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universal classical computer.
quantum computers, which operate at a still higher level of universality.)
this is still no more than a metaphor, says Searle, and there is no more reason to expect the brain to be a computer than a steam engine.
The jump to universality in digital computers has left analogue computation behind.
Hilbert’s thought experiment of Infinity Hotel.
Cantor proved, with his diagonal argument, that there are infinitely many levels of infinity, of which physics uses at most the first one or two: the infinity of the natural numbers and the infinity of the continuum.
Martin Rees suspects that civilization was lucky to survive the twentieth century.
the danger that newly created knowledge would have catastrophic consequences.
If civilization falls, that will not be something that just happens to us: it will be the outcome of choices that people make.
Russian roulette is merely random.
The future of civilization is unknowable, because the knowledge that is going to affect it has yet to be created.
our own future will be shaped by knowledge that we do not yet have.
prediction
prophecy for anything that purports to know what is not yet knowable.
in Leibniz’s ‘optimistic’ world, whenever we try to solve a problem and fail, it is because we have been thwarted by an unimaginably vast intelligence that determined that it was best for us to fail.
there is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism. And the only moral values that permit sustained progress are the objective values that the Enlightenment has begun to discover.
full of misconceptions
misled by the ineluctable fact of the human condition that we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered.
In a parochial sense, the weather killed them; but the deeper explanation is lack of knowledge.
Many of the hundreds of millions of victims of cholera throughout history must have died within sight of the hearths that could have boiled their drinking water and saved their lives;
the next such object to strike us is already out there at this moment, speeding towards us with nothing to stop it except human knowledge.
Our political institutions, ways of life, personal aspirations and morality are all forms or embodiments of knowledge, and all will have to be improved if civilization – and the Enlightenment in particular – is to survive every one of the risks
policies cannot be derived from anything. They are conjectures.
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?’
the answer is basically the same for human decision-making as it is for science: it requires a tradition of criticism, in which good explanations are sought – for example, explanations of what has gone wrong, what would be better, what effect various policies have had in the past and would have in the future.
The misconception that evidence can play no legitimate role in philosophy is a relic of empiricism. Objective progress is indeed possible in politics just as it is in morality generally and in science.
They expect knowledge to be created by fiat with few errors, and not by a process of variation and selection that is making a continual stream of errors and correcting them.
fallibilism in action. It assumes that rulers and policies are always going to be flawed – that problems are inevitable. But it also assumes that improving upon them is possible: problems are soluble.
Popper’s criterion can be met only by societies that expect their knowledge to grow – and to grow unpredictably.
The Principle of Optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.
‘wise action’.
He also mentioned freedom as a cause of success. A pessimistic civilization considers it immoral to behave in ways that have not been tried many times before, because it is blind to the possibility that the benefits of doing so might offset the risks. So it is intolerant and conformist. But Athens took the opposite view. Pericles also contrasted his city’s openness to foreign visitors with the closed, defensive attitude of rival cities: again, he expected that Athens would benefit from contact with new, unforeseeable ideas,
A pessimistic civilization prides itself on its children’s conformity to the proper patterns of behaviour, and bemoans every real or imagined novelty.
was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.
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.
Savonarola,
‘Bonfire of the Vanities’
The inhabitants of Florence in 1494 or Athens in 404 BCE could be forgiven for concluding that optimism just isn’t factually true. For they knew nothing of such things as the reach of explanations or the power of science or even laws of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the Enlightenment got under way.
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.
Blind optimism
Blind pessimism (precautionary principle) Avoiding everything not known to be safe.
The principle of optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.
Wealth The repertoire of physical transformations that one is...
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SOCRATES is staying at an inn near the Temple of the Oracle at Delphi.
HERMES:
is also our custom to give a hearing to anyone who offers us honest criticism, seeking to persuade us freely to change our minds. For we want to do what is right.
nothing more boring
than to attain the state of being perfectly secure in one’s beliefs,
what I do yearn for, which is to discover the truth of how the world
is, and why – and, even more, of how it should be.
