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every putative physical transformation,
is either – impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature; or – achievable, given the right knowledge.
the Haldane–Dawkins queerer-than-we-can-suppose
argument is mistaken
The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors,
the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and
hence of ...
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In addition to matter and energy, there is one other essential requirement, namely evidence:
problems are inevitable.
problems are soluble.
That progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the Enlightenment.
Continental (European) Enlightenment to distinguish it from the more fallibilist British Enlightenment,
Roy Porter’s book Enlightenment.)
The Continental Enlightenment was impatient for the perfected state
the creation of knowledge.
The configuration of the cork is what experimentalists call a ‘proxy’: a physical variable which can be measured as a way of measuring another variable.
humans, people and knowledge
are by far the most significant phenomena in nature
the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything o...
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Person An entity that can create explanatory knowledge.
Anthropocentric
Principle of Mediocrity
Parochialism Mistaking appearance for reality, or local regularities for universal laws.
Spaceship Earth
everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.
Both the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth idea are, contrary to their motivations, irreparably parochial and mistaken.
people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things.
support themselves by creatin...
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biological evolution. The knowledge it creates (other than via people) is inherently bounded and parochial.
knowledge – is very unlikely to come into existence other than through the error-correcting processes of evolution or thought.
human knowledge can have broad or even unlimited reach.
knowledge must be first conjectured and then tested. That is what Darwin’s theory says:
The central idea of neo-Darwinism is that evolution favours the genes that spread best through the population.
more March-nesting
nesting birds,
This change has harmed the species,
not all evolution constitutes progress,
It favours only the genes that spread best through the population.
peacock’s large, colourful tail,
Organisms are the slaves, or tools, that genes use to achieve their ‘purpose’ of spreading themselves through the population.
a replicator (anything that contributes causally to its own copying).*
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.
in the case of most memes, the real replicator is abstract: it is the knowledge itself.
‘weak anthropic principle’,
scientific discovery is profoundly unpredictable,
what science – and creative thought in general – achieves is unpredictable creation ex nihilo.
genes and ideas are both replicators; knowledge and adaptations are both hard to vary.
human knowledge can be explanatory and can have great reach; adaptations are never explanatory and rarely have much reach
The only way to emancipate arithmetic from tallying is with rules of universal reach.
Such ‘positional’ systems require ‘placeholders’,
