all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.
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. Yet the first such explosion, and the conditions under which it would occur, had been accurately predicted – but not from the assumption that the future would be like the past.
The quest for authority led empiricists to downplay and even stigmatize conjecture, the real source of all our theories.
empiricists came to believe that, in addition to rejecting ancient authority and tradition, scientists should suppress or ignore any new ideas they might have, except those that had been properly ‘derived’ from experience.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.’
on the timescale of individual lifetimes, they almost never made any. Discoveries such as fire, clothing, stone tools, bronze, and so on, happened so rarely that from an individual’s point of view the world never improved.
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.
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.
Instrumentalism is one of many ways of denying realism, the commonsense, and true, doctrine that the physical world really exists,
One cannot make even the simplest prediction without invoking quite a sophisticated explanatory framework.
The essence of experimental testing is that there are at least two apparently viable theories known about the issue in question, making conflicting predictions that can be distinguished by the experiment.
if we are simply curious about something, it means that we believe that our existing ideas do not adequately capture or explain it.
Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem
Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.
Every other detail of the story, apart from its bare prediction that winter happens once a year, is just as easily variable. So, although the myth was created to explain the seasons, it is only superficially adapted to that purpose. When its author was wondering what could possibly make a goddess do something once a year, he did not shout, ‘Eureka! It must have been a marriage contract enforced by a magic seed.’ He made that choice – and all his substantive choices as author – for cultural and artistic reasons, and not because of the attributes of winter at all.
If we ignore all the parts of both myths whose role could be easily replaced, we are left with the same core explanation in both cases: the gods did it.
when theories are easily variable in the sense I have described, experimental testing is almost useless for correcting their errors. I call such theories bad explanations. Being proved wrong by experiment, and changing the theories to other bad explanations, does not get their holders one jot closer to the truth.
the sea 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.
We do not test every testable theory, but only the few that we find are good explanations. Science would be impossible if it were not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of false theories can be rejected out of hand without any experiment, simply for being bad explanations.
discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.
‘Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it – in a decade, a century, or a millennium – we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?
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.
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.
The reach of an explanation is not a ‘principle of induction’; it is not something that the creator of the explanation can use to obtain or justify it. It is not part of the creative process at all. We find out about it only after we have the explanation – sometimes long after.
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.
Were any of them at that moment staring at the Milky Way, asking the same questions about us as I was about them? If so, then they were looking at our galaxy as it was when the most advanced forms of life on Earth were fish.
Thomas Edison once said, ‘None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes.
I expect that Edison was misinterpreting his own experience. 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
an error in experimental science is a mistake about the cause of something.
Astronomers nowadays never look up at the sky (except perhaps in their spare time), and hardly ever look through telescopes. Many telescopes do not even have eyepieces suitable for a human eye. Many do not even detect visible light.
In many cases, no image of the distant object is ever produced, only lists of numbers, or graphs and diagrams, and only the outcome of those processes affects the astronomers’ senses.
Observing a galaxy via specks of silver is no different in that regard from observing a garden via images on a retina.
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.
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
We call a phenomenon significant (or fundamental) if parochial theories are inadequate to explain it, or if it appears in the explanation of many other phenomena; so it may seem that human beings and their wishes and actions are extremely insignificant in the universe at large.
unseen (though not unseeable)
at that background temperature of 2.7 kelvin, which is cold enough to freeze every known substance except helium. (Helium is believed to remain liquid right down to absolute zero, unless highly pressurized.)
The biosphere only ever achieves stability – and only temporarily at that – by continually neglecting, harming, disabling and killing individuals.
Our night vision is poor and monochromatic because not enough of our ancestors died of that limitation to create evolutionary pressure for anything better.
John Haldane, who expected that ‘the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’
At root, the Principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth metaphor overlap in a claim about reach: they both claim that the reach of the distinctively human way of being – that is to say, the way of problem-solving, knowledge-creating and adapting the world around us – is bounded. And they argue that its bounds cannot be very far beyond what it has already reached. Trying to go beyond that range must lead to failure and catastrophe respectively.
That momentous dichotomy exists because if there were transformations that technology could never achieve regardless of what knowledge was brought to bear, then this fact would itself be a testable regularity in nature. But all regularities in nature have explanations, so the explanation of that regularity would itself be a law of nature, or a consequence of one. And so, again, everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.
BulLshit
This fundamental connection between explanatory knowledge and technology is why the Haldane–Dawkins queerer-than-we-can-suppose argument is mistaken
No one will think of the moon as a fringe habitat, distinguished from our ‘natural’ environment on Earth, any more than we now think of Oxfordshire as being fundamentally different from the Great Rift Valley as a place to live.
– if our disability cannot be remedied by mere automation – then this is just another claim that the world is not explicable. Indeed, it is tantamount to an appeal to the supernatural, with all the arbitrariness that is inherent in such appeals, for if we wanted to incorporate into our world view an imaginary realm explicable only to superhumans, we need never have bothered to abandon the myths of Persephone and her fellow deities.
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.
Nor will we ever run out of problems. The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates. That must be so, if only because there can be no such thing as an ultimate explanation: just as ‘the gods did it’ is always a bad explanation, so any other purported foundation of all explanations must be bad too.
consequently it is not true that the attributes of supernovae in general are independent of the presence or absence of people, or of what those people know and intend. More generally, if we want to predict what a star will do, we first have to guess whether there are any people near it, and, if so, what knowledge they may have and what they may want to achieve.
Knowledge is a significant phenomenon in the universe, because to make almost any prediction about astrophysics one must take a position about what types of knowledge will or will not be present near the phenomena in question.
Somehow that jet happens in such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, a chemical scum can know and predict what the jet will do, and can understand why. That means that one physical system – say, an astrophysicist’s brain – contains an accurate working model of the other, the jet.
The SETI instrument is also remarkably finely tuned to its purpose. Completely insensitive to the presence of several tonnes of people a few metres away, and even to the tens of millions of tonnes of people on the same planet, it detects only people on planets orbiting other stars, and only if they are radio engineers.
good adaptations, like good explanations, are distinguished by being hard to vary while still fulfilling their functions.
the two kinds of knowledge share enough of their underlying logic for the theory of evolution to be highly relevant to human knowledge.
Charles Darwin put it in The Origin of Species, ‘On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility…should so frequently occur.’
In regard to what is or is not real, this leads to the requirement that, if an entity is referred to by our best explanation in the relevant field, we must regard it as really existing. And if, as with the force of gravity, our best explanation denies that it exists, then we must stop assuming that it does.
Fortunately, we are uninterested in predicting or explaining most of those properties, despite the fact that they are the overwhelming majority. That is because none of them has any bearing on what we want to do with the water – such as understand what it is made of, or make tea. To make tea, we want the water to be boiling, but we do not care what the pattern of bubbles was. We want its volume to be between a certain minimum and maximum, but we do not care how many molecules that is. We can make progress in achieving those purposes because we can express them in terms of those quasi-autonomous emergent properties about which we have good high-level explanations. Nor do we need most of the microscopic details in order to understand the role of water in the cosmic scheme of things, because nearly all of those details are parochial.