Knowledge Makes Us Converge
We are channels through which information flows—as are histories, as are all relatively autonomous objects. But sentient beings are unusual channels: we create knowledge.
And this, physicist David Deutsch writes, has dramatic effects not only within our own history but across the multiverse itself.
Knowledge grows through error-correction. There are infinitely more ways to be wrong than right. A wrong theory about physics will lead you in one direction; another wrong theory will lead you somewhere else entirely. But the right theory—the true one—pulls everyone toward the same place. "Knowledge-creating entities," Deutsch writes, "rapidly become more alike in different histories than other entities."
Two civilizations separated by galaxies, working independently to understand the same universe, will converge on the same truths. The laws of thermodynamics don't change depending on who discovers them. This is why knowledge is so powerful: it's a force that makes minds across space and time—and even across different histories in the multiverse—become more similar, drawn together by truth itself.