Conjecture Institute’s Fourth Book Is Live!
The Farthest Reaches: Why People Are the Most Important Entities in the Universe, by Conjecture Institute Ambassador Brett Hall, is now available in paperback!
Conjecture Institute’s Fourth Book Is Live!
The Farthest Reaches: Why People Are the Most Important Entities in the Universe, by Conjecture Institute Ambassador Brett Hall, is now available in paperback!
Get your copy here.
Kindle version will be available soon.
In a universe filled with violent supernovae, an untold number of species, and black holes far larger than the Earth, can people really be more significant than all of them in the grand scheme of things? If so, what is it about people that grants them such privileged status?
In The Farthest Reaches, Brett expounds on the concept of explanatory universality, as first explained by physicist and philosopher (and Conjecture Institute Advisor) David Deutsch in his book, The Beginning of Infinity. It is this characteristic that grants people their primacy in the cosmos. This ability to explain anything that can be explained, to understand anything that can be understood, is more significant than a star’s titanic gravitational pull, a gene’s ability to replicate itself, or a computer’s ability to execute calculations at the speed of electrons.
Beyond explaining this idea, Brett applies the concept of explanatory universality to a number of contentious debates in society, such as: school, IQ, multiculturalism, mental illness, evolutionary psychology, immigration, and many more. Such is the beauty of a deep idea: it has surprising, counterintuitive, and beautiful implications for seemingly faraway areas of life and the world at large.
The Farthest Reaches is an expansion of Brett’s podcast series of the same name.
Note: The ideas that Brett writes about in The Farthest Reaches are not grounded in religion or mysticism, nor are they a matter of self-help. Rather, the ideas in this book follow from our deepest theories in computer science, physics, and epistemology.
Conjecture Institute Office Hours
Listen to last week’sOffice Hours, featuring Fellow Carlos De la Guardia and his research into artificial general intelligence.
Physics
In light of a new proposal for a quantum computing architecture, Fellow Maria Violaris breaks down how exactly we’ve been getting closer and closer to breaking encryption with quantum computers over the years.
Conjecture University
President Logan Chipkin’s Constructor Theory, Module 3: Four Laws of Thermodynamics, is now live.
Read/listen on our website, X, or Substack.
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