[David Deutsch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch) One of my favorite minds alive today. Author of [[The Beginning of Infinity]] and [[The Fabric of Reality]]. I find him most intriguing because he introduced me to the idea that explanation is the root of all knowledge. Knowledge can only grow in the face of problems to solve, and by problem he means some sort of incongruity between expectation and reality, or between one expectation and another in an intellectual sense. He is a champion of [[Karl Popper]], and believes his work is widely misunderstood. He believes that a lot of the past 50 years of Philosophy has been heading in the wrong direction, that [[Bayesians]] have is the wrong way around (what knowledge purports to explain isn't probabilistic, fallibility makes probability a useful in various contexts as a tool), and that in the right context the growth of knowledge is both limitless but never completed. Every solution will always lead to more problems, but all problems, so long as their solutions are not forbidden by a law of physics, have a solution in principle. The growth of knowledge is the only way to solve problems. He gets what creativity means wrong, in part because he has a misguided view of infinity, but also because he discounts the important of the time dimension in problem solving and misunderstands what an algorithm entails. > [!example]- [[Creativity is Computible]] - Deutsch often says otherwise. > He often implies it is an almost magical property because it cannot be computable in principle, because then it would be reducible to an algorithm. An algorithm cannot lead to creativity because it will be bound to the system used to code it. We know that mathematical proof requires escape from systems, and we know that human minds are capable of this, so he thinks this is a slam dunk against creativity being part of a computable process. This is flawed for 2 reasons: he believe the universe is computible and believes the mind is solely an artifact of the universe. He cannot believe both that the mind houses an incomputible process and this at the same time. When pressed, he will say "our capacity to understand creativity is beyond our current knowledge" or some such. OK, but I think he gets stuck because of the next problem in his thinking in my view. > [!example]- [[Infinity doesn't exist]] - Deutsch thinks so in several contexts. Infinity exists as a mathematical tool, and as an idea in the minds of humans, but in reality there is only "arbitrarily many" or "arbitrarily small" or "arbitrarily long", etc. He views creativity, I think, in the sense that it must have an infinite capacity to generate explanations. I think this is wrong. The human mind does not have an infinite capacity to generate new knowledge. Not all knowledge can be compressible to fit in a finite space, and the human mind is (he thinks there are infinite parallel worlds, which may be where he leaves the door open here--If multi-world interpretation of quantum effects is true, I believe the right way to think about it is there are "arbitrarily many" worlds, not infinitely many of them"). If the mind is finite, then in principle there will be an [computationally irreducible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility) object which must have an object bigger than the mind to compute it. Understanding as a compressed view of this irreducible process entails a hindrance of our understanding, so long as our minds do not grow. Of course, we can grow our minds, and we are, but this growth happens iteratively over time, and not within the confines of the creative process that exists independent of this iterative growth. > [!example]- Time is a Critical Property of Knowledge. > Deutsch often says "in principle" when he talks about knowledge. Knowledge as a theoretical object can do away with the time dimension, but there is a serious difference between someone that can understand something in 5 minutes versus 5 hours, intuitively. Also in principle, the time dimension is often the most limiting factor in whether someone or something can understand some concept or other. I think this is a big hole in his theory of knowledge. ## What I Believe Creativity is [[Creativity is idea generation plus testability]]. I believe creativity is not infinite. It is limited by the understanding it has about it's environment. If it doesn't understand something, it cannot create a story about it. Building up understanding allows for a bigger scope of creative process. The bigger the mind's capacity for understanding, the bigger the space of creativity possible for the mind. Of course, a mind may understand how to make bigger minds capable of understanding more than it itself does, and I believe humanity is in the process of building them.