Ep: 99 David Deutsch‘s ”The Beginning of Infinity” - a retrospective in 99 minutes

This is episode 99 of ToKCast. More than any other work, the contents of "The Beginning of Infinity" (BoI) have informed the content of this podcast, so in celebration of Episode 99 I set myself the challenge of taking on each chapter in sequence, retelling the main points of it in my own words (no readings from the actual book itself this time) and construct an episode as close as possible to 99 minutes long. Obviously this required quite some editing - this episode now holds the record for time-taken-to-edit. As much was left on the virtual "cutting room floor" and extended "directors cut" is available for Patreons and other supporters of ToKCast. Become a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/tokcast (per episode support) or https://www.patreon.com/BrettRHall (monthly donation).

 

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction

00:10:10 Chapter 1 The Reach of Explanations

00:15:21 Chapter 2 Closer to Reality

00:19:50 Chapter 3 The Spark

00:24:14 Chapter 4 Creation

00:29:06 Chapter 5 The Reality of Abstractions

00:34:14 Chapter 6 The Jump to Universality 

00:38:51 Chapter 7 Artificial Creativity

00:43:58 Chapter 8 A Window on Infinity

00:49:01 Chapter 9 Optimism

00:53:47 Chapter 10 A Dream of Socrates

00:58:20 Chapter 11 The Multiverse

01:03:26 Chapter 12 A Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy

01:08:36 Chapter 13 Choices

01:13:42 Chapter 14 Why are Flowers Beautiful?

01:18:00 Chapter 15 The Evolution of Culture

01:22:56 Chapter 16 The Evolution of Creativity

01:28:23 Chapter 17 Unsustainable

01:33:24 Chapter 18 The Beginning

01:37:43 Concluding Remarks