Problems

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

I have settled on a simple test for judging claims, including Dennett’s, to have explained the nature of consciousness (or any other computational task): if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it. Turing invented his test in the hope of bypassing all those philosophical problems. In other words, he hoped that the functionality could be achieved before it was explained. Unfortunately it is very rare for practical solutions to fundamental problems to be discovered without any explanation of why they work. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The biologist Peter Medawar described science as ‘the art of the soluble’, but the same applies to all forms of knowledge. All kinds of creative thought involve judgements about what approaches might or might not work. Gaining or losing interest in particular problems or sub-problems is part of the creative process and itself constitutes problem-solving. So whether ‘problems are soluble’ does not depend on whether any given question can be answered, or answered by a particular thinker on a particular day. But if progress ever depended on violating a law of physics, then ‘problems are soluble’ would be false. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The theory reaches out, as it were, from its finite origins inside one brain that has been affected only by scraps of patchy evidence from a small part of one hemisphere of one planet – to infinity. This reach of explanations is another meaning of ‘the beginning of infinity’. It is the ability of some of them to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Not only is there constant backtracking, but the many subproblems all remain simultaneously active and are addressed opportunistically. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

I think that there is only one way to science – or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part – unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children… — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them. It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible to — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Some philosophers confine the term ‘moral’ to problems about how one should treat other people. But such problems are continuous with problems of individuals choosing what sort of life to lead, which is why I adopt the more inclusive definition. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The Easter Island civilization collapsed because no human situation is free of new problems, and static societies are inherently unstable in the face of new problems. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’ – The ‘perspiration’ phase can always be automated. – The knowledge-friendliness of the physical world. – People are universal constructors. – The beginning of the open-ended creation of explanations. – The environments that could create an open-ended stream of knowledge, if suitably primed – i.e. almost all environments. – The fact that new explanations create new problems. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

To avoid misunderstanding, let me stress that experience provides problems only by bringing already-existing ideas into conflict. It does not, of course, provide theories. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Thus we acquire ever more knowledge of reality by solving problems and finding better explanations. But when all is said and done, problems and explanations are located within the human mind, which owes its reasoning power to a fallible brain, and its supply of information to fallible senses. What, then, entitles a human mind to draw conclusions about objective, external reality from its own purely subjective experience and reason? — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

You have to live the solution, and to set about solving the new problems that this creates. It is because of this unsustainability that the island of Britain, with a far less hospitable climate than the subtropical Easter Island, now hosts a civilization with at least three times the population density that Easter Island had at its zenith, and at an enormously higher standard of living. Appropriately enough, this civilization has knowledge of how to live well without the forests that once covered much of Britain. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Here is another misconception in the Garden of Eden myth: that the supposed unproblematic state would be a good state to be in. Some theologians have denied this, and I agree with them: an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Happiness is a state of continually solving one’s problems, they conjecture. Unhappiness is caused by being chronically baulked in one’s attempts to do that. And solving problems itself depends on knowing how; so, external factors aside, unhappiness is caused by not knowing how. — David Deutsch, N/A

Rational: Attempting to solve problems by seeking good explanations; actively pursuing error-correction by creating criticisms of both existing ideas and new proposals. The West The political, moral, economic and intellectual culture that has been growing around the Enlightenment values of science, reason and freedom. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The conditions of ‘fairness’ as conceived in the various social-choice problems are misconceptions analogous to empiricism: they are all about the input to the decision-making process – who participates, and how their opinions are integrated to form the ‘preference of the group’. A rational analysis must concentrate instead on how the rules and institutions contribute to the removal of bad policies and rulers, and to the creation of new options. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

There is a saying that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure. But that is only when one knows what to prevent. No precautions can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. To prepare for those, there is nothing we can do but increase our ability to put things right if they go wrong. Trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

I have argued that the laws of nature cannot possibly impose any bound on progress: by the argument of Chapters 1 and 3, denying this is tantamount to invoking the supernatural. In other words, progress is sustainable, indefinitely. But only by people who engage in a particular kind of thinking and behaviour – the problem-solving and problem-creating kind characteristic of the Enlightenment. And that requires the optimism of a dynamic society. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World