FoR's 1st post

This is a brief attempt at writing Deutsch's ideas with my own words with the goal of understanding them better

I’ve read DD’s 2 books 4 times each during the last few years and I learn something new every time but some of the concepts are just way too hard for me to grasp yet.

The reason why I keep reading them is because sometimes I read a book and even if I understand just a little, my intuition tends to tell me smth like: “it’s worth dedicating some more time to this”.

Deutsch has an explanation for this: some explanations are more fundamental than others, which means, some explanations describe better or deeper or more broadly a larger number of aspects of how reality works around us. Therefore learning truly fundamental explanations helps you potentially explain multiple other things.

This is validated by my experience. Ever since learning DD’s ideas, even if only partially, it has helped me fill the gaps in some of the ideas I’ve been willing to put together into a book, particularly in regards to those written by Nick Szabo in his essays and blog regarding Bitcoin.

It’s truly fascinating to me how reading from a theoretical physicist like Deutsch can fill in the gaps in my undersanding of things written by a legal scholar, computer scientist and cryptographer like Szabo but that has been indeed the case or, at least, my conjectures to fill those gaps have helped me put together a story compelling enough to feel comfortable writing a book about them.

What is knowing?

The first concept DD deals with in FoR is what does it mean to know something? Knowing for DD is understanding. Learning formulas or data by heart doesn’t really help you get one jot closer to the truth of how the universe works.

Instead, having explanations lets you derive whatever formula or prediction too from them if needed. But even if you can derive them, predictions and formulas are not the goal of knowing. Understanding is. And understanding has those as additional consequences. if needed.

Memorizing facts doesn’t help either, only understanding what they are and how they came about does.

This role of explanations is central to DD’s books and thinking and is derived from Karl Popper’s epistemology.

Knowledge is central to DD’s philosophy but also to his understanding of how the world works, which he connects with quantum theory, the theory of computation and the theory of evolution. Those 4 theories are what he calls the strands of the Fabric of Reality, which is the name of his first book.

Ever since I started thinking about explanations I see them as sort of a code of how the universe works. Explanations need to be logical. By scrutinizing them you can find errors forcing your counterpart or yourself to think deeper about them and, when you do, you learn more about them.

Explanations can be polished in the same way a work of art, a sculpture or a painting is. Or in the same way a post like this hopefully is if you guys can find logical errors, alternative explanations or contradictions and help me polish my writing.

I will hopefully feel embarrassed enough to think deeper and improve my understanding.

Wealth for DD is the capacity to create physical transformations in the world, which is a consequence of a) accumulating abstract knowledge or b) accumulating knowledge embedded in artifacts, procedures, know how which let you produce those transformations.

Indeed once you become knowledgeable or accumulate embedded knowledge you become a magnet for people that want your help. That is true wealth.