Beginning of Infinity

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World is a popular science book by the physicist David Deutsch first published in 2011.

The "Beginning of infinity" referred to was the shift from society from a static society to a dynamic society that began to generate memes endlessly (esp. rational memes, instead of being stuck in local maximas in preserving existing memes.

Deutsch speculates on the process of human-culture development from a genetic basis through to a memetic emergence. This emergence led to the creation of static societies where innovation occurs, but most of the time at a rate too slow for individuals to notice during their lifetimes. It was only at the point where knowledge of how to purposefully create new knowledge through good explanations was acquired that the beginning of infinity took off during the enlightenment. His explanation for human creativity is that it evolved as a way to faithfully reproduce existing memes, as this would require creative intelligence to produce a refined rule set that would more faithfully reproduce the existing memes that happened to confer benefit (and all the other memes too). From this increased creative ability, the ability to create new memes emerged and humans thus became universal constructors and technological development accelerated.

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