Listen Now
Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: — The Day Progress Began
Chapter 3: — Good Explanations, Not Just Predictions
Chapter 4: — Instruments Don’t Make Observation Pure
Chapter 5: — People Aren’t Passengers on Spaceship Earth
Chapter 6: — Evolution Creates Knowledge, But It’s Not What You Think
Chapter 7: — Abstractions Are Real, And They Cause Things
Chapter 8: — The Jump to Universality
Chapter 9: — Artificial Creativity and the Missing Explanation
Chapter 10: — Infinity, Probability, and the Limits of Prophecy
Chapter 11: — The Multiverse as a Good Explanation
Chapter 12: — Optimism as a Theory, Not a Mood
Chapter 13: — Politics, Choice, and Error-Correcting Institutions
Chapter 14: — Beauty, Culture, and Memes
Chapter 15: — Unsustainability and the Real Lesson of Collapse
Description
The Beginning of Infinity is David Deutsch’s sweeping argument that the engine behind all meaningful progress—scientific, technological, moral, and cultural—is the creation of good explanations: ideas that are hard to vary without breaking what they explain. He rejects empiricism and inductivism as myths about how knowledge is “derived” from experience, insisting instead that knowledge grows through conjecture and criticism, in a fallibilist tradition that began with the Enlightenment.
Deutsch connects this epistemology to a bold worldview: problems are not only solvable in principle; they are the expected condition of human life. The biosphere does not “support” us—people support themselves by transforming environments with knowledge. He extends the claim across domains: evolution and memes, universality and computation, optimism and politics, objective beauty and art, and quantum theory as a multiverse explanation. The result is a unified case for an open-ended future—so long as societies preserve criticism, tolerate dissent, and keep improving explanations.
Who Should Listen
- Listeners who enjoy big-picture science-and-philosophy syntheses (Popper, Darwin, computation, quantum theory) framed around a single unifying idea.
- Anyone wrestling with pessimism about the future—climate, technology risk, societal collapse—and wanting a rigorous argument for rational optimism.
- Creators, founders, engineers, and students who want a deeper theory of progress: why solutions create new problems, and why that’s a feature, not a bug.