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Quotes from The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch

born 1953 Israel

← All quotes by David Deutsch

6 quotes

Let me define that [wealth] in a non-parochial way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing.

The Beginning of Infinity (2011)

If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

The Beginning of Infinity (2011)

Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative? That all other moral truths follow from it?

The Beginning of Infinity (2011)

Any theory about improvement raises the question: how is the knowledge of how to make that improvement created? Was it already present at the outset? The theory that it was is creationism. Did it ‘just happen’? The theory that it did is spontaneous generation.

The Beginning of Infinity (2011)

Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from experience’ is.

The Beginning of Infinity (2011)

The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge.

The Beginning of Infinity (2011)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: David Deutsch (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.