Duy Nguyen

"We limit ourselves to the attainable, and this means the renunciation of all other potentialities. One man loses a valuable piece of his past, another a valuable piece of his future."

— C.G. Jung, The Stages of Life

What is possible in a lifetime?

I've always asked this question. Like David Deutsch.

In The Fabric of Reality, he opens with a thought he had as a child and never gave up on — that every modern child is told the same thing: in ancient times a single learned person could know everything that was known, but we have moved past such a world; there is now too much knowledge for any one mind.

I found this surprising and disappointing, and simply did not want it to be true.

Deutsch spent most of the book dismantling it, and showing me his answer.

Knowing, he insisted, is not memorizing — he had no wish to track "the fall of every sparrow." He meant understanding: having the right explanations. One simple theory, he writes, can cover "an infinity of indigestible facts."

An AI researcher cannot recall every training technique, but understands the bitter scaling behind Chinchilla and test-time compute. New theories absorb their predecessors, just like Newton subsumed into Einstein — "fewer, deeper and more general." As for Deutsch, it was Popper, Dawkins, Turing, Everett. As for me, I'd try to weave it through this tiny space I occupy on the web. But the essence is: as knowledge grows, its structure gets simpler, not harder, to hold.

"The proposition that I refused to believe as a child," Deutsch writes, "is indeed false, and practically the opposite is true. We are not heading away from a state in which one person could understand everything that is understood, but towards it."