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As Webster wrote, of the apportionment problem, ‘That which cannot be done perfectly must be done in a manner as near perfection as can be. If exactness cannot, from the nature of things, be attained, then the nearest practicable approach to exactness ought to be made.’
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
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Popper’s criterion 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.
It is a fact – often mentioned but seldom explained – that deep truth is often beautiful. Mathematicians and theoretical scientists call this form of beauty ‘elegance’. Elegance is the beauty in explanations. It is by no means synonymous with how good, or how true, an explanation is.
But it is true that some important mathematical proofs, and some scientific theories, are far from elegant. Yet the truth so often is elegant that elegance is, at least, a useful heuristic when searching for fundamental truths. And when a ‘beautiful hypothesis’ is slain, it is more often than not replaced, as the spontaneous-generation theory was, by a more beautiful one. Surely this is not coincidence: it is a regularity in nature. So it must have an explanation.
The processes of science and art can look rather different: a new artistic creation rarely proves an old one wrong; artists rarely look at a scene through microscopes, or understand a sculpture through equations. Yet scientific and artistic creation do sometimes look remarkably alike. Richard Feynman once remarked that the only equipment a theoretical physicist needs is a stack of paper, a pencil and a waste-paper basket, and some artists, when they are at work, closely resemble that picture. Before the invention of the typewriter, novelists used exactly the same equipment.
If you see a work of art that you appreciate, that means that you want to dwell on it, to give it your attention, in order to appreciate more in it. If you are an artist, and halfway through creating a work of art you see something in it that you want to bring out, then you are being attracted by a beauty that you have not yet experienced. You are being attracted by the idea of a piece of art before you have created it.
Humans seem to have an inborn liking for symmetry. It is thought to be a factor in sexual attractiveness, and it may also be useful in helping us to classify things and to organize our environment physically and conceptually.
poetry and mathematics or physics share the property that they develop a language different from ordinary language in order to state things efficiently that it would be very inefficient to state in ordinary language.
Expression is conveying something that is already there, while objective progress in art is about creating something new.
A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour. Thus the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline and the appreciation of a given musical style are all, in this sense, ‘sets of ideas’ that define cultures.
fundamental question in the study of cultures is: what is it about a long-lived meme that gives it this exceptional ability to resist change throughout many replications?
scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees.
It has to be conjectured, not derived.
Philosophers and psychologists work hard to discover, and to make explicit, the assumptions that our culture tacitly makes about social institutions, human nature, right and wrong, time and space, intention, causality, freedom, necessity and so on. But we do not acquire those assumptions by reading the results of such research: it is entirely the other way round.
The sound of the meme would be there, but its meaning would not. And it is the meaning – the knowledge – that is the replicator.
what replicates human memes is creativity; and creativity was used, while it was evolving, to replicate memes. In other words, it was used to acquire existing knowledge, not to create new knowledge. But the mechanism to do both things is identical, and so in acquiring the ability to do the former, we automatically became able to do the latter. It was a momentous example of reach, which made possible everything that is uniquely human.
The beginning of creativity was, in that sense, the beginning of infinity.
Jacob Bronowski made his way to Easter Island to film part of his magnificent television series The Ascent of Man.
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’.
Physical resources such as plants, animals and minerals afford opportunities, which may inspire new ideas, but they can neither create ideas nor cause people to have particular ideas. They also cause problems, but they do not prevent people from finding ways to solve those problems.
no human situation is free of new problems, and static societies are inherently unstable in the face of new problems.
people are problem-solvers: creators of the unsustainable solution and hence also of the next problem.
there is no way, short of stasis, to avoid unforeseen problems arising from new solutions. But stasis is itself unsustainable, as witness every static society in history.
Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man
It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
because of the finiteness of the speed of light, we shall only ever see a finite portion of infinite space – but that portion will continue to grow for ever.
But tasks like internet searching will never be carried out by super-fast AIs scanning billions of documents creatively for meaning, because they will not want to perform such tasks any more than humans do.
To attempt to predict anything beyond the relevant horizon is futile – it is prophecy – but wondering what is beyond it is not. When wondering leads to conjecture, that constitutes speculation, which is not irrational either. In fact it is vital. Every one of those deeply unforeseeable new ideas that make the future unpredictable will begin as a speculation. And every speculation begins with a problem: problems in regard to the future can reach beyond the horizon of prediction too – and problems have solutions.
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.
that light. *Our experience of the world is indeed a form of virtual-reality rendering which happens wholly inside the brain.
