David Deutsch Quotes
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Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.
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The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
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A prediction, or any assertion, that cannot be defended might still be true, but an explanation that cannot be defended is not an explanation.
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Humans may or may not have cosmic significance, and if they do, it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic scheme of things.
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The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation-the only one that is tenable-of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality.
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To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.
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The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
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Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.
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I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more inclined to try to derive an ought from an is, than the population at large.
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Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.
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Surely it is more interesting to argue about what the truth is, than about what some particular thinker, however great, did or did not think.
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The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.
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Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.
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The next chapter is likely to provoke many mathematicians. This can't be helped. Mathematics is not what they think it is.
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Mathematical knowledge may, just like our scientific knowledge, be deep and broad, it may be subtle and wonderfully explanatory, it may be uncontroversially accepted; but it cannot be certain.
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I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.
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Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.
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Is the human race a universal constructor?
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The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.
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Reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical.
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Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.
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To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. … Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.
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Since building a universal virtual-reality generator is physically possible, it must actually be built in some universes.
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Necessary truth is merely the subject-matter of mathematics, not the reward we get for doing mathematics. The object of mathematics is not, and cannot be, mathematical certainty. It is not even mathematical truth, certain or otherwise. It is, and must be, mathematical explanation.