|
Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.
|
{'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.
|
{'optimism', 'person'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time.
|
{'interpretation', 'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.
|
{'problem', 'creativity'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.
|
{'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.
|
{'infinite', 'knowledge', inf}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Like an explosive awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future. If we want to, we could be that spark.
|
{'knowledge', 'universe', 'gene', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.
|
{'decision-making'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our ‘wall’.
|
{'knowledge', 'conjecture'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe.
|
{'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rulers or policies without violence when they are.
|
{'institution'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract, as a topic in pure mathematics. This is to miss the point of it. Computers are physical objects, and computations are physical processes. What computers can or cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone, and not by pure mathematics.
|
{'computer', 'mathematics', 'physics', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.
|
{'parochialism', 'knowledge', 'universe', 'explanation', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
History is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.
|
{'biogeography', 'wealth', 'history', 'science'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.
|
{'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.
|
{'interpretation', 'explainer'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What
|
{'explanation', 'creativity'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Sparta has no philosophers. That’s because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don’t want it. Another difference: they don’t honour living poets, only dead ones. Why? Because dead poets don’t write anything new, but live ones do. A third difference: their education system is insanely harsh; ours is famously lax. Why? Because they don’t want their kids to dare to question anything, so that they won’t ever think of changing anything.
|
{'education'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
It follows that humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.
|
{'knowledge', 'behaviourism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever
|
{'explainer', 'optimism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Although, through the vagaries of international politics, Athens became independent and democratic again soon afterwards, and continued for several generations to produce art, literature and philosophy, it was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.
|
{'rationality', 'optimism', 'gene', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The most important of all limitations on knowledge – creation is that we cannot prophecy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.
|
{'prediction', 'knowledge', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But in any case, understanding is one of the higher functions of the human mind and brain, and a unique one. Many other physical systems, such as animals’ brains, computers and other machines, can assimilate facts and act upon them. But at present we know of nothing that is capable of understanding an explanation – or of wanting one in the first place – other than a human mind.
|
{'explanation', 'computer', 'physics', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The scientific revolution was part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment, which also brought progress in other fields, especially moral and political philosophy, and in the institutions of society. Unfortunately, the term ‘the Enlightenment’ is used by historians and philosophers to denote a variety of different trends, some of them violently opposed to each other... But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.
|
{'enlightenment', 'knowledge', inf, 'institution', 'infinite', 'emergence', 'history'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Arthur C. Clarke once remarked that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. This is true, but slightly misleading. It is stated from the point of view of a pre-scientific thinker, which is the wrong way round. The fact is that to anyone who understands what virtual reality is, even genuine magic would be indistinguishable from technology, for there is no room for magic in a comprehensible reality. Anything that seems incomprehensible is regarded by science merely as evidence that there is something we have not yet understood, be it a conjuring trick, advanced technology or a new law of physics.
|
{'science', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes.
|
{'explainer', 'universe', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.
|
{'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden, and hence fallible, as all our theories are.
|
{'interpretation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The only uniquely significant thing about humans (whether in the cosmic scheme of things or according to any rational human criterion) is our ability to create new explanations, and we have that in common with all people. You do not become less of a person if you lose a limb in an accident; it is only if you lose your brain that you do. Changing our genes in order to improve our lives and to facilitate further improvements is no different in this regard from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes.
|
{'huamn', 'person'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned.
|
{'justificationism', 'quale', 'creativity', 'explainer', 'conjecture', 'rational', 'explanation', 'decision-making', 'refutation', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest.
|
{'explanation', 'creativity'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Amending the ‘data’, or rejecting some as erroneous, is a frequent concomitant of scientific discovery, and the crucial ‘data’ cannot even be obtained until theory tells us what to look for and how and why.
|
{'data', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future.
|
{'problem'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.
|
{'society', 'optimism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
A rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect, and persuade others, that a leader or policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are.
|
{'government', 'rationality', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.
|
{'government'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'error-correction'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'computer', 'problem', 'explainer', 'explanation', 'program', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem', 'knowledge', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.
|
{'darwin', 'replicator', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Using our explanations, we ‘see’ right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people’s behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That
|
{'behaviourism', 'gene', 'conjecture', 'explanation', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
A population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.
|
{'replicator'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Whenever we observe anything – a scientific instrument or a galaxy or a human being – what we are actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger object that extends some way into other universes.
|
{'universe', 'instrumentalism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Copenhagen Interpretation: Niels Bohr’s combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.
|
{'interpretation', 'instrumentalism', 'quantum', 'anthropocentric'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
[Jared Diamond's] mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs [in his book Guns, Germs and Steel] not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape.
|
{'explanation', 'interpretation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The Enlightenment [was the start of] a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.
|
{'explanation', 'enlightenment', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Conjectures are the products of creative imagination. But the problem with imagination is that it can create fiction much more easily than truth. As I have suggested, historically, virtually all human attempts to explain experience in terms of a wider reality have indeed been fiction, in the form of myths, dogma and mistaken common sense – and the rule of testability is an insufficient check on such mistakes. But the quest for good explanations does the job: inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found; discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.
|
{'history', 'creativity', 'problem', 'explainer', 'conjecture', 'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
They are also about coherence, elegance and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity, though none of those things is easy to define either.
|
{'elegance', 'implicit'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The whole motivation for seeking a perfectly secure foundation for mathematics was mistaken. It was a form of justificationism. Mathematics is characterized by its use of proofs in the same way that science is characterized by its use of experimental testing; in neither case is that the object of the exercise. The object of mathematics is to understand – to explain – abstract entities. Proof is primarily a means of ruling out false explanations; and sometimes it also provides mathematical truths that need to be explained. But, like all fields in which progress is possible, mathematics seeks not random truths but good explanations.
|
{'justificationism', 'mathematics', 'explainer', 'science', 'proof', 'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent.
|
{'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.
|
{'optimism', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time.
|
{'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.
|
{'quale', 'explainer', 'rational', 'rationality', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
If two programs respond in the same way to every possible action by the user, then they render the same environment; if they would respond perceptibly differently to even one possible action, they render different environments.
|
{'program'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The fundamental theories of modern physics explain the world in jarringly counter-intuitive ways. For example, most non-physicists consider it self-evident that when you hold your arm out horizontally you can feel the force of gravity pulling it downwards. But you cannot. The existence of a force of gravity is, astonishingly, denied by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, one of the two deepest theories of physics. This says that the only force on your arm in that situation is that which you yourself are exerting, upwards, to keep it constantly accelerating away from the straightest possible path in a curved region of spacetime
|
{'physics', 'relativism', 'gene', 'explainer', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
This inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusions.
|
{'induction', 'inductivism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Instrumentalism is rather like reductionism except that, instead of rejecting only high-level explanations, it tries to reject all explanations. The Principle of Mediocrity is a milder form of reductionism: it rejects only high-level explanations that involve people. While I am on the subject of bad philosophical doctrines with moral overtones, let me add holism, a sort of mirror image of reductionism. It is the idea that the only valid explanations (or at least the only significant ones) are of parts in terms of wholes. Holists also often share with reductionists the mistaken belief that science can only (or should only) be reductive, and therefore they oppose much of science. All those doctrines are irrational for the same reason: they advocate accepting or rejecting theories on grounds other than whether they are good explanations.
|
{'education', 'reductionism', 'holism', 'instrumentalism', 'science', 'explanation', 'rational', 'rationality', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Very little in nature is detectable by unaided human senses.
|
{'people', 'nature'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem-solving', 'knowledge', 'creativity', 'problem', 'science', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Its quest for good explanations corrects the errors, allows for the biases and misleading perspectives, and fills in the gaps.
|
{'explanation', 'error-correction'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of. And when we can change them no more, we have understood some objective truth. And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real. We are like gods!
|
{'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'explanation', 'problem', 'infinite', inf}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.
|
{'explanation', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Thus, although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress.
|
{'optimism', 'explainer', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between.
|
{'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods. So the situation was that all the sources from which it was generally believed knowledge came actually knew very little, and were mistaken about most of the things that they claimed to know. And therefore progress depended on learning how to reject their authority. This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto ‘Nullius in verba’, which means something like ‘Take no one’s word for it.
|
{'enlightenment', 'knowledge', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.
|
{'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good
|
{'decision-making'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But that is really the least of the irrational attributes of proportional representation. A more important one – which is shared by even the mildest of proportional systems – is that they assign disproportionate power in the legislature to the third-largest party, and often to even smaller parties. It works like this. It is rare (in any system) for a single party to receive an overall majority of votes. Hence, if votes are reflected proportionately in the legislature, no legislation can be passed unless some of the parties cooperate to pass it, and no government can be formed unless some of them form a coalition. Sometimes the two largest parties manage to do this, but the most common outcome is that the leader of the third-largest party holds the ‘balance of power’ and decides which of the two largest parties shall join it in government, and which shall be sidelined, and for how long. That means that it is correspondingly harder for the electorate to decide which party, and which policies, will be removed from power.
|
{'government', 'rationality', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.
|
{'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.
|
{'institution'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative?
|
{'error-correction'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.
|
{'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
There can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors.
|
{'explainer', 'constructor', 'universe', 'person'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
There is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism
|
{'criticism', 'conjecture'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Beware the difference between prediction and prophecy. Prophecy purports to know things which cannot be known.
|
{'prediction'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The last room number [in Hilbert's Infinite Hotel Paradox] is not infinity. First of all, there is no last room.
|
{'infinite', inf}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Again we were too parochial, and were led to the false conclusion that knowledge-bearing entities can be physically identical to non-knowledge-bearing ones; and this in turn cast doubt on the fundamental status of knowledge. But now we have come almost full circle. We can see that the ancient idea that living matter has special physical properties was almost true: it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the multiverse.
|
{'multiverse', 'parochialism', 'knowledge', 'universe', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
From the least parochial perspectives available to us, people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not ‘supported’ by their environments, but support themselves by creating knowledge. Once they have suitable knowledge (essentially, the knowledge of the Enlightenment), they are capable of sparking unlimited further progress.
|
{'enlightenment', 'parochialism', 'knowledge', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge. Thus ‘how do we know…?’ is transformed into ‘by what authority do we claim…?
|
{'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Consider also the revolutionary utopians, who typically achieve only destruction and stagnation. Though they are blind optimists, what defines them as utopians is their pessimism that their supposed utopia, or their violent proposals for achieving and entrenching it, could ever be improved upon. Additionally,
|
{'optimism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
If it turns out that all this time we have merely been studying the programming of a cosmic planetarium, then that would merely mean that we have been studying a smaller portion of reality than we thought. So what? Such things have happened many times in the history of science, as our horizons have expanded beyond the Earth to include the solar system, our Galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on, and, of course, parallel universes.
|
{'universe', 'science', 'program'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The fact that the principles of neo-Darwinist theory are, from a certain perspective, self-evident has itself been used as a criticism of the theory. For instance, if the theory must be true, how can it be testable? One reply, often attributed to Haldane, is that the whole theory would be refuted by the discovery of a single fossilized rabbit in a stratum of Cambrian rock. However, that is misleading. The import of such an observation would depend on what explanations were available under the given circumstances. For instance, misidentifications of fossils, and of strata, have sometimes been made and would have to be ruled out by good explanations before one could call the discovery ‘a fossilized rabbit in Cambrian rock’.
|
{'explanation', 'refutation', 'darwin'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Not only is there constant backtracking, but the many subproblems all remain simultaneously active and are addressed opportunistically.
|
{'problem'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The argument of Chapter 2, applied to any interference phenomenon destroys the classical idea that there is only one universe. Logically, the possibility of complex quantum computations adds nothing to a case that is already unanswerable. But it does add psychological impact. With Shor’s algorithm, the argument has been writ very large. To those who still cling to a single-universe world-view, I issue this challenge: explain how Shor’s algorithm works. I do not merely mean predict that it will work, which is merely a matter of solving a few uncontroversial equations. I mean provide an explanation. When Shor’s algorithm has factorized a number, using 10500 or so times the computational resources that can be seen to be present, where was the number factorized? There are only about 1080 atoms in the entire visible universe, an utterly minuscule number compared with 10500. So if the visible universe were the extent of physical reality, physical reality would not even remotely contain the resources required to factorize such a large number. Who did factorize it, then? How, and where, was the computation performed?
|
{'prediction', 'computer', 'quantum', 'universe', 'explainer', 'explanation', 'physics', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Shoddy explanations that yield correct predictions are two a penny, as UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy-theorists and pseudo-scientists of every variety should (but never do) bear in mind.
|
{'explanation', 'prediction', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found; discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.
|
{'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies. But compromises – amalgams of the policies of the contributors – have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it.
|
{'government', 'explainer', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one’s own and others’.
|
{'optimism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The system used to elect members of the legislatures of most countries in the British political tradition is that each district (or ‘constituency’) in the country is entitled to one seat in the legislature, and that seat goes to the candidate with the largest number of votes in that district. This is called the plurality voting system (‘plurality’ meaning ‘largest number of votes’) – often called the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, because there is no prize for any runner-up, and no second round of voting (both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake of increasing the proportionality of the outcomes). Plurality voting typically ‘over-represents’ the two largest parties, compared with the proportion of votes they receive. Moreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox, and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The meaning of life is something we are using creativity to discover, to build. We can’t find the meaning of life in the world ‘out there’, nor just by pure thought, or by reference to an authority. What we have to do is form explanations about what is right and wrong, what is better and worse, what is beautiful and ugly, and hone those theories, while also trying to meet them. At any one moment, we will meet them imperfectly, just like scientific theories, at any one moment, are only an imperfect explanation of what the physical world is like. But, through criticism and conjecture and seeking the truth, we can resolve the errors in what we had previously thought and thereby make progress.
|
{'physics', 'creativity', 'conjecture', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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…
|
{'problem', 'science'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Yet, over time, the conclusions that science has drawn have become ever truer to reality.
|
{'science'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
There is an explanatory link between ought and is, and this provides one of the ways in which reason can indeed address moral issues.
|
{'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
It would be astonishing if the details of a primitive, static society’s collapse had any relevance to hidden dangers that may be facing our open, dynamic and scientific society, let alone what we should do about them.
|
{'static', 'dynamic', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety.
|
{'enlightenment'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
If a parrot had copied snatches of Popper’s voice at a lecture, it would certainly have copied them with his Austrian accent: parrots are incapable of copying an utterance without its accent. But a human student might well be unable to copy it with the accent.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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
|
{'quale', 'knowledge', 'problem', 'physics', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
As I said, imitation is not at the heart of human meme replication.
|
{'replicator', 'meme', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Suppose that the lecturer had repeatedly returned to a certain key idea, and had expressed it with different words and gestures each time. The parrot’s (or ape’s) job would be that much harder than imitating only the first instance; the student’s much easier, because to a human observer each different way of putting the idea would convey additional knowledge.
|
{'knowledge', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent. Our Final Century makes the case that the period since the mid twentieth century has been the first in which technology has been capable of destroying civilization. But that is not so. Many civilizations in history were destroyed by the simple technologies of fire and the sword. Indeed, of all civilizations in history, the overwhelming majority have been destroyed, some intentionally, some as a result of plague or natural disaster. Virtually all of them could have avoided the catastrophes that destroyed them if only they had possessed a little additional knowledge, such as improved agricultural or military technology, better hygiene, or better political or economic institutions. Very few, if any, could have been saved by greater caution about innovation. In fact most had enthusiastically implemented the precautionary principle.
|
{'institution', 'knowledge', 'theory', 'culture'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.
|
{'problem', 'knowledge', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
And they carry much the same content: not only is the universe full of evidence, it is full of the same evidence everywhere. All people in the universe, once they have understood enough to free themselves from parochial obstacles, face essentially the same opportunities. This is an underlying unity in the physical world more significant than all the dissimilarities I have described between our environment and a typical one: the fundamental laws of nature are so uniform, and evidence about them so ubiquitous, and the connections between understanding and control so intimate, that, whether we are on our parochial home planet or a hundred million light years away in the intergalactic plasma, we can do the same science and make the same progress.
|
{'parochialism', 'universe', 'science', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Most ancient accounts of the reality beyond our everyday experience were not only false, they had a radically different character from modern ones: they were anthropocentric. That is to say, they centred on human beings, and more broadly on people – entities with intentions and human-like thoughts – which included powerful, supernatural people such as spirits and gods.
|
{'anthropocentric'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The real situation is that people need inexplicit knowledge to understand laws and other explicit statements, not vice versa.
|
{'inexplicit', 'explicit', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Therefore, if the ancient Greeks had known that a warm growing season occurs in Australia at the very moment when, as they believed, Demeter is at her saddest, they could have inferred that there was something wrong with their explanation of seasons.
|
{'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'static', 'problem'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The very phrase ‘It’s a matter of taste’ is used interchangeably with ‘There is no objective truth of the matter
|
{'truth'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'constructor', 'knowledge', 'problem', 'universe', 'rational', 'explanation', 'rationality', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The Royal Society, for instance, was founded in 1660 – a development that would hardly have been conceivable a generation earlier.
|
{'rationality', 'gene', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The sea [of] change in the values and patterns of thinking of a whole community of thinkers, which brought about a sustained and accelerating creation of knowledge, happened only once in history, with the Enlightenment and its scientific revolution. An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.
|
{'culture', 'pattern', 'enlightenment', 'knowledge', 'sustain', 'rational', 'explanation', 'west', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But, in reality, scientific theories are not ‘derived’ from anything. We do not read them in nature, nor does nature write them into us. They are guesses – bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them.
|
{'science', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
We do not begin with ‘white paper’ at birth, but with inborn expectations and intentions and an innate ability to improve upon them using thought and experience. Experience is indeed essential to science, but its role is different from that supposed by empiricism. It is not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. That is what ‘learning from experience’ is.
|
{'science', 'conjecture', 'theory', 'empiricism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
It is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable. Bad explanations are equally useless whether they are testable or not.
|
{'explanation', 'quale'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
This has given rise to a misconception known as ‘Occam’s razor’ (named after the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Occam, but dating back to antiquity), namely that one should always seek the ‘simplest explanation’. One statement of it is ‘Do not multiply assumptions beyond necessity.’ However, there are plenty of very simple explanations that are nevertheless easily variable (such as ‘Demeter did it’). And, while assumptions ‘beyond necessity’ make a theory bad by definition, there have been many mistaken ideas of what is ‘necessary’ in a theory. Instrumentalism, for instance, considers explanation itself unnecessary, and so do many other bad philosophies of science.
|
{'explanation', 'science', 'instrumentalism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. It is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed: It trivially implies that prediction alone is insufficient. Somewhat less trivially, it leads to the rejection of authority, because if we adopt a theory on authority, that means that we would also have accepted a range of different theories on authority. And hence it also implies the need for a tradition of criticism.
|
{'prediction', 'enlightenment', 'gene', 'knowledge', 'science', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
What if you’d rather not know? You may not like these predictions. Your friends and colleagues may ridicule them. You may try to modify the explanation so that it will not make them, without spoiling its agreement with observations and with other ideas for which you have no good alternatives. You will fail. That is what a good explanation will do for you: it makes it harder for you to fool yourself.
|
{'explanation', 'prediction'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
So there is no resource-management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories. But there are ideas that reliably cause disasters, and one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned. The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes: removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters.
|
{'institution', 'rational', 'explanation', 'rationality', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
For example, one of the triumphs of twentieth-century progress was the discovery of antibiotics, which ended many of the plagues and endemic illnesses that had caused suffering and death since time immemorial. However, it has been pointed out almost from the outset by critics of ‘so-called progress’ that this triumph may only be temporary, because of the evolution of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. This is often held up as an indictment of – to give it its broad context – Enlightenment hubris. We need lose only one battle in this war of science against bacteria and their weapon, evolution (so the argument goes), to be doomed, because our other ‘so-called progress’ – such as cheap worldwide air travel, global trade, enormous cities – makes us more vulnerable than ever before to a global pandemic that could exceed the Black Death in destructiveness and even cause our extinction.
|
{'enlightenment', 'science'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But all triumphs are temporary. So to use this fact to reinterpret progress as ‘so-called progress’ is bad philosophy. The fact that reliance on specific antibiotics is unsustainable is only an indictment from the point of view of someone who expects a sustainable lifestyle. But in reality there is no such thing. Only progress is sustainable.
|
{'interpretation', 'sustain'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Good/bad explanation: An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.
|
{'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
We do so by seeking good explanations – explanations that are hard to vary in the sense that changing the details would ruin the explanation. This, not experimental testing, was the decisive factor in the scientific revolution, and also in the unique, rapid, sustained progress in other fields that have participated in the Enlightenment. That was a rebellion against authority which, unlike most such rebellions, tried not to seek authoritative justifications for theories, but instead set up a tradition of criticism.
|
{'justificationism', 'enlightenment', 'sustain', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The prophetic approach can see only what one might do to postpone disaster, namely improve sustainability: drastically reduce and disperse the population, make travel difficult, suppress contact between different geographical areas. A society which did this would not be able to afford the kind of scientific research that would lead to new antibiotics. Its members would hope that their lifestyle would protect them instead. But note that this lifestyle did not, when it was tried, prevent the Black Death. Nor would it cure cancer.
|
{'sustain', 'education'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Both the future of civilization and the outcome of a game of Russian roulette are unpredictable, but in different senses and for entirely unrelated reasons. Russian roulette is merely random. Although we cannot predict the outcome, we do know what the possible outcomes are, and the probability of each, provided that the rules of the game are obeyed. The future of civilization is unknowable, because the knowledge that is going to affect it has yet to be created. Hence the possible outcomes are not yet known, let alone their probabilities.
|
{'prediction', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Just as no one in 1900 could have foreseen the consequences of innovations made during the twentieth century – including whole new fields such as nuclear physics, computer science and biotechnology – so our own future will be shaped by knowledge that we do not yet have.
|
{'computer', 'knowledge', 'science', 'physics', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed to try to change them for the better. In contrast, the logic of justificationism is to seek (and typically, to believe that one has found) ways of securing ideas against change. Moreover, the logic of fallibilism is that one not only seeks to correct the misconceptions of the past, but hopes in the future to find and change mistaken ideas that no one today questions or finds problematic. So it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity.
|
{'justificationism', 'knowledge', inf, 'problem', 'infinite', 'fallibilism', 'explanation', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
As the physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
|
{'science', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
People in 1900 did not consider the internet or nuclear power unlikely: they did not conceive of them at all.
|
{'history', 'technology'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.
|
{'culture', 'rational', 'explanation', 'west', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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?
|
{'problem', 'explanation', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Like Lagrange, Michelson himself had already contributed unwittingly to the new system – in this case with an experimental result. In 1887 he and his colleague Edward Morley had observed that the speed of light relative to an observer remains constant when the observer moves.
|
{'relativism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.
|
{'enlightenment', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods.
|
{'enlightenment', 'knowledge', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Observations are theory-laden. Given an experimental oddity, we have no way of predicting whether it will eventually be explained merely by correcting a minor parochial assumption or by revolutionizing entire sciences. We can know that only after we have seen it in the light of a new explanation.
|
{'parochialism', 'prediction', 'explainer', 'science', 'explanation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Blind optimism is a stance towards the future. It consists of proceeding as if one knows that the bad outcomes will not happen. The opposite approach, blind pessimism, often called the precautionary principle, seeks to ward off disaster by avoiding everything not known to be safe. No one seriously advocates either of these two as a universal policy, but their assumptions and their arguments are common, and often creep into people’s planning.
|
{'universe', 'optimism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Our Final Century makes the case that the period since the mid twentieth century has been the first in which technology has been capable of destroying civilization. But that is not so. Many civilizations in history were destroyed by the simple technologies of fire and the sword. Indeed, of all civilizations in history, the overwhelming majority have been destroyed, some intentionally, some as a result of plague or natural disaster. Virtually all of them could have avoided the catastrophes that destroyed them if only they had possessed a little additional knowledge, such as improved agricultural or military technology, better hygiene, or better political or economic institutions. Very few, if any, could have been saved by greater caution about innovation. In fact most had enthusiastically implemented the precautionary principle.
|
{'institution', 'knowledge', 'culture'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and that ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. (Or that it ‘probably’ will.) But in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen. Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before.
|
{'induction', 'prediction', 'inductivism', 'universe', 'science', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
People are significant in the cosmic scheme of things; and The Earth’s biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.
|
{'earth', 'people'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The Medici were soon promoting the new philosophy of ‘humanism’, which valued knowledge above dogma, and virtues such as intellectual independence, curiosity, good taste and friendship over piety and humility.
|
{'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
For example, the philosopher Roger Bacon (1214–94) is noted for rejecting dogma, advocating observation as a way of discovering the truth (albeit by ‘induction’), and making several scientific discoveries.
|
{'induction'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
They can be understood only by being explained. Fortunately, our best theories embody deep explanations as well as accurate predictions.
|
{'explanation', 'prediction', 'explainer', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But that rapid progress lasted for only a generation or so. A charismatic monk, Girolamo Savonarola, began to preach apocalyptic sermons against humanism and every other aspect of the Florentine enlightenment.
|
{'enlightenment', 'rationality', 'gene', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Scientific theories explain the objects and phenomena of our experience in terms of an underlying reality which we do not experience directly. But the ability of a theory to explain what we experience is not its most valuable attribute. Its most valuable attribute is that it explains the fabric of reality itself.
|
{'explainer', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Instead of looking upon discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’, c. 431 BCE
|
{'rationality', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The horror of static societies, which I described in the previous chapter, can now be seen as a hideous practical joke that the universe played on the human species. Our creativity, which evolved in order to increase the amount of knowledge that we could use, and which would immediately have been capable of producing an endless stream of useful innovations as well, was from the outset prevented from doing so by the very knowledge – the memes – that that creativity preserved. The strivings of individuals to better themselves were, from the outset, perverted by a superhumanly evil mechanism that turned their efforts to exactly the opposite end: to thwart all attempts at improvement; to keep sentient beings locked in a crude, suffering state for eternity. Only the Enlightenment, hundreds of thousands of years later, and after who knows how many false starts, may at last have made it practical to escape from that eternity into infinity.
|
{'enlightenment', 'knowledge', 'creativity', inf, 'meme', 'universe', 'infinite', 'static'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.
|
{'darwin', 'replicator', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests. We reject them without ever bothering to test them. For example, consider the theory that eating a kilogram of grass is a cure for the common cold. That theory makes experimentally testable predictions: if people tried the grass cure and found it ineffective, the theory would be proved false. But it has never been tested and probably never will be, because it contains no explanation – either of how the cure would work, or of anything else. We rightly presume it to be false. There are always infinitely many possible theories of that sort, compatible with existing observations and making new predictions, so we could never have the time or resources to test them all. What we test are new theories that seem to show promise of explaining things better than the prevailing ones do.
|
{'prediction', inf, 'explainer', 'infinite', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. In fact, burning fuel is only one of many things a spaceship has to do to accomplish its real purpose, which is to transport its payload from one point in space to another. Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.
|
{'prediction', 'explainer', 'science'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
For example, you cannot predict what numbers will come up on a fair (i.e. unbiased) roulette wheel. But if you understand what it is in the wheel’s design and operation that makes it fair, then you can explain why predicting the numbers is impossible.
|
{'prediction', 'explainer', 'rationality', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
A theory may be superseded by a new theory which explains more, and is more accurate, but is also easier to understand, in which case the old theory becomes redundant, and we gain more understanding while needing to learn less than before. That is what happened when Nicolaus Copernicus’s theory of the Earth travelling round the Sun superseded the complex Ptolemaic system which had placed the Earth at the centre of the universe.
|
{'universe', 'explainer'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The critical question about these statues is, Why were they all made alike? You see them sitting there, like Diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them. When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition…These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilization which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge.
|
{'rationality', 'knowledge', 'gene', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The statues were all made alike because Easter Island was a static society. It never took that first step in the ascent of man – the beginning of infinity.
|
{'static', 'infinite', inf}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem', 'sustain', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
That is to say, every putative physical transformation, to be performed in a given time with given resources or under any other conditions, is either – impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or – achievable, given the right knowledge.
|
{'knowledge', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The Easter Islanders’ culture sustained them in both senses. This is the hallmark of a functioning static society. It provided them with a way of life; but it also inhibited change: it sustained their determination to enact and re-enact the same behaviours for generations. It sustained the values that placed forests – literally – beneath statues. And it sustained the shapes of those statues, and the pointless project of building ever more of them.
|
{'behaviourism', 'culture', 'gene', 'sustain', 'rational', 'static', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
We understand the fabric of reality only by understanding theories that explain it. And since they explain more than we are immediately aware of, we can understand more than we are immediately aware that we understand.
|
{'explainer', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
And, if the prevailing theory is true, the Easter Islanders started to starve before the fall of their civilization. In other words, even after it had stopped providing for them, it retained its fatal proficiency at sustaining a fixed pattern of behaviour. And so it remained effective at preventing them from addressing the problem by the only means that could possibly have been effective: creative thought and innovation. Attenborough regards the culture as having been very valuable and its fall as a tragedy. Bronowski’s view was closer to mine, which is that since the culture never improved, its survival for many centuries was a tragedy, like that of all static societies.
|
{'behaviourism', 'culture', 'pattern', 'creativity', 'problem', 'sustain', 'static'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.
|
{'explanation', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Centuries ago, if you had wanted to build a large structure such as a bridge or a cathedral you would have engaged a master builder. He would have had some knowledge of what it takes to give a structure strength and stability with the least possible expense and effort. He would not have been able to express much of this knowledge in the language of mathematics and physics, as we can today. Instead, he relied mainly on a complex collection of intuitions, habits and rules of thumb, which he had learned from his apprentice-master and then perhaps amended through guesswork and long experience. Even so, these intuitions, habits and rules of thumb were in effect theories, explicit and inexplicit, and they contained real knowledge of the subjects we nowadays call engineering and architecture. It was for the knowledge in those theories that you would have hired him, pitifully inaccurate though it was compared with what we have today, and of very narrow applicability. When admiring centuries-old structures, people often forget that we see only the surviving ones. The overwhelming majority of structures built in medieval and earlier times have collapsed long ago, often soon after they were built. That was especially so for innovative structures. It was taken for granted that innovation risked catastrophe, and builders seldom deviated much from designs and techniques that had been validated by long tradition. Nowadays, in contrast, it is quite rare for any structure – even one that is unlike anything that has ever been built before – to fail because of faulty design. Anything that an ancient master builder could have built, his modern colleagues can build better and with far less human effort. They can also build structures which he could hardly have dreamt of, such as skyscrapers and space stations. They can use materials which he had never heard of, such as fibreglass or reinforced concrete, and which he could hardly have used even if he could somehow have been given them, for he had only a scanty and inaccurate understanding of how materials work. Progress to our current state of knowledge was not achieved by accumulating more theories of the same kind as the master builder knew.
|
{'physics', 'explicit', 'knowledge', 'mathematics', 'inexplicit', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Our knowledge, both explicit and inexplicit, is not only much greater than his but structurally different too. As I have said, the modern theories are fewer, more general and deeper. For each situation that the master builder faced while building something in his repertoire – say, when deciding how thick to make a load-bearing wall – he had a fairly specific intuition or rule of thumb, which, however, could give hopelessly wrong answers if applied to novel situations. Today one deduces such things from a theory that is general enough for it to be applied to walls made of any material, in all situations: on the Moon, underwater, or wherever. The reason why it is so general is that it is based on quite deep explanations of how materials and structures work.
|
{'explanation', 'explicit', 'gene', 'knowledge', 'inexplicit', 'education', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Before 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear-fission (atomic-bomb) explosion; there may never have been one in the history of the universe.
|
{'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Solipsism, the theory that only one mind exists and that what appears to be external reality is only a dream taking place in that mind, cannot be logically disproved.
|
{'solipsism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
the Principle of Mediocrity opposes the pre-Enlightenment arrogance of believing ourselves significant in the world; the Spaceship Earth metaphor opposes the Enlightenment arrogance of aspiring to control the world.
|
{'enlightenment'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
That is why, despite understanding incomparably more than an ancient master builder did, a modern architect does not require a longer or more arduous training. A typical theory in a modern student’s syllabus may be harder to understand than any of the master builder’s rules of thumb; but the modern theories are far fewer, and their explanatory power gives them other properties such as beauty, inner logic and connections with other subjects which make them easier to learn. Some of the ancient rules of thumb are now known to be erroneous, while others are known to be true, or to be good approximations to the truth, and we know why that is so. A few are still in use. But none of them is any longer the source of anyone’s understanding of what makes structures stand up.
|
{'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Much of medicine, in other words, is still in the rule-of-thumb era, and when new rules of thumb are discovered there is indeed more incentive for specialization. But as medical and biochemical research comes up with deeper explanations of disease processes (and healthy processes) in the body, understanding is also on the increase. More general concepts are replacing more specific ones as common, underlying molecular mechanisms are found for dissimilar diseases in different parts of the body. Once a disease can be understood as fitting into a general framework, the role of the specialist diminishes. Instead, physicians coming across an unfamiliar disease or a rare complication can rely increasingly on explanatory theories. They can look up such facts as are known. But then they may be able to apply a general theory to work out the required treatment, and expect it to be effective even if it has never been used before.
|
{'explanation', 'theory', 'gene', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Thus the issue of whether it is becoming harder or easier to understand everything that is understood depends on the overall balance between these two opposing effects of the growth of knowledge: the increasing breadth of our theories, and their increasing depth. Breadth makes it harder; depth makes it easier. One thesis of this book is that, slowly but surely, depth is winning. In other words, the proposition that I refused to believe as a child is indeed false, and practically the opposite is true. We are not heading away from a state in which one person could understand everything that is understood, but towards it.
|
{'knowledge', 'theory', 'person'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Even a typical star converts millions of tonnes of mass into energy every second, with each gram releasing as much energy as an atom bomb.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse.
|
{'enlightenment', 'science'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in the history of our species. It began at approximately the time of the scientific revolution, and is still under way. It has included improvements not only in scientific understanding, but also in technology, political institutions, moral values, art, and every aspect of human welfare.
|
{'rationality', 'institution', 'gene', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Some types of transmutation happen spontaneously on Earth, in the decay of radioactive elements. This was first demonstrated in 1901, by the physicists Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford,
|
{'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem', 'creativity'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The assumption that progress in a hypothetical rapacious civilization is limited by raw materials rather than by knowledge.
|
{'knowledge', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
I have mentioned behaviourism, which is instrumentalism applied to psychology.
|
{'instrumentalism', 'behaviourism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Prediction – even perfect, universal prediction – is simply no substitute for explanation.
|
{'explanation', 'prediction', 'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Explanation: Statement about what is there, what it does, and how and why. Reach: The ability of some explanations to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve. Creativity: The capacity to create new explanations. Empiricism: The misconception that we ‘derive’ all our knowledge from sensory experience. Theory-laden: There is no such thing as ‘raw’ experience. All our experience of the world comes through layers of conscious and unconscious interpretation. Inductivism: The misconception that scientific theories are obtained by generalizing or extrapolating repeated experiences, and that the more often a theory is confirmed by observation the more likely it becomes.
|
{'induction', 'gene', 'knowledge', 'empiricism', 'problem', 'creativity', 'interpretation', 'inductivism', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Induction: The non-existent process of ‘obtaining’ referred to above. Principle of induction The idea that ‘the future will resemble the past’, combined with the misconception that this asserts anything about the future. Realism The idea that the physical world exists in reality, and that knowledge of it can exist too. Relativism The misconception that statements cannot be objectively true or false, but can be judged only relative to some cultural or other arbitrary standard. Instrumentalism The misconception that science cannot describe reality, only predict outcomes of observations. Justificationism The misconception that knowledge can be genuine or reliable only if it is justified by some source or criterion.
|
{'induction', 'justificationism', 'culture', 'prediction', 'relativism', 'knowledge', 'science', 'instrumentalism', 'realism', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
One thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.
|
{'enlightenment', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Fallibilism: The recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable.
|
{'fallibilism', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem', 'conjecture'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Good/bad explanation: An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for. The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. Mini-enlightenment A short-lived tradition of criticism.
|
{'explanation', 'enlightenment', 'knowledge', 'mini-enlightenment'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
[on learning how to reject authority] This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto ‘Nullius in verba’, which means something like ‘Take no one’s word for it.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'culture', 'enlightenment', 'problem', 'science', 'rational', 'explanation', 'west', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
This is another reason that ‘one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration’ is a misleading description of how progress happens: the ‘perspiration’ phase can be automated – just as the task of recognizing galaxies on astronomical photographs was. And the more advanced technology becomes, the shorter is the gap between inspiration and automation.
|
{'rationality', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.
|
{'enlightenment', 'sustain', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors.
|
{'constructor', 'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But failure need not be permanent in a world in which all evils are due to lack of knowledge. We failed at first to notice the non-existence of a force of gravity. Now we understand it. Locating hang-ups is, in the last analysis, easier.
|
{'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
After all, computers play chess mindlessly – by exhaustively searching the consequences of all possible moves – but humans achieve a similar-looking functionality in a completely different way, by creative and enjoyable thought.
|
{'computer', 'creativity', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Just as organisms are the tools of genes, so individuals are used by memes to achieve their ‘purpose’ of spreading themselves through the population.
|
{'meme', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Another thing that should make us suspicious is the presence of the conditions for anti-rational meme evolution, such as deference to authority, static subcultures and so on. Anything that says ‘Because I say so’ or ‘It never did me any harm,’ anything that says ‘Let us suppress criticism of our idea because it is true,’ suggests static-society thinking. We should examine and criticize laws, customs and other institutions with an eye to whether they set up conditions for anti-rational memes to evolve. Avoiding such conditions is the essence of Popper’s criterion.
|
{'culture', 'institution', 'meme', 'rational', 'static', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism. We create theories by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories, not to be the source of new ones. We interpret experiences through explanatory theories, but true explanations are not obvious. Fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but instead acknowledging that we may always be mistaken, and trying to correct errors.
|
{'knowledge', 'interpretation', 'fallibilism', 'conjecture', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
As Einstein remarked, ‘My pencil and I are more clever than I.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
We now have to accept, and rejoice in bringing about, our next transformation: to active agents of progress in the emerging rational society – and universe.
|
{'rationality', 'universe', 'emergence', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Today, the creativity that humans use to improve ideas is what pre-eminently sets us apart from other species. Yet for most of the time that humans have existed it was not noticeably in use.
|
{'creativity'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Yet I am writing this in Oxford, England, where winter nights are likewise often cold enough to kill any human unprotected by clothing and other technology. So, while intergalactic space would kill me in a matter of seconds, Oxfordshire in its primeval state might do it in a matter of hours – which can be considered ‘life support’ only in the most contrived sense. There is a life-support system in Oxfordshire today, but it was not provided by the biosphere. It has been built by humans. It consists of clothes, houses, farms, hospitals, an electrical grid, a sewage system and so on. Nearly the whole of the Earth’s biosphere in its primeval state was likewise incapable of keeping an unprotected human alive for long.
|
{'biosphere'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
For instance, at present during any given century there is about one chance in a thousand that the Earth will be struck by a comet or asteroid large enough to kill at least a substantial proportion of all human beings. That means that a typical child born in the United States today is more likely to die as a result of an astronomical event than a plane crash.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But then the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who was well aware of the distinction between the absolutely necessary truths of mathematics and the contingent truths of science, nevertheless concluded that Euclid’s theory of geometry was self-evidently true of nature.
|
{'mathematics', 'science'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Principle of Mediocrity: ‘There is nothing significant about humans.’
|
{'mediocrity'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Fundamental or significant phenomenon: One that plays a necessary role in the explanation of many phenomena, or whose distinctive features require distinctive explanation in terms of fundamental theories.
|
{'phenomenon', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Parochialism: Mistaking appearance for reality, or local regularities for universal laws.
|
{'explanation', 'parochialism', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Person: An entity that can create explanatory knowledge.
|
{'parochialism', 'person', 'knowledge', 'anthropocentric', 'universe', 'explanation', 'theory'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Even the Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa, where our species evolved, was barely more hospitable than primeval Oxfordshire. Unlike the life-support system in that imagined spaceship, the Great Rift Valley lacked a safe water supply, and medical equipment, and comfortable living quarters, and was infested with predators, parasites and disease organisms. It frequently injured, poisoned, drenched, starved and sickened its ‘passengers’, and most of them died as a result.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Universal constructor: A constructor that can cause any raw materials to undergo any physically possible transformation, given the right information.
|
{'constructor'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Constructor: A device capable of causing other objects to undergo transformations without undergoing any net change itself.
|
{'constructor'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Both the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth idea are, contrary to their motivations, irreparably parochial and mistaken. From the least parochial perspectives available to us, people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not ‘supported’ by their environments, but support themselves by creating knowledge.
|
{'parochialism', 'knowledge'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
|
{'science'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
It was similarly harsh to all the other organisms that lived there: few individuals live comfortably or die of old age in the supposedly beneficent biosphere. That is no accident: most populations, of most species, are living close to the edge of disaster and death.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
For instance, when the Black Death plague destabilized the static societies of Europe in the fourteenth century, the new ideas for plague-prevention that spread best were extremely bad ones.
|
{'static'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Given a sufficiently precise description of the initial state of any isolated physical system, it would in principle predict the future behaviour of the system. Where the exact behaviour of a system was intrinsically unpredictable, it would describe all possible behaviours and predict their probabilities. In practice, the initial states of interesting systems often cannot be ascertained very accurately, and in any case the calculation of the predictions would be too complicated to be carried out in all but the simplest cases.
|
{'prediction', 'behaviourism', 'physics'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Thus, ironically, there is much truth in the typical static-society fear that any change is much more likely to do harm than good. A static society is indeed in constant danger of being harmed or destroyed by a newly arising dysfunctional meme. However, in the aftermath of the Black Death a few true and functional ideas did also spread, and may well have contributed to ending that particular static society in an unusually good way (with the Renaissance).
|
{'static', 'meme'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The reductionist conception leads naturally to a classification of subjects and theories in a hierarchy, according to how close they are to the ‘lowest-level’ predictive theories that are known. In this hierarchy, logic and mathematics form the immovable bedrock on which the edifice of science is built. The foundation stone would be a reductive ‘theory of everything’, a universal theory of particles, forces, space and time, together with some theory of what the initial state of the universe was. The rest of physics forms the first few storeys. Astrophysics and chemistry are at a higher level, geology even higher, and so on. The edifice branches into many towers of increasingly high-level subjects like biochemistry, biology and genetics. Perched at the tottering, stratospheric tops are subjects like the theory of evolution, economics, psychology and computer science, which in this picture are almost inconceivably derivative.
|
{'prediction', 'computer', 'gene', 'reductionism', 'theory', 'mathematics', 'universe', 'science', 'west', 'education', 'physics', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances the stupendously complex behaviour of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence: high-level simplicity ‘emerges’ from low-level complexity.
|
{'behaviourism', 'emergence', 'implicit'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
That is a universal system of tallying. But, like levels of emergence, there is a hierarchy of universality. The next level above tallying is counting, which involves numerals. When tallying goats one is merely thinking ‘another, and another, and another’; but when counting them one is thinking ‘forty, forty-one, forty-two…’ It is only with hindsight that we can regard tally marks as a system of numerals, known as the ‘unary’ system.
|
{'universe', 'emergence'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Since static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge, they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness. (Ironically, creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire, and static societies, however primitive, ‘unnaturally’ suppress it.) From the point of view of every individual in such a society, its creativity-suppressing mechanisms are catastrophically harmful. Every static society must leave its members chronically baulked in their attempts to achieve anything positive for themselves as people, or indeed anything at all, other than their meme-mandated behaviours. It can perpetuate itself only by suppressing its members’ self-expression and breaking their spirits, and its memes are exquisitely adapted to doing this.
|
{'behaviourism', 'positivism', 'knowledge', 'creativity', 'meme', 'static', 'imitation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'empiricism', 'problem', 'institution', 'rational', 'decision-making', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
However, in regard to these more sophisticated applications, the system was not universal. Since there was no higher-valued symbol than (one thousand), the numerals from two thousand onwards all began with a string of ’s, which therefore became nothing more than tally marks for thousands.
|
{'universe'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
But merely being present in a mind does not automatically get a meme expressed as behaviour: the meme has to compete for that privilege with other ideas – memes and non-memes, about all sorts of subjects – in the same mind. And merely being expressed as behaviour does not automatically get the meme copied into a recipient along with other memes: it has to compete for the recipients’ attention and acceptance with all sorts of behaviours by other people, and with the recipient’s own ideas. All that is in addition to the analogue of the type of selection that genes face, each meme competing with rival versions of itself across the population, perhaps by containing the knowledge for some useful function.
|
{'knowledge', 'meme', 'gene', 'behaviourism'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The more accurately the hobgoblin’s attributes exploit genuine, widespread vulnerabilities of the human mind, the more faithfully the anti-rational meme will propagate. If the meme is to survive for many generations, it is essential that its implicit knowledge of these vulnerabilities be true and deep. But its overt content – the idea of the hobgoblin’s existence – need contain no truth. On the contrary, the non-existence of the hobgoblin helps to make the meme a better replicator, because the story is then unconstrained by the mundane attributes of any genuine menace, which are always finite and to some degree combatable.
|
{'replicator', 'gene', 'knowledge', 'meme', 'rational', 'implicit', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Rational and anti-rational memes: Thus, memes of this new kind, which are created by rational and critical thought, subsequently also depend on such thought to get themselves replicated faithfully. So I shall call them rational memes. Memes of the older, static-society kind, which survive by disabling their holders’ critical faculties, I shall call anti-rational memes.
|
{'replicator', 'meme', 'rational', 'static', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Hence the metaphor of a spaceship or a life-support system, is quite perverse: when humans design a life-support system, they design it to provide the maximum possible comfort, safety and longevity for its users within the available resources; the biosphere has no such priorities.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies. But compromises – amalgams of the policies of the contributors – have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it. Thus compromise policies shield the underlying explanations which do at least seem good to some faction from being criticized and abandoned.
|
{'explanation', 'government', 'explainer', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
So the professor takes the student's point seriously, and responds with a concise but adequate argument in defence of the disputed equation. The professor tries hard to show no sign of being irritated by criticism from so lowly a source. Most of the questions from the floor will have the form of criticisms which, if valid, would diminish or destroy the professor's life's work. But bringing vigorous and diverse criticism to bear on accepted truths is one of the very purposes of the seminar. Everyone takes it for granted that the truth is not obvious, and that the obvious need not be true; that ideas are to be accepted or rejected according to their content and not their origin; that the greatest minds can easily make mistakes; and that the most trivial-seeming objection may be the key to a great new discovery.
|
set()
|
David Deutsch
|
|
And countless individuals have been harmed or killed by adopting memes that were bad for them – such as irrational political ideologies or dangerous fads.
|
{'meme', 'rationality', 'rational'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The fabric of reality does not consist only of reductionist ingredients like space, time and subatomic particles, but also of life, thought, computation and the other things to which those explanations refer.
|
{'computer', 'reductionism', 'explanation', 'education', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Also, memes can be passed to people other than the holders’ biological descendants. Those factors make meme evolution enormously faster than gene evolution, which partly explains how memes can contain so much knowledge.
|
{'meme', 'knowledge', 'explainer', 'gene'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
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.
|
{'problem', 'quale'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The first people to live at the latitude of Oxford (who were actually from a species related to us, possibly the Neanderthals) could do so only because they brought knowledge with them, about such things as tools, weapons, fire and clothing. That knowledge was transmitted from generation to generation not genetically but culturally.
|
{'culture', 'gene', 'knowledge', 'rational', 'rationality'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
This is called the plurality voting system (‘plurality’ meaning ‘largest number of votes’) – often called the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, because there is no prize for any runner-up, and no second round of voting (both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake of increasing the proportionality of the outcomes). Plurality voting typically ‘over-represents’ the two largest parties, compared with the proportion of votes they receive. Moreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox, and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total. These features are often cited as arguments against plurality voting and in favour of a more proportional system – either literal proportional representation or other schemes such as transferable-vote systems and run-off systems which have the effect of making the representation of voters in the legislature more proportional. However, under Popper’s criterion, that is all insignificant in comparison with the greater effectiveness of plurality voting at removing bad governments and policies.
|
{'government'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Hence the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life on Earth, in which human civilization occupies only the final ‘second’ of the ‘day’ during which life has so far existed, is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes.
|
{'meme'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Let me trace the mechanism of that advantage more explicitly. Following a plurality-voting election, the usual outcome is that the party with the largest total number of votes has an overall majority in the legislature, and therefore takes sole charge. All the losing parties are removed entirely from power. This is rare under proportional representation, because some of the parties in the old coalition are usually needed in the new one. Consequently, the logic of plurality is that politicians and political parties have little chance of gaining any share in power unless they can persuade a substantial proportion of the population to vote for them. That gives all parties the incentive to find better explanations, or at least to convince more people of their existing ones, for if they fail they will be relegated to powerlessness at the next election.
|
{'explanation', 'elegance', 'explicit'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
The first person to measure the circumference of the Earth was the astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene, in the third century BCE. His result was fairly close to the actual value, which is about 40,000 kilometres. For most of history this was considered an enormous distance, but with the Enlightenment that conception gradually changed, and nowadays we think of the Earth as small.
|
{'enlightenment', 'person'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
Quantum theory is, as I have said, one such theory. But the other three main strands of explanation through which we seek to understand the fabric of reality are all ‘high level’ from the point of view of quantum physics. They are the theory of evolution (primarily the evolution of living organisms), epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the theory of computation (about computers and what they can and cannot, in principle, compute).
|
{'computer', 'knowledge', 'quantum', 'explanation', 'physics', 'computation'}
|
David Deutsch
|
|
To the extent that we are on a ‘spaceship’ [i.e. planet earth], we have never been merely its passengers, nor (as is often said) its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous raw materials.
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{'people'}
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David Deutsch
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Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures – all evils – are due to insufficient knowledge.
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{'optimism', 'knowledge'}
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David Deutsch
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The post-Enlightenment West is the only society in history that for more than a couple of lifetimes has ever undergone change rapid enough for people to notice.
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{'west', 'enlightenment'}
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David Deutsch
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Bad philosophy [is] philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge.
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{'explanation', 'bad philosophy', 'knowledge'}
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David Deutsch
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Interpretation [is] the explanatory part of a scientific theory, supposedly distinct from its predictive or instrumental part.
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{'explanation', 'bad philosophy'}
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David Deutsch
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Positivism [is] the bad philosophy that everything not ‘derived from observation’ should be eliminated from science.
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{'explanation', 'bad philosophy', 'positivism'}
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David Deutsch
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Logical positivism [is] the bad philosophy that statements not verifiable by observation are meaningless.
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{'positivism', 'bad philosophy', 'science', 'instrumentalism', 'explanation'}
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David Deutsch
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But, while a society lasted, all important areas of life seemed changeless to the participants: they could expect to die under much the same moral values, personal lifestyles, conceptual framework, technology and pattern of economic production as they were born under. And, of the changes that did occur, few were for the better. I shall call such societies ‘static societies’: societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants.
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{'static', 'pattern', 'person'}
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David Deutsch
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More generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge and knowledge embodied in technological artefacts, namely sufficient wealth. Let me define that in a non-parochial way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing.
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{'wealth', 'parochialism', 'knowledge', 'gene', 'physics'}
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David Deutsch
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Under proportional representation, there are strong incentives for the system’s characteristic unfairnesses to persist, or to become worse, over time. For example, if a small faction defects from a large party, it may then end up with more chance of having its policies tried out than it would if its supporters had remained within the original party.
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{'democracy'}
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David Deutsch
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For a society to be static, something else must be happening as well. One thing my story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws – taboos – that prevent their memes from changing.
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{'static', 'meme'}
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David Deutsch
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Thus, in regard to the geography of the universe and to our place in it, the prevailing world view has rid itself of some parochial misconceptions. We know that we have explored almost the whole surface of that formerly enormous sphere; but we also know that there are far more places left to explore in the universe (and beneath the surface of the Earth’s land and oceans) than anyone imagined while we still had those misconceptions. In regard to theoretical knowledge, however, the prevailing world view has not yet caught up with Enlightenment values. Thanks to the fallacy and bias of prophecy, a persistent assumption remains that our existing theories are at or fairly close to the limit of what it is knowable – that we are nearly there, or perhaps halfway there. As the economist David Friedman has remarked, most people believe that an income of about twice their own should be sufficient to satisfy any reasonable person, and that no genuine benefit can be derived from amounts above that.
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{'parochialism', 'person', 'enlightenment', 'knowledge', 'universe', 'theory', 'imitation'}
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David Deutsch
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The moral component of the Spaceship Earth metaphor is therefore somewhat paradoxical. It casts humans as ungrateful for gifts which, in reality, they never received. And it casts all other species in morally positive roles in the spaceship’s life-support system, with humans as the only negative actors. But humans are part of the biosphere, and the supposedly immoral behaviour is identical to what all other species do when times are good – except that humans alone try to mitigate the effect of that response on their descendants and on other species.
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{'biosphere', 'person'}
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David Deutsch
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Before the Enlightenment, bad philosophy was the rule and good philosophy the rare exception. With the Enlightenment came much more good philosophy, but bad philosophy became much worse, with the descent from empiricism (merely false) to positivism, logical positivism, instrumentalism, Wittgenstein, linguistic philosophy, and the ‘postmodernist’ and related movements. In science, the main impact of bad philosophy has been through the idea of separating a scientific theory into (explanationless) predictions and (arbitrary) interpretation. This has helped to legitimize dehumanizing explanations of human thought and behaviour. In quantum theory, bad philosophy manifested itself mainly as the Copenhagen interpretation and its many variants, and as the ‘shut-up-and-calculate’ interpretation. These appealed to doctrines such as logical positivism to justify systematic equivocation and to immunize themselves from criticism.
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{'behaviourism', 'positivism', 'prediction', 'enlightenment', 'quantum', 'empiricism', 'interpretation', 'science', 'instrumentalism', 'explanation'}
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David Deutsch
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That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.
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{'static', 'creativity', 'rationality', 'rational'}
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David Deutsch
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As with wealth, so with scientific knowledge: it is hard to imagine what it would be like to know twice as much as we do, and so if we try to prophesy it we find ourselves just picturing the next few decimal places of what we already know.
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{'wealth', 'knowledge'}
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David Deutsch
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What had changed? What made science effective at understanding the physical world when all previous ways had failed?
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{'science', 'physics'}
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David Deutsch
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Dawkins named his tour-de-force account of neo-Darwinism The Selfish Gene because he wanted to stress that evolution does not especially promote the ‘welfare’ of species or individual organisms. But, as he also explained, it does not promote the ‘welfare’ of genes either: it adapts them not for survival in larger numbers, nor indeed for survival at all, but only for spreading through the population at the expense of rival genes, particularly slight variants of themselves.
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{'darwin', 'explainer', 'gene'}
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David Deutsch
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One consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable (though this was not made explicit at first). That is to say, the theory must make predictions which, if the theory were false, could be contradicted by the outcome of some possible observation. Thus, although scientific theories are not derived from experience, they can be tested by experience – by observation or experiment.
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{'prediction', 'explicit', 'emergence', 'theory'}
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David Deutsch
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One consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable (though this was not made explicit at first).
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{'explicit', 'emergence'}
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David Deutsch
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Genetic studies suggest that our own species came close to extinction about 70,000 years ago, as a result of an unknown catastrophe which reduced its total numbers to only a few thousand.
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{'education', 'gene'}
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David Deutsch
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Testability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method. Popper called it the ‘criterion of demarcation’ between science and non-science.
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{'gene', 'science'}
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David Deutsch
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In contrast, the ancient theory that all matter is composed of combinations of the elements earth, air, fire and water was untestable, because it did not include any way of testing for the presence of those components. So it could never be refuted by experiment.
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{'refutation'}
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David Deutsch
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Would we seem like insects to it? This can seem plausible only if one forgets that there can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors. The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.
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{'explainer', 'constructor', 'universe', 'person'}
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David Deutsch
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They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members’ sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others. So they feel pride and shame, and form all their aspirations and opinions, by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society’s memes.
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{'quale', 'meme', 'rationality', 'rational'}
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David Deutsch
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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.
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{'problem', 'knowledge', 'theory'}
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David Deutsch
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What are the best sources of our knowledge – the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?’ I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist – no more than ideal rulers – and that all ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’
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{'error-correction', 'knowledge'}
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Karl Popper
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The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem.
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{'explanation', 'problem'}
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David Deutsch
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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.
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{'problem-solving', 'behaviourism', 'dynamic', 'enlightenment', 'problem', 'sustain', 'optimism'}
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David Deutsch
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Infinite ignorance is a necessary condition for there to be infinite potential for knowledge.
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{'ignorance', 'infinite', 'knowledge'}
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David Deutsch
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Optimism and reason are incompatible with the conceit that our knowledge is ‘nearly there’ in any sense, or that its foundations are.
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{'ignorance', 'knowledge', inf}
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David Deutsch
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Changing our genes in order to improve our lives and to facilitate further improvements is no different in this regard from augmenting our skin with clothes or our eyes with telescopes.
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{'gene', 'person'}
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David Deutsch
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Because of the necessity for error-correction, all jumps to universality occur in digital systems.
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{'universe'}
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David Deutsch
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It is why spoken languages build words out of a finite set of elementary sounds: speech would not be intelligible if it were analogue.
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{'language'}
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David Deutsch
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Just as genes often work together in groups to achieve what we might think of as a single adaptation, so there are memeplexes consisting of several ideas which can, alternatively, be thought of as a single more complex idea, such as quantum theory or neo-Darwinism.
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{'memeplex', 'darwin', 'gene', 'quantum', 'meme'}
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David Deutsch
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So if it would be wrong for science to adopt that ‘democratic’ principle, why is it right for politics? Is it just because, as Churchill put it, ‘Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
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{'government', 'science'}
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David Deutsch
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In early prehistory, populations were tiny, knowledge was parochial, and history-making ideas were millennia apart. In those days, a meme spread only when one person observed another enacting it nearby, and (because of the staticity of cultures) rarely even then. So at that time human behaviour resembled that of other animals, and much of what happened was indeed explained by biogeography.
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{'parochialism', 'behaviourism', 'person', 'culture', 'biogeography', 'knowledge', 'explainer', 'meme', 'static'}
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David Deutsch
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But developments such as abstract language, explanation, wealth above the level of subsistence, and long-range trade all had the potential to erode parochialism and hence to give causal power to ideas.
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{'explanation', 'wealth', 'parochialism'}
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David Deutsch
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|
In reality, the difference between Sparta and Athens, or between Savonarola and Lorenzo de’ Medici, had nothing to do with their genes; nor did the difference between the Easter Islanders and the imperial British. They were all people – universal explainers and constructors. But their ideas were different. Nor did landscape cause the Enlightenment.
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{'constructor', 'enlightenment', 'gene', 'universe', 'explainer'}
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David Deutsch
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|
So I suppose that the real difference between the Spartans and us is that their moral education enjoins them to hold their most important ideas immune from criticism. Not to be open to suggestions. Not to criticize certain ideas such as their traditions or their conceptions of the gods; not to seek the truth, because they claim that they already have it.
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{'education'}
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David Deutsch
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It would be much truer to say that the landscape we live in is the product of ideas. The primeval landscape, though packed with evidence and therefore opportunity, contained not a single idea. It is knowledge alone that converts landscapes into resources, and humans alone who are the authors of explanatory knowledge and hence of the uniquely human behaviour called ‘history’.
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{'explanation', 'knowledge', 'behaviourism'}
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David Deutsch
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In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.
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{'explanation'}
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David Deutsch
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Thus ‘how do we know…?’ is transformed into ‘by what authority do we claim…?’ The latter question is a chimera that may well have wasted more philosophers’ time and effort than any other idea. It converts the quest for truth into a quest for certainty (a feeling) or for endorsement (a social status). This misconception is called justificationism.
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{'justificationism'}
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David Deutsch
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For most of the history of our species, we had almost no success in creating such knowledge. Where does it come from? Empiricism said that we derive it from sensory experience. This is false. The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism.
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{'knowledge', 'conjecture', 'theory', 'empiricism'}
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David Deutsch
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While humans transform inhospitable environments like the biosphere into support systems for themselves. And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors’.
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{'constructor', 'universe'}
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David Deutsch
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The self is the collective term for the creative institutions of consent among the multiple strands of creativity and criticism that constitute a mind.
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{'consent', 'institution'}
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David Deutsch
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For example money, and rules of voluntary transfer of property, are powerful institutions of consent, capable of allowing millions of people who don't know each other, and who would hate each other if they did, to cooperate on projects from which they each individually benefit.
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{'consent', 'institution'}
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David Deutsch
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The self is the collective term for the creative institutions of consent among the multiple strands of creativity and criticism that constitute a mind.
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{'consent', 'institution'}
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David Deutsch
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This finite resource model of the world implicitly assumes finite knowledge. It says knowledge creation has come to an end. We are stuck at this current point, and, therefore, based on the knowledge that we have currently, these are all the resources available to us. Now we must start conserving. But knowledge is a thing that we can always create more of.
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{'resources', 'knowledge'}
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Naval Ravikant
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Domestication, harvesting crops, metallurgy, chemistry, physics, developing engines and rockets—all of these are things that are taking things that we thought were worthless and turning them into resources. Uranium has gone from being completely worthless to being an incredible resource.
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{'resources', 'knowledge'}
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Naval Ravikant
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|
In fact, the mind-blowing thing here is that your mind cannot be blown. There’s no idea out there that your mind cannot absorb given the time and the effort.
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{'cognition'}
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Naval Ravikant
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|
Because I grew up on rote sci-fi, I used to be pessimistic about alien encounters ... The reality of it is that any species that finds us is going to immediately give us all the knowledge that they have. And they’re going to crave new knowledge that we have, because they will realize that would allow them to light up the dark matter, the dark energy, the unused resources in the universe, to allow them to thrive as well.
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{'resources', 'knowledge', 'fermi paradox'}
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Naval Ravikant
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|
[ChatGPT] doesn’t have an underlying model of reality that can explain the seen in terms of the unseen. And I think that’s critical. That is what humans do uniquely that no other creature, no other computer, no other intelligence—biological or artificial—that we have ever encountered does.
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{'artificial_intelligence'}
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Naval Ravikant
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|
We are maximally capable of understanding. There is no concept out there that is possible in this physical reality that a human being, given sufficient time and resources and education, could not understand.
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{'cognition', 'understanding'}
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Naval Ravikant
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|
If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.
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{'understanding', 'program'}
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David Deutsch
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|
And, by the way, we don’t have to worry about [Aliens] stealing our resources. It’s not like they’re going to go, Ah, there’s a planet full of coal and water. We’re going to take it... In fact, that might be another answer to the Fermi paradox. [Aliens] don’t need to leave their local area because they’ve already got the technology to perfectly sustain them.
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{'extraterrestrial life', 'fermi paradox'}
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Brett Hall
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|
When we encounter the aliens, we shouldn’t expect that they’re going to be immoral bastards that are going to want to take over our resources, but the opposite: They’re going to look at us and think what primitive savages that we are. They’re going to think that we’re moral midgets, and they’re going to want to teach us. They’re not going to want to put us in prison or anything like that.
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{'extraterrestrial life', 'fermi paradox'}
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Brett Hall
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Moloch is the misconception that one can apply game theory to situations that involve creativity, which in reality game theory cannot model or address.
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{'moloch', 'game theory'}
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David Deutsch
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Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification—the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.
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{'explanation', 'science'}
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Karl Popper
|