Seeking Explanation

Digesting “The Fabric of Reality” by David Deutsch, as a waystation on my reading journey

Warning: this is a long one!

Photo by Zuzana Ruttkay on Unsplash

Introduction

“The Fabric of Reality” by David Deutsch swallowed me whole. That I came to it nearly 30 years after its first publication is a personal failing I deeply regret. That I came to it at the end of a two-year-long trek through philosophy, history, neuroscience, consciousness, fundamental physics, ethics, and technology feels fortuitous.

While it was going to feature at some point in my semi-intentional trawl through non-fiction books on reality, consciousness, and suchlike, it is pertinent to mention that I am doing a course on Quantum Computing and I was extremely dissatisfied with Quantum Supremacy by Michio Kaku (it came recommended as a primer on all things Quantum). So after having heard about him for a long time, I decided to go to the font that the modern thinking* on Quantum Computing originated from. (* = post Feynman, of course) which is David Deutsch in this 1996 book.

This article is a brain-dump of all my thoughts after reading the book, a brief summary of the book itself, a mind-map of how it represents a ‘connectional hub’ for my ~2 years worth of reading into related subjects, as well as some navel gazing on where I am headed next.

Read this if you are interested in geeking out about science, need a few book recommendations, or just have a few minutes to scroll. The mind-map I am especially proud of.

Summarizing the Book

At its heart, the book argues that a viable candidate for a ‘theory of everything’ that describes the eponymous Fabric of Reality is within reach (it pre-dates most forays into String and Superstring/ M Theory it must be noted). As a paradigm, it suggests that this theory would be some sort of an amalgam or a common antecedent of four theories -

1. Quantum Mechanics and the Many Worlds Hypothesis by Hugh Everett and Bryce DeWitt
2. Evolution, Genetics and Memetics by Darwin and Dawkins
3. Computation theory, based on the work of Alan Turing, and,
4. Epistemology/ Theory of Knowledge from the work of Karl Popper

Let’s do a salient summary for each in turn…

Quantum Mechanical Reality: in The first theory suggests there is a multiverse out there where anything that can happen, does/ did happen. Reality is comprised of spacetime ‘moments’, causality depends on your perspective as an observer, and similar parallel universes interfere with each other to produce a multiverse where everything that can happen does happen.

Life as Emergent Phenomenon: The second suggests that Life is an emergent phenomenon that does not require purpose or design. Agglomerations of molecules become replicators that replicate successfully in certain niches of surroundings/ environments and form successively more complex agglomerations that iteratively replicate.

Consciousness: This is another emergent phenomenon that in some cases, randomly, enables better replication and therefore becomes a persistent feature of Life. Note that the things replicating are NOT the full organism but rather the genes that codify the knowledge of the form the organism takes. This gives us the two segue points we need into the third and fourth theories…

Theory of Computation: The third (in the form of an extended/ expanded Turing principle suggests that it is possible to build a universal computer: a machine that can be programmed to perform any computation that any other physical object can perform. However, note that the concepts and numbers and algorithms that make up the computation can (and must, in one sense) be embodied in the universe. There are also things that cannot be embodied in a given universe but can be envisaged as being embodied in a multiverse. And there are things that are simply impossible even given the multiverse (which the author cleverly calls cantgotu environments, after Cantor, Gödel and Turing — but let’s avoid that rabbit hole!).

Embodied knowledge of life: In that sense, genes are different from junk parts of DNA because they embody the knowledge that is needed to be Life. A Turing machine used to generate a virtual reality in some sense embodies the reality in computing it. (The book calls forward here to Reality+ by David Chalmers which agrees that virtual reality IS reality).

Epistemology/ Theory of Knowledge: Finally, the fourth theory of science is the Popperian one: that scientific theory itself proceeds by bold conjecture aimed at solving problems and the refutation of any rival conjectures rather than some form of inductive reasoning based on evidence. The book absolutely disdains Inductivism, ‘Crypto-Inductivism’, instrumentalism, and the focus on testable predictions alone as the purpose of any scientific theory. The purpose of science for the book then is Explanation, not experimental verificaition.

In its final chapter there is a brief dalliance with the Omega Point Theory that I did not care for, and some attempts to think in terms of the moral dimension and utilitarianism etc. — beyond “how things work and why?” and into “what is it all for?”. I frankly thought this was not needed. I can see why it’s there — I didn’t need it! I have reconciled myself long ago to the idea of a purposeless universe where meaning is manufactured.

This is of course only a flying summary of the book, and the author himself gives a much longer but better summary by putting chapter summaries at the end of each chapter. I felt compelled to write it because this reflects what stuck with me as I read it. In a stream of consciousness kind of way, it gives a framework in which to view one’s paradigm for the universe — nay, multiverse — we inhabit!

A Connections Hub for my World-view

Now importantly, I found this book also serves as a hub that connects most if not all of the non-fiction reading I have been doing for the past few years. In that it was a really validating experience, as the interconnections it highlighted explicitly or implicitly have convinced me that my reading journey has an ‘emergent’ direction (although thus far I have mostly let each book point me to the next).

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So what have I been reading that suddenly feels super-connected to this book? Here’s a chronological list:

1. Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Carlo Rovelli)
2. The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future (Mustafa Suleyman)
3. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will (Robert Sapolsky)
4. Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (Kieran Setiya)
5. The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (Daniel Hoffman)
6. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Anil Seth)
7. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (David Chalmers)
8. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert Sapolsky)
9. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Yuval Noah Harari)
10. Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
11. Quantum Supremacy (Michio Kaku)
12. The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything (David Deutsch)

The ones in bold above I have added to the mind-map below. This will evolve to certainly include the ones not emboldened in the list — I have spent too much time on the mind-map and was afraid I would simply not get this post out so I stopped adding to it. I will return to it. :) so treat it as v0.1. (scroll past it for more)

A mind-map representing the books I have read recently and the concepts/ interconnections in them that I have spent altogether too much time on

Consider me thrilled also that at the end the author also includes a number of “books everyone MUST read” of which I find over half are already on my TBR. So here are the ones I am planning to read that will get incorporated into the map soon:

1. The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins) — need to re-read!
2. The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins)
3. Godel, Escher, Bach an Eternal Braid (Douglas Hofstadter)
4. The Proteus Operation (James P Hogan)
5. Popper (Bryan Magee)
6. Conjectures and Refutations (Karl Popper)
7. The Myth of the Framework (Karl Popper)

Conclusion: The Search for Explanation, and a Framework

I am not sure why I started this reading journey, and certainly it is one that has proceeded not according to a plan, but largely lackadaisically. Each step was driven by the preceding step recommending it OR a whim taking me and me making what felt like a left turn. I have always been curious about fundamental physics and science in general and always lacked the mathematical ability or discipline to get deeper into it.

In Fabric of Reality I finally landed on something that helped me give voice to something I was looking for without realizing I was looking for it. I have been reading books about Grand Unified Theories or Theories of Everything for a while now. Everything from Cosmos by Sagan, A Brief History of Time by Hawking to Theories of Everything by John Barrow and an odd assortment of books and articles on String Theory. What I realized I was missing however was the “so what?” of it all in all these ambitious and very good books.

I have always been frustrated with how the books I mentioned tended to be hands-off when it came to ethics or religion or indeed, eschatology. I am not a scientist and so, while scientific theories and experiments are all well and good what I realized I was hungering for was an explanation. And there all the Grand Unified Theories stopped short of giving one.

It was refreshing then to hear Deutsch say that the very purpose of science and a scientific theory was explanation, not just prediction or application! The explanation that is involved in understanding that everything — from matter in the universe, the DNA in your body, to the thought in “your” mind — proceeds from a set of first principles, and emergent phenomenon is one that sits right with me. However no one had really attempted (in my reading, before now) to pull together these disparate threads into a rational whole. Books on consciousness did not touch quantum mechanics, books on quantum gravity did not touch God, and books on ethics or evolution did not touch physics! Until now.

So I am grateful to David Deutsch for writing this book, and searching for commonalities of mechanism and mode in (at first glance) seemingly disparate disciplines. The ambition is breathtaking, and one I share. To discover and verify a set of axioms that are the building blocks for the edifice that becomes your framework for understanding the world, that leads to a world-view.

Why does one learn science, or feel passionately about it after all, but in order to understand this world a little better?

While I do not agree with everything in the book, and I am cognizant of the fact that in the past three decades our understanding has expanded beyond some of its contours, it did help me think about and voice my own framework for understanding the world — or my world-view if you will, a little more concretely.

I can suddenly name this thing I have been doing reading all these books over the past couple of years. It is what quite a lot of people have been doing through history, and will continue to do for eons to come. I was/ am simply,

Seeking an Explanation.