Filmed while we were both in San Francisco in Golden Gate Park.

We go into Tom’s early acts of defiance. Weaving through some random anecdotes, like me stealing my mom’s car to drive my friends to Vegas at 15, to broader reflections on how childhood disobedience connects to a philosophy of free thought.

Inspired by David Deutsch’s ideas, we unpack how questioning authority fuels creativity.

Tom talks about his concept of "Wonderism," a framework that bridges the rigor of science with the awe of human achievement. We go from William Wordsworth’s poetic reverence for London’s skyline to Ayn Rand’s celebration of New York’s grandeur, and explore how human creations can inspire more wonder than nature itself.

We also explore the tension between efficiency and beauty—such as choosing a scenic route over a straight one—and how boredom can spark innovation.

Enjoy the ride!

Show notes and transcript here in the Roam Graph:

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Jesse: https://x.com/jessenichols
Tom: https://tomhyde.substack.com/
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People are most characterized by their problems. When we think of personhood, we usually think in terms of where they come from, what tribes they belong to–their religion, their family, their work and so on–and the environment that they grew up in. This misses the mark. People are universal explainers. 

The evolution of a person is a problem space with a trajectory that is sometimes chaotic, or if one is fortunate, one can grow peacefully throughout life. A person can solve their problems by discovering one of an infinite number of solutions, but there are no guarantees. Therefore, whether we progress, stagnate, or regress is due to what we do in the face of our problems.

This universal capacity to solve any problem is the fundamental aspect that makes us more significant than every other animal on Earth. We reshape our world because we understand the hidden structure of nature and exploit its laws to our benefit. And yet, sitting on our elated perch on the shoulders of giants, we have demeaned this status as tiresome to embody.

We are biological beings, but we are not defined by our biological evolution. We are not just monkeys toiling away with our tools. Our ongoing cultural evolution entails a deep playfulness that aids our creation of a better world. The role of play in progress is deeply unvalued in life. We take that play benefits the artist for granted, but we fail to see how it can help the scientist, engineer, or mechanic.

My earliest memories are of assembling Legos. I refused to follow the instructions and instead created spaceships from a set initially designed for a car. I am a product of Western values. Some of my heroes were Bart Simpson and the band Rage Against the Machine. I wouldn’t explicitly connect the values of individualism and disobedience baked into pop culture to their Enlightenment roots until much later, but the seeds had been planted by playfulness.

Explanatory universality is the lifeblood of people. We are inevitably faced with choices of how to live, and these constitute our problem situation. The explanations we create through guesswork and criticism have no limits(outside laws of physics) because we are a product of nature, and nature has no fundamental bounds on how much we can understand in principle. 

The alternative and pessimistic view is that we are stuck in a parochial bubble of understanding that can never be popped. This is tantamount to believing in the supernatural, essentially that a phenomenon in reality exists that we can not grasp with our tools of reason. In The Beginning of Infinity, the physicist David Deutsch explained, “Denying that some regularity in nature has an explanation is effectively the same as believing in the supernatural – saying, ‘That’s not conjuring, it’s actual magic.’”. The gap is ignorance, and we leap not with faith, but by building bridges composed of explanations.

Nor are there limits to the tools we can create to augment our intelligence. Ever since we invented writing with smudges of pigment on caves, we have supplanted our ability to extend our biological memory of processing the world. Today, we have extended our toolkit to supercomputers and smartphones, furthering our ability to process information. 

When we think of science and philosophy, we too easily forget how crucial the element of play is. We are not just social animals—we are playful creators. We are artists and scientists from birth. We take myths and stories, and then we put together theoretical structures out of the pieces. 

A person’s ever-evolving problem situation is a painting on one’s canvas of life. The evolution of a person has zero limitations outside the laws of physics. As David Deutsch has argued: 

“...if the ancient Athenians had known antibiotics or just about hygiene, they could have prevented the plague that contributed to the fall of their society, of their nascent optimist society. If they had, then as Carl Sagan speculated, we might now be at the stars and technology would be regulating trivialities like the planetary climate as automatically as it's now regulating the temperature in this room. We know that's possible because of a momentous dichotomy that follows directly from the rejection of the supernatural, namely, every transformation of physical systems that is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge, and hence the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism — the principle of optimism, namely that: all evils are caused by lack of knowledge.”

We can scale down the same argument to an individual level and reject the stance that you should slow down and accept your fate. I flirted with a formal meditation practice for over a year, attempting to resist the chaos of life. I was wrong. I lacked an attitude of responsibility toward the problems I had on my plate. I now have the attitude to seek out creative solutions to my problems. I embrace that life is chaotic but that solutions are out there, and that incorporating them is an act of creative play. The world is not against me—it is a playground full of elegant wonders and abundance. 

There is more to life than thinking you are hardstuck at an unbeatable level in some part of the simulation. This is pessimistic religious thinking built on sand. We have the power to choose the direction of our life. Playfulness and freedom of choice emerge from our creative ability to solve problems. Understanding this liberating idea makes life like a game where you are the hero and the world-builder.

Unsurprisingly, some of the best inventors of our age like Elon Musk grew up playing video games and then learned how to design and program them. It’s one thing to master a set of rules in a game; it’s another to realize that you can become the game-maker. 

The leading rival explanation for making progress involves forcing yourself through something that you don’t enjoy to get you to some imagined end state. We consider a disciplined person to be hard-working, committed, and showing self-control, and we deem this as desirable, but this is wrong. We can spend a lifetime working towards an end state, and only realize once we are there that the path was wrong and the end state was a fantasy. The most maintainable attitude is removing force, especially inner coercion like discipline from our worldview. Peacefully aligning oneself to reasoned values requires no coercion; it only requires an understanding of optimism.

When one understands they are the ultimate creator, life becomes infinitely more malleable. Bits and atoms become our Lego blocks, and the rules and dynamics we play by become more open-ended than the most expansive video game.

This form of optimism is distinct from psychological woo and from blind optimism, which asserts that solutions will automatically emerge. Knowledge is not guaranteed—it requires focus, a rejection of evasion, and an attitude of facing problems head-on with a playful attitude.

The principle of optimism, play, and our explanatory universality together cements the idea that we are an entirely different entity than every other living being. On these grounds alone, we can throw away evolutionary psychology. We have evolved by natural selection, but we underwent a phase change, a jump to universality. As Jacob Bronowski has masterfully articulated in his Ascent of Man series, we have elevated from mere features of the landscape to shapers of the landscape. From atoms and ideas, we are now free to imagine and build extraordinary lives.

Thanks to Logan for the help on this.

PROBLEMS ARE INEVITABLE

PROBLEMS ARE SOLUBLE

With a diamond cutting wheel and my own two hands, I created these granite bookends inspired by David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. Gold acrylic paint adds a pop of elegance, and geometric cuts add dynamism to the set.

Sold made to order, individually or as a pair. I’ve only made these two, so these first pieces are not for sale. They’re sentimental, and I can make future pieces much better!

The standard size is 12.7 cm x 16.51 cm x 5.08 cm, or 5” wide, 6.5” tall 2” deep, shown on the right.

The bases have felt feet to be scratch-resistant and weigh 3 kg or 6.61 lb.

More images:

Contact me at x.com/jessenichols or email jesseray@infinitedays.org

Copy paste order info in msg:

Set (individually, inevitable or soluble, or pair):

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I spun up this site on a smartphone on a lunch break, an impossible feat in 1997, and yet, while computer engineering has dramatically improved in speed and memory capacity, the quality of artificial general intelligence (AGI) programs hasn't gotten anywhere. But you might say, DeepMind! OpenAI! No. Once you grok the connections of epistemology to computer science, you will see those programs as very helpful tools, but not anything close to a real AGI mind.

If you do not understand the ideas below, which stem from Karl Popper and later from David Deutsch, you will be lost. And most crucially, if you do not understand the ideas that were first established and published in 1997 by David Deutsch, you will not make any progress in understanding AGI, let alone building it.

This post is more of a catalog of the history of ideas of AGI and links out to the actual arguments rather than actually making the case here. Feel free to skim the post and follow your curiosity to whatever seems interesting to you.

Unless you reinvent the ideas below, you are building on sand. As the picture below shows, dominating over you in the sea, looming over your sandcastles, stands a powerful forgotten force — epistemology. David Deutsch connected epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, to the theory of computation unlike anyone before him. Bold words, but Karl Popper can't know everything 😉.

Everything is applied epistemology, meaning that all the fields of knowledge, computer science, physics, mathematics, etc., must all be in accordance with our best theory of epistemology.

The simplest way that Deutsch puts it is:

However, the problem is, to understand how powerful that claim is, you have to see how he gets there. Deutsch is a physicist who wrote the first quantum program in 1985, which pioneered the field of quantum computation, so he knows a thing or two about computer science. To disregard his work is a mistake, which is why if you are interested in AGI, you need to read the list below.

These are the prerequisites, in chronological order, starting with the astounding and amazing book, The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, written in 1997, which cemented what the problems in epistemology are, their solutions, and how they connect with the theory of computation, building from the work of Alan Turing. This is the groundwork one must do to begin to understand true AGI.

The Fabric of Reality, Chapter 5 - Virtual Reality, (1997)

• What makes reality comprehensible?

• The Turing principle.

• The universality of computation.

The Beginning of Infinity: ch 5, ch 6, ch 7, (2011)

The Beginning of Infinity: official book website

These chapters are key to computer science and AGI:

• Ch 5, The Reality of Abstractions

• Ch 6, The Jump to Universality

• Ch 7, Artificial Creativity:

Brett Hall's excellent breakdown of The Beginning of Infinity:

Why has AGI not been created yet? (2012)

Text:

Narration:

Beyond Reward and Punishment (2019)

AGIs are people, universal explainers, as well as universal computers.

PDF: http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/PossibleMinds_Deutsch.pdf

Full Book:

Narration:

Bonus content:

Knowledge Creation and its Risks

Talk at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), Trinity College, Cambridge.

• Transcript excerpt on AGI and existential risk: Knowledge Creation and its Risks (roamresearch.com)

Dennis Hackethal

Artificial Creativity Podcast

A Window on Intelligence

Carlos De la Guardia

Making Mind & Making Progress | Substack

Increments Podcast

Naval

Infinite Days

A relational database of Karl Popper, David Deutsch, Richard Feynman, and more.

updated nov 2022 to add the increments podcast

Knowledge is a type of information that people create by solving problems, not just within a laboratory or in some crucial experiment, but within the lives of you, me, and every other person. This is a creative process that brings us closer to understanding reality and making progress. The structure of knowledge follows a pattern not only similar to Charles Darwin's biological evolution but is itself a fundamental part of the modern idea of evolution, aka neo-Darwinism(post Dawkins evolutionary theory).

This new idea of evolution contains both memes and genes. The idea of a meme was first described by the biologist Richard Dawkins in the book The Selfish Gene in 1976. He was the first to clearly explain that memes and genes both evolve through variation and selection. The structure of the evolution of memes–of ideas, and the evolution of genes both create knowledge. This idea was later connected to a larger framework in David Deutsch's book The Fabric of Reality (1996), where he connected the ideas of the evolution of memes and genes to the critical rationalist problem-solving process of how science and reason in general work.

This frame of evolution and knowledge explains that life itself as we experience it in our minds, and how we see in biology is best characterized as a process of problem-solving. Memes evolve faster because they exist in minds and therefore can change at the speed of thought – unlike genes. It is why we see the progress we experience now in our science and technology. We have gone far beyond the bacteria and every other non-human animal!

We have solved hard problems that have allowed us to travel to space, create health for billions, and invent new forms of art. We now are on the brink of solving extraordinary problems that will showcase the capacity of the mind. In the grand scheme of it all our culture is still only in its childhood stages, and even though we have solved many great problems we still have many more problems to play with.

PROBLEMS SOLVED WITHIN THE FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE

The Problem of Induction

Karl Popper created a new philosophy of science that was based around the idea that we can never have an ultimate form of knowledge. Popper's groundbreaking achievement said that we can never justify knowledge with any process of induction, because knowledge always has errors and is only justified by beating out it's rival explanations.

Does objective truth exist?

See David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality for the clearest explanation or Karl Popper’s Realism and the Aim of Science

GREAT PROBLEMS TO SOLVE WITHIN THE FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE

Moral problems within philosophy

We need more answers to the problem of what to do next, or as Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity has said, “moral philosophy Addresses the problem of what sort of life to want.”

Problems within Aesthetics

Creating new explanations of why something is beautiful.

Theory of mind

Qualia

What is the explanation behind the subjective aspect of sensations?

How can we create artificial general intelligence?

How does creativity and free will work at the level of the mind?

KNOWLEDGE IS A TOOLKIT

A person's Toolkit, their theory of knowledge or epistemology, is fundamental and determines how they think about their place in the world, and therefore how fast they can grow.

There is no limit to the growth of any person’s toolkit, which is composed of better and better error-correction ideas.

Having the better toolkit, one that can outcompete its rivals, based in a fallibilist framework is optimal to understand how to make good choices.

We can gain the knowledge of different modes of explaining some phenomenon, which can allow us to connect different theories into simpler, more elegant ones.

Within physics we can think of the possibility of unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics, just as how electricity and magnetism has been unified.

Everyone should read these

David Deutsch’s article in Nautilus on fallibilism (~20 min read), on why being able to be wrong lets us access an unbroken chain of infinite progress.

He describes why the nature of knowledge will give us ever better problems to play with, and why this is a great fact about how the world works.

There is a startling explanation that is undervalued here: we can solve a problem at any scale within our lives and then we can birth ever more beautiful and attractive problems. And with that, with the embodiment of a childlike curiosity, we can rid us of our current assumptions and errors; which leads a person to a life of unending flourishing,

David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity takes these ideas of knowledge and explains why we have been able to make so much progress since the enlightenment.

The Beginning of Infinity was inspired by Jacob Bronowski's epic BBC series The Ascent of Man (DVD series amazon affiliate link) or watch on YouTube below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH7SJf8BnBI

More things to read

The root of the problem of how a person can attain knowledge can also be seen in the work of Karl Popper. I highly recommend reading this essay (~15 min read PDF link) from his landmark book [[conjecture]]s and Refutations, which could also be thought of as ‘Guesswork and Criticism,’ but that doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

His focus on the theory of knowledge started when he was trying to separate where the line between science is, and where nonscience or pseudoscience is.

His masterpiece is Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge and is available as a free audiobook read by Elyse Hargreaves: YouTube here.

The best for last

The physicist Richard Feynman followed this theme and often encapsulated these fallibilist ideas. He would say things like, “science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.”

Listen to Feynman’s audiobook Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. It captures fundamental aspects of what a life in pursuit of knowledge looks like.

We need to keep fighting for a world where his essay Cargo Cult Science isn’t as relevant today as it was when it was written 44 years ago, because there is so much fun to be had, there are so many ideas to toy around with, there are spacecraft to fly, cities to build, art to create, and bongos to be played...

Notes and acknowledgments

Thank you to Scott Hamilton for helping in version 1.2

To Elyse Hargreaves for at the time of writing, producing Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations audiobook.

hey Zoe McCarthy, thanks for reading

Dustin Cox for the countless conversations.

David Deutsch for being The Spark.

I have not loved much as I have loved my errors

Version 1.1 here

Version 1.2 here

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.
— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (2011)

Forward, into the edges of the known — this is where the true optimists of our day live. The lines of thought they draw and connect within their minds are structures formerly unearthed, untold, and unexplained. They are built with the tools of knowledge: conjecture and criticism, logic, experiment, the critical rationalist attitude towards solving problems, and the scientific methodology of trial and error-correction.

Essentially, they have rejected blind pessimism, as David Deutsch explains: "Blind pessimism (precautionary principle) Avoiding everything not known to be safe." A stance that leaves a void of innovation and in its place lies stagnation like the dark ages and death in the face of an unforeseeable society level problem. There are fascinating new strands being sewn inside the minds of a growing set of individuals. They are starting to pick up the pace against the tides of stasis. These are the true optimists: thinkers and builders who have taken the stance that huge problems can be solved, and not just with depressing toil, but with joyful Imagination towards an ever more peaceful world.

Peace is possible because reason is written into the laws of nature.*

*(but not inevitable, it takes effort by us humans)

The relative peace we experience now is due to the optimists of our past: the thinkers, scientists, and philosophers who solved fundamental problems. They gave the engineers and artists the ability to play with new tools of thought. The industrialists then brought scale of production to those inventions, by fine-tuning their manufacturing process and business philosophy, learning how to trade more effectively. But why did these optimists make progress? And who are some great examples of these new optimists?

THE PHILOSOPHY OF OPTIMISM

Firstly we must look at what optimism is. Is it merely a psychological feeling? It used to be. Deutsch did his thing of making a commonplace concept more elegant and exact in The Beginning of Infinity, Affiliate link: (#ad), when he defined the philosophical principle of optimism as, "All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge." The inverse that follows is that all good comes from having the correct knowledge. This stance shapes the world into a playground of transforming some raw material into another material which has more value and more capacity for creating progress. Cotton into clothes, metal into gears, water into energy, chemicals into computers. We can change the world to any state we wish, within the laws of nature, to an ever more peaceful and interesting place.

Want to solve the medical problem of aging? Then bioengineer cures and therapies for the human body. Want to solve climate change? Build millions of micro fusion reactors for every neighborhood. Want to feed the world? Harness the energy from those reactors to power UV lights for vertical indoor farms for billions of people. Want to make the world multi-planetary? Build a production facility in Texas that can build thousands of Starships that can carry over 100 tonnes to space at a time. Want to simulate and model any physical system to an arbitrary level of accuracy? Create a universal virtual-reality generator using a universal quantum computer; that would make possible the simulation of the complex folding of proteins for the development of cures for a multitude of medical problems. Want to extend virtual-reality even further? Figure out brain interface technology so we can plug into the world of The Matrix (1999), without the AI overlords. These are the playgrounds of the new optimists.

OPTIMISTS OF YORE

The path to the optimists of our age is laid down by an unbroken chain of people standing on each other's shoulders. This colossal circus act of global civilization creators can be seen in the history of optimists such as: Karl Popper (1902-1994), Richard Feynman (1918-1988), Albert Einstein (1878-1955), Alan Turing (1912-1954), Marie Curie (1867-1934), Charles Darwin (1802-1882), Michael Faraday (1791-1867), William Godwin (1756-1836), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and all the way back to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). To name just a few of my favorites.

THE CONSTRUCTORS OF THEORY

The optimists of our day create structures. Some are abstract like the powerful theoretical frameworks of David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto. They are currently challenging the ideas of the naysayers who argue that stagnation is the rule within modern physics. Their work on Constructor Theory makes amazing connections between theories of information, evolution, thermodynamics, and even knowledge itself. The theory is based on a fundamental frame, of what is possible and what is impossible, along with an explanation of why or why not, in terms of specific laws of physics. This is a huge shift from the current view of fundamental physics which is mostly concerned with the mechanics of particles and their movements, not abstract things like evolution and information, let alone something like knowledge itself and how that could be seen within the laws of physics.

The current theory is stuck in an inadequate mode of explaining a thing. Modern physics starts with initial conditions such as where a star or particle is and where it is going to move to, which works for those systems but falls short for understanding information, life, and knowledge in terms of laws of physics. Constructor Theory gives physicists a new mode of explanation. From the movement of stars and quarks, to the workings of evolution at the level of information in genes and memes. It does so by explaining things in terms of possible and impossible tasks, and why those tasks can happen or not due to certain laws of physics. This is a growing beacon of hope for digging down deeper into Feynman's infinite onion of nature:

“Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is. ... My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world.”

OPTIMISTS OF DEATH

As we go further down the rabbit hole you will find that as you read these words there are thousands of people fighting to save your life. Well, it's you and every other human who has the tragic fate of being born into a body that decays and then dies. The medical problem of aging is being spearheaded by Aubrey de Grey and his SENS Research Foundation, along with many other biotech companies and research universities around our planet. They view the body as a machine with parts that can be fixed, and fixed without any upper bound. The Book Ending Aging (2007), Affiliate link: (Support us by buying here), explains the finite set of the types of damage that happens in a human body and the paths to outright solving each one of the medical problems until we create evermore healthy bodies. This scientific and humanitarian cause is one of the most undervalued human endeavors at the moment. And as we live longer and longer we are starting to realize more and more how much more there is to explore; from the human body to beyond the atmosphere and into space.

AD ASTRA

Voyaging to the stars will give society opportunities to get closer and closer to the stories of science fiction. The saying 'the sky's the limit' will soon be a saying that will show your age. Creativity and the laws of physics are the only limits. Elon Musk has said as much in his Caltech commencement address, "Don't let anything hold you back. Imagination is the limit." His first-principles approach to making progress shines in his engineering work at SpaceX and Tesla. In those companies, he and his team outcompete their rivals by asking what laws of physics say is possible and then building from those fundamentals.

While these brilliant optimists have incredible power to shape our civilization, there remain unchecked systems of power that are slowing us down. We are preventing billions of optimists from being created. The education of our children slowly removes the capacity for creative thought. We waste and destroy much of our children's incredible potential. Musk has noticed this and has made changes for his children and the kids of the employees at his companies. Speaking about his school Ad Astra (Latin for "to the stars") that he created, he said, "There aren't any grades, making all of the children go in the same grade at the same time [is] like an assembly line." These are changes in the right direction. Mastery learning, project-based learning, and learning without coercion are what is going to help create future optimists. We need more optimists—people who follow the fun, who have fun figuring out how the world works, who follow it so far they end up creating new parts of the world that have been left unimagined by a pessimistic world. The optimism of the sort here is the only sustainable way to advance the speed and growth of knowledge.

EXPLANATORY JOY

The fun and the joy of discovery and creation can be seen in all the people mentioned above. Musk started out programming computer games because he really enjoyed them. David Deutsch told a story on the Making Sense Podcast, when he met Richard Feynman for the first time and began telling him about the first algorithm for a quantum computer, but Feynman stopped him so he could run to a blackboard to have the joy of finding it out for himself. He reproduced the algorithm to Deutsch's amazement. Marletto can be heard here joyfully musing about evolution, "Living things have puzzled and challenged us since the dawn of our species. Even in the light of our modern scientific understanding, they seem remarkable. A merlin falcon hunting its prey, a hummingbird suspended in the air beside a flower...." This deep playful connection runs throughout the best thinkers of our day.

The lines that we as a society choose to draw coalesces into an ever-work-in-progress portrait we call civilization. We can either slow down and break the unbroken chain of progress that humanity has achieved since the enlightenment or we can keep making connections. Connections to each other through our ideas, our kindness, our technologies, our thinking, for the sake of living so well we stretch out into the cosmos, and dive gleefully into the rich contents of our minds. The project of Infinite Days is going to highlight and connect the rational ideas of the like that the optimists here have put forward. Yes, we too can see so many broken parts of the world. We understand that solutions equal progress, we start with a problem and create solutions and move forward to better problems. It is our mission at Infinite Days to help bring about this brilliance so that we may shower in the abundance all around us.

If you want to keep following these lines of thinking, I'm on twitter @JesseNichols.