively.
Tom Ashbrook
Vijay is calling from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vijay, you’re on the air with David Deutsch. Thanks for calling.
Vijay
Hi, Tom. So I think that Professor Deutsch’s thesis is deeply misguided and badly reasoned, and here is why. His basic idea is that since we can reason, we can do anything. As long as we cannot violate the limits placed by physics. But we also know from computer science and mathematics that there are many things that are beyond reason. These are called independence results or incompleteness results. So there are things that we cannot know, and this leads us to deep philosophical issues in the context of computer science and mathematics. I’m sure Professor Deutsch is most likely aware of these things. And still, his basic thesis is that because we can reason, we can understand anything, and therefore we can do anything. And secondly, it’s actually a true… So this is one aspect that he hasn’t talked about so far, so I’m wondering why not.
Tom Ashbrook
Yes, we will.
Vijay
Secondly, the limits placed by physics and the limits placed that I just mentioned, the impossibility results that people have discussed in computer science and mathematics. Everything else is possible, is essentially a truism. So what exactly is he trying to say? What is new here?
Tom Ashbrook
Vijay, stand by. David Deutsch, what do you say?
David Deutsch
Okay, so to deal with the first question first. So in mathematics, it can be proved that the overwhelming majority of mathematical truths cannot be proved and indeed cannot be known. And so the question is, how is that compatible with the idea that we can do anything? Well, the short answer is this. If a mathematician is interested in a certain problem, let’s say to do with prime numbers and so on, then one way that will lead to the bottle of champagne being opened is if this mathematician discovers a proof that the thing is true, or a proof that it’s false. But another way that you could get exactly the same success in human terms would be to prove that it is unprovable. So this is as much a reason for writing a mathematics paper and for opening the bottle of champagne as for proving that it’s true or proving that it’s false. And if you can’t prove that it’s unprovable, then maybe the next best thing is you conjecture that it’s unprovable, and then you write a paper about what would be the consequences if it were, and another paper about what would be the consequences if it weren’t. And so, and therefore you get twice the number of papers just because the thing you were working on is unprovable. So in the human sense, mathematics provides no barrier to progress, even though as a matter of logic, there are things that we can’t know, but they’re not things that matter ultimately to humans. Now, what is new about what I said to answer your second question is simply listen to the other commenters. They are saying that gaining control of the universe is A, impossible, and B, wrong. And I’m saying that the scientific worldview, which in a sense you’re quite right, it’s almost a trivial consequence of just regarding the scientific worldview as true, that the scientific worldview is incompatible with those ancient ideas of limitation.
Tom Ashbrook
Vijay, our time is so short at this point. Let me move on, but I appreciate you raising it, and the big question will no doubt be worked on for a long time. Let me get one more right here. David in Boston. David, thank you for calling.
David in Boston
Yeah, thanks for having me on. Mr. Deutsch, I’m just, I feel, I’m certainly no, I’m very much a fan of science, and I’m not opposed to the idea of progress and knowledge. I guess for me it’s a question of whether human history, the story of human history is simply a story of the development of knowledge or a moral struggle. It seems to me that since Bacon, Francis Bacon, first formulated this idea of technology as control over nature, the results have always been ambiguous, and people have always felt that the way we use technology is sometimes good and sometimes ill. And our modern technologies from nuclear weapons to the capacity for a modern famine, which is very different from famines in the past, you know, is as ambiguous as it ever has been. So I’m sort of surprised, especially at this moment when this critical environmental crisis is going on, and we’re really at risk of destroying the life-giving value of the earth, that you have so, you’re so optimistic.
Tom Ashbrook
David, let us pick it up right there and use the time we have. David Deutsch, what do you say to our young, smart listener?
David Deutsch
Okay, first of all, two things. One is that you’re grossly underestimating how bad the past was. How totally contrary.
Tom Ashbrook
You mean the Edenic, environmentally unscathed past, you mean?
David Deutsch
That past, yes. And it was bad not only because of what nature was doing to us, but because of what humans were doing to each other. The staticity that was imposed by bad human ideas and violence channeled into bad directions is simply incomprehensible to someone who is used to our society.
Tom Ashbrook
But the environment certainly looked better 50 years ago than it does today.
David Deutsch
Well, I think that is not comparing like with like. But let me just say the other half of that first. In regard to modesty, this idea that we’re going to control as much as we want to control sounds like hubris if you think that the total amount to be controlled is finite, and therefore we’re going to be nearly there and we’re going to be like gods. But actually the title of the book is The Beginning of Infinity. No matter how much of this we do, we will always be just scratching the surface. We will always be looking out at an infinite vista that we have not yet understood, not yet conquered and so on. And when we look back, we will think that the previous people’s ideas of being nearly there, like our present day idea that having conquered the surface of the earth, we’re really there. We’re nearly there. The idea that that is hubris will seem pathetic.
Tom Ashbrook
Final question. We just have one minute. Enlightenment, the thing that you see behind all of this, the Enlightenment, might we turn our backs on that?
David Deutsch
There’s certainly a lot of pushback and denial in substantial parts of American politics and culture to science and the scientific revolution. There are no guarantees. Now I believe that the Enlightenment has sort of tried to happen several times in human history, such as in Periclean Athens and in Florence during the Renaissance. And I describe these in the book as well. And there will have been other cases as well which were less spectacular because they were put down earlier. It is always possible to turn one’s back on Enlightenment and reason, and we could do so, in which case perhaps our whole planet is doomed and somebody else will be the people that have The Beginning of Infinity.
Tom Ashbrook
David Deutsch, we could go on maybe to infinity here. It’s been fantastic. Thank you for joining us today from Oxford.
David Deutsch
Thank you for having me.
Tom Ashbrook
It’s wonderful to have you with us. The new book is The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World. I’m Tom Ashbrook. Thanks for joining us. This is On Point.
Markdown