yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

We’re at the Beginning of an Infinity of Knowledge


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

The difference with "The Beginning of Infinity" is that you're getting a worldview. You're not being given the standard take from physicists about how to understand quantum theory. You're not being given the standard take of how to understand knowledge from philosophers, and you're certainly not being given the standard take of how to understand mathematics from mathematicians.

Deutsch is qualified in all these areas; he's an expert in all these areas. So, the worldview itself—what's at the core of it? Deutsch's worldview is that reality is comprehensible. Problems are soluble. It's a deeply rationally optimistic worldview. It believes in good explanations, good scientific explanations, and progress.

Progress is inevitable as long as we have these good explanations. Good explanations have tremendous reach; they are acts of creativity. Humans are problem solvers and can solve all problems. All sins and evil are due to a lack of knowledge. One can be optimistic about constant progress.

That's what the title "The Beginning of Infinity" refers to: that we're at the beginning of an infinite series of progress. It's a very optimistic take. It believes that we are at home in the universe; the universe is ours as a resource to learn about and exploit. That material wealth is a set of physical transformations that we can affect.

Everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is eventually possible through knowledge and knowledge creation. He also talks about how humans are universal explainers. That anything that can be known and understood can be known and understood by human beings in the computational power of a human system.

It's all knowable; it's all noble by humans. We're the beginning of an infinity of knowledge. As we understand things using good explanations and we create new theories that are constantly being destroyed and replaced by better ones, there's no endpoint in sight. There's no perfection; every theory can be falsified and improved.

That we are on our way to being able to do everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics.

Thank you to Eight Sleep for supporting the Naval Podcast. All of the sponsorship revenue goes to our guests to support their work. Eight Sleep makes a heating and cooling smart mattress, which they tell us gets you to sleep 32 percent faster with 40 percent fewer sleep interruptions.

Go to eightsleep.com/infinity for a discount. I'll put a link in the show notes.

More Articles

View All
Startup Hiring Advice from Lever CEO Sarah Nahm with Holly Liu
Seren: Holly, welcome to the podcast! Holly: Thanks for having us! Seren: Yeah, pumped! So, Holly, you have a question to start it off? Holly: Yeah, I’m super curious. Did you ever see yourself becoming a founder, a founding CEO? Holly: Oh my gosh, I …
Decomposing shapes to find area (subtract) | Math | 3rd grade | Khan Academy
What is the area of the shaded figure? So down here we have this green shaded figure, and it looks like a rectangle, except it has this square cut out in the middle. So when we find its area, we can think of it exactly like that. We want to know how much…
Space Mountain Fears - Smarter Every Day 12
Intro music Hey. It’s Disney World, and it’s magic hours, which means nobody is here, so we get to ride everything. But we’ve always had this fear of Space Mountain; that if you put your arms up, you’ll get ‘em chopped off. So we got this trick we do, sh…
How to sell private jets to billionaires
Excuse me, what do you do for a living? I sell jets. Wait, are you Steve Bano? It depends who’s asking. Oh my God, Steve, can you show me around the showroom? Yeah, sure, come on in. Steve, I love this sign! You love this thing? Time is money, buy a je…
Extraneous solutions | Equations | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to talk about extraneous solutions. If you’ve never heard the term before, I encourage you to review some videos on Khan Academy on extraneous solutions. But just as a bit of a refresher, it’s the idea that you do a bunch of leg…
Pen Pal Experiment: Two Women Swap the Data of Their Daily Lives | Short Film Showcase
[Music] I’m Georgia. I am Italian, but I live in New York. I’m Stephanie. I was born in Denver, Colorado, but I’ve lived in London for the past 13 years. We met each other in person twice. When in September 2014, we decided to collaborate on a year-lon…