“Jump to Universality” Reading

I found the examples that Deutsch used in the text to be fascinating, as I had never perceived, for instance, language and the numeric system in such a way. The explanation for some examples were difficult to comprehend. For instance, when discussing language he claimed “a rule works by exploiting regularities in the language, it implicitly encodes those regularities, and so contains more knowledge than the list.” What did he mean by “exploiting regularities” and “implicitly encoding”? Some ideas were hard to comprehend because he communicated in such abstract terms, not always with further explanation. I found the general, overall message to be extremely interesting. How small changes in a system to meet a narrow purpose happened to contribute to the universality of something, without intentionally meaning to contribute to universality. I always thought universality was intentional. Instead, I learnt we didn’t achieve universality by trying to deliberately make something universal. It was interesting how he offered a very limited explanation for why communities didn’t attempt to reach universality earlier, why they were avoiding universality on purpose. The one explanation that stood out to me from the few was the fact that the communities’ livelihood would be threatened by a system that was too easy to learn. Perhaps the increase in trust, or the colonisation and globalisation of the world, makes it less threatening to aspire for universality.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *