Top 39 David Deutsch Quotes
#1. David Deutsch, in The Fabric of Reality, embraces the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum theory,
Richard Dawkins
#2. 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.
David Deutsch
#3. The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.
David Deutsch
#4. 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.
David Deutsch
#5. Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.
David Deutsch
#6. Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For
David Deutsch
#7. Yet, over time, the conclusions that science has drawn have become ever truer to reality.
David Deutsch
#8. If two programs respond in the same way to every possible action by the user, then they render the same environment; if they would respond perceptibly differently to even one possible action, they render different environments.
David Deutsch
#9. Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent.
David Deutsch
#10. Trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering.
David Deutsch
#11. Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.
David Deutsch
#12. 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.
David Deutsch
#13. This inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusions.
David Deutsch
#14. Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.
David Deutsch
#15. Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.
David Deutsch
#16. 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.
David Deutsch
#17. It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good
David Deutsch
#18. It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment.
David Deutsch
#19. No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. We need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance.
David Deutsch
#20. Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.
David Deutsch
#21. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.
David Deutsch
#22. 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.
David Deutsch
#24. 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.
David Deutsch
#25. The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.
David Deutsch
#26. If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial ... the best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat.
David Deutsch
#27. I chop and change between what is called 'work' and what is called 'recreation.' There are no discontinuities in my day. I only play tennis with people I find interesting.
David Deutsch
#28. Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe.
David Deutsch
#29. If we can't program it, we can't understand it.
David Deutsch
#30. 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.
David Deutsch
#31. The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
David Deutsch
#32. 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.
David Deutsch
#33. Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.
David Deutsch
#34. 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.
David Deutsch
#35. Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.
David Deutsch
#36. mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape. Diamond
David Deutsch
#37. Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr's combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.
David Deutsch
#38. 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.
David Deutsch
#39. Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. This
David Deutsch
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