Notes from: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: The quest for what I call good explanations. Though this quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal, cosmic level - namely that it conforms to universal laws of nature that are indeed good explanations. This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things.
     Must progress come to an end - either in catastrophe or in some sort of completion - or is it unbounded? The answer is the latter. That unboundedness is the 'infinity' referred to in the title of this book. ... Progress has a necessary beginning: a cause, or an event with which it starts, or a necessary condition for it to take off and thrive. Each of these beginnings is 'the beginning of infinity' as viewed from the perspective of that field. Many seem, superficially, to be unconnected. But they are all facets of a single attribute of reality, which I call THE beginning of infinity.

Scientific theories are not 'derived' from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses - bold conjectures.

Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.

Fallibilism is the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying ideas as being true or probable... Fallibilists are predisposed to try to change their explanations for the better.

...no amount of observing will correct the misconception until after one has thought of a better idea...

The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally ... What is now called 'The West' - grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of descent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.

Conjecture is the origin of all knowledge.

The real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism.

Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.

An error in experimental science is a mistake about the cause of something. Like an accurate observation, it is a matter of theory.

Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.

Explanatory theories tell us how to build and operate instruments in exactly the right way to work this miracle. Like conjuring tricks in reverse, such instruments fool our senses into seeing what is really there.

All observation is theory-laden.

New explanations create new problems.

Person: An entity that can create explanatory knowledge.

There are very few fossils of old people.

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.

The Principle of (Human) Mediocrity is paradoxical too. Since it singles out anthropocentrism for special opprobrium among all forms of parochial misconception, it is itself anthropocentric. Also, it claims that all value judgments are anthropocentric, yet it itself is often expressed in value-laden terminology, such as 'arrogance', 'just scum', and the very word 'mediocrity.' With respect to whose values are those disparagements to be understood? Why is arrogance even relevant as a criticism? Also, even if holding an arrogant opinion is morally wrong, morality is supposed to refer only to the internal organization of chemical scum. So how can it tell us anything about how the world beyond the scum is organized, as the Principle of Mediocrity purports to do?

Apart from the thoughts of people, the only process known to be capable of creating knowledge is biological evolution. The knowledge it creates (other than via people) is inherently bounded and parochial. Yet it also has close similarities with human knowledge.

Reductionism and Holism are both mistakes. In reality, explanations do not form a hierarchy with the lowest level being the most fundamental. Rather, explanations at any level of emergence can be fundamental. Abstractions are real, and can play a role in causing physical phenomena. Causation is itself such an abstraction.

All knowledge growth is by incremental improvement, but in many fields there comes a point when one of the incremental improvements in a system of knowledge or technology causes a sudden increase in reach, making it a universal system in the relevant domain.

We can understand infinity through the infinite reach of some explanations. It makes sense, both in mathematics and in physics. But it has counterintuitive properties, some of which are illustrated by Hilbert's thought experiment of Infinity Hotel. One of them is that, if unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always will be.

Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures - all evils - are due to insufficient knowledge. This is the key to the rational philosophy of the unknowable. It would be contentless if there were fundamental limitations to the creation of knowledge, but there are not. It would be false if there were fields - especially philosophical fields such as morality - in which there were no such thing as observable progress. But truth does exist in all those fields, and progress towards it is made by seeking good explanations. Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors. There may have been many short-lived enlightenments in history. Ours has been uniquely long lived.

The way [for people] to converge with each other is to converge upon the truth.

[Regarding the Multiverse:] All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.

With the enlightenment came much more good philosophy, but bad philosophy became much worse, with the descent from empiricism (merely false) to positivism, logical positivism, instrumentalism, Wittgenstein, linguistic philosophy, and the 'postmodernist'and related movements.
     in science, the main impact of bad philosophy has been through the idea of separating a scientific theory into (explanationless) predictions and (arbitrary) interpretation. 

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. 

There are objective truths in aesthetics... The fact that flowers reliably seem beautiful to humans when their designs evolved for an apparently unrelated purpose is evidence that beauty is objective.

 - Anti-Rational meme: an idea that relies on disabling the recipients critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated.
 - Static society: one whose changes happen on a time scale longer than its members can't notice. Such cultures are dominated by anti-rational memes.

Biological evolution was merely a finite preface to the main story of evolution, the unbounded evolution of memes. So was the evolution of anti-rational memes in static societies.