read on nov. 2024 and reformated on may 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity 1 The Reach of Explanations 1 2 Closer to Reality 34 3 The Spark 42 4 Creation 78 5 The Reality of Abstractions 107 6 The Jump to Universality 125 7 Artificial Creativity 148 8 A Window on Infinity 164 9 Optimism 196 10 A Dream of Socrates 223 11 The Multiverse 258 12 A Physicist's History of Bad Philosophy 305 13 Choices 326 14 Why are Flowers Beautiful? 353 15 The Evolution of Culture 369 16 The Evolution of Creativity 398 17 Unsustainable 418 18 The Beginning 443 But genes can pass from one generation to the next without ever being expressed in behavior. Why? Because in sexual reproduction, a random selection of genes is chosen from both parents, including genes that no longer create active behavior. These genes can be replicated for many generations, before either dying out or resurfacing in expressed behavior. economist Kenneth Arrow did something radical. He proved a theorem that appears to deny the very possibility of representative democracy. His argument was that joint decision-making, the process of multiple people agreeing on something for a group, is necessarily irrational. To prove his theorem, Arrow laid down five elementary principles he deemed necessary for groups to make rational and democratic decisions about their preferences in a way that reflects the will of the people. For example, one of these is the no-dictator principle. It says that the preference of one individual cannot be taken as the preference of the group. So, if you have a preference for, say, hamburgers but everyone else prefers pizza, then the group's preference cannot be for hamburgers. Another principle is that if the members of the group have identical preferences, then the group must have those preferences too. If every individual wants pizza, the group's preference must be for pizza. However, Arrow proved that it is in fact impossible to define the group's preferences in a way that satisfies all five principles, making joint decision-making necessarily irrational. This finding actually won him a Nobel Prize. Common sense says that when we make a decision, we weigh the evidence that each option presents. But there is something fundamentally wrong with this perception of decision-making. It conceives of decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options. However, at the heart of decision-making is the **creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones**. So, it's not a matter of mere rational comparison.