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although progress has no necessary end, it does have a necessary beginning: a cause, or an event with which it starts, or a necessary condition for it to take off and to thrive.
So much for inductivism. And since inductivism is false, empiricism must be as well. For if one cannot derive predictions from experience, one certainly cannot derive explanations. Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.
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. The quest
the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.
The reason that testability is not enough is that prediction is not, and cannot be, the purpose of science.
appearances are not self-explanatory.
an explanation: a statement of the reality that accounts for the appearance.
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… Realism and the Aim of Science (1983)
A new conjuring trick is never totally unrelated to existing tricks. Like a new scientific theory, it is formed by creatively modifying, rearranging and combining the ideas from existing tricks. It requires pre-existing knowledge of how objects work and how audiences work, as well as how existing tricks work.
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
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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.
Good explanations are often strikingly simple or elegant
Conjectures are the products of creative imagination. But the problem with imagination is that it can create fiction much more easily than truth.
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
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A trial that fails is still fun. A repetitive experiment is not repetitive if one is thinking about the ideas that it is testing and the reality that it is investigating.
Very little in nature is detectable by unaided human senses. Most of what happens is too fast or too slow, too big or too small, or too remote, or hidden behind opaque barriers, or operates on principles too different from anything that influenced our evolution.
Sometimes they are still looking at glowing dots just as their ancestors did – but on computer monitors instead of the sky. Sometimes they are looking at numbers or graphs. But in all cases they are inspecting local phenomena: pixels on a screen, ink on paper, and so on. These things are physically very unlike stars: they are much smaller; they are not dominated by nuclear forces and gravity; they are not capable of transmuting elements or creating life; they have not been there for billions of years. But when astronomers look at them, they see stars.
there have been human populations who, for instance, knew how to survive in the Amazon jungle but not in the Arctic, and populations for whom it was the other way round. Therefore that knowledge was not part of their genetic inheritance. It was created by human thought, and preserved and transmitted in human culture.
human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors’.
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.
the SETI instrument is exquisitely adapted to detecting something that has never yet been detected.
conjecture the existence of something, calculate what some of its observable attributes would be, and then construct an instrument to detect it.
Parochialism Mistaking appearance for reality, or local regularities for universal laws.
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.
The knowledge in human brains and the knowledge in biological adaptations are both created by evolution in the broad sense: the variation of existing information, alternating with selection. In the case of human knowledge, the variation is by conjecture, and the selection is by criticism and experiment.
A good design is hard to vary: If the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.
knowledge must be first conjectured and then tested.
Dawkins coined the term memes (rhymes with ‘dreams’) for ideas that are replicators.
The physicist Brandon Carter calculated in 1974 that if the strength of the interaction between charged particles were a few per cent smaller, no planets would ever have formed and the only condensed objects in the universe would be stars; and if it were a few per cent greater, then no stars would ever explode, and so no elements other than hydrogen and helium would exist outside them. In either case there would be no complex chemistry and hence presumably no life. Another example: if the initial expansion rate of the universe at the Big Bang had been slightly higher, no stars would have
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the problem has been not that the world is so complex that we cannot understand why it looks as it does, but it is that it is so simple that we cannot yet understand it. But this will be noticeable only with hindsight.
case, the upshot is that what science – and creative thought in general – achieves is unpredictable creation ex nihilo. So does biological evolution. No other process does.
Here we see a transition that is typical of the jump to universality: before the jump, one has to make specialized objects for each document to be printed; after the jump, one customizes (or specializes, or programs) a universal object – in this case a printing press with movable type.
in reality, information that cannot be reliably retrieved is not really being stored. Fortunately,
AI abilities must have some sort of universality: special-purpose thinking would not count as thinking in the sense Turing intended.
even if chatbots did at some point start becoming much better at imitating humans (or at fooling humans), that would still not be a path to AI. Becoming better at pretending to think is not the same as coming closer to being able to think.
The analogue of evolutionary change in a species is creative thought in a person.
although it seems obvious that an AI will have qualia and consciousness, we cannot explain those things. So long as we cannot explain them, how can we expect to simulate them in a computer program?
The field of artificial (general) intelligence has made no progress because there is an unsolved philosophical problem at its heart: we do not understand how creativity works. Once that has been solved, programming it will not be difficult.
The unpredictability of the content of future knowledge is a necessary condition for the unlimited growth of that knowledge.
The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists,’ this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world. Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994)
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. We cannot even predict most of the problems that we shall encounter, or most of the opportunities to solve them, let alone the solutions and attempted solutions and how they will affect events.
When the determinants of future events are unknowable, how should one prepare for them? How can one? Given that some of those determinants are beyond the reach of scientific prediction, what is the right philosophy of the unknown future? What is the rational approach to the unknowable – to the inconceivable?
Great questions!
The principle of optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.
Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved.
Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.
Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative? That all other moral truths follow from it?
Nevertheless, you have conceded that even those things that you thought were the easiest to see literally are in fact not easy to see at all without prior knowledge about them. In fact nothing is easy to see without prior knowledge. All knowledge of the world is hard to come by.
Hermes. God of knowledge, and of messages, and of information flow –
Quantum computation Computation in which the flow of information is not confined to a single history.
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.
