19 Nov 2025
After reading my summary of Chapter 4 of The Fabric of Reality, my friend Michael challenged me to distil David Deutsch’s core mental model into something the public can understand - clear enough to be accessible, but not so simple that it becomes wrong.
This article answers that challenge. Using a familiar, everyday scenario, I will show why you should treat software as real - even though it is invisible, intangible, and usually described as virtual.
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14 Nov 2025
How can we know what’s real or not? That’s the key question David Deutsch sets out to answer in Chapter 4 of The Fabric of Reality (TFoR).
David offers logical refutations for the recurring errors found in theories that claim to describe reality. He then explains a positive criterion for deciding what is real.
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11 Nov 2025
After months of digging - investigations, confidential conversations, FOI requests - I can finally lay out a comprehensive, end-to-end, documented account of how cybersecurity professionalization emerged in Australia.
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03 Nov 2025
Where does knowledge come from? How do we decide that one explanation is better than another? These are foundational questions across every field of human inquiry.
In The Fabric of Reality (TFoR), David Deutsch presents a powerful defense of Popperian epistemology — the view that knowledge grows through bold conjectures and the systematic elimination of errors. Deutsch argues that this framework is one of humanity’s four most fundamental explanatory theories, alongside quantum physics, evolution by natural selection, and the theory of computation.
In this article, I will outline what I understand Popperian epistemology to assert.
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30 Oct 2025
In The Fabric of Reality (TFoR), chapter 3, David Deutsch mounts a direct critique of inductivism.
This is worth understanding because inductive reasoning is still widely used to form beliefs about reality, and it gives the illusion of justification and plays no role in how genuine knowledge is created.
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