Imagined and True

Consider for a moment computer programming. The program is just made up. There is a sense in which it's not 'real'. You could call it a kind of 'abstract engineering'.

Put it like this: When one engineers a physical machine, they're limited by what is possible given the resources. A software engineer is only really limited by human imagination.

But this difference between what one can create with physical resources and what one can create with imagination isn't as fundamental as it might at first appear.

Consider yourself looking up at the night sky and viewing a star. The physical constraint on your resources, as a biological being, mean that what you see is a small, slightly sparkly dot just above you. But you know that really it's not small, not sparkly, and not particular in 'your' sky. Instead it's a gigantic sphere of plasma held together by gravity at an immense distance from you. Just like the computer program, we are having to image that this is what the star is, because we don't see it that way.

Now, you could at this point try to draw a distinction between imagining what stars are into existence and imagining a software program into existence. You could say that the star is *really there*, and it's only a limitation of our human situation that we see it as a small dot in the sky. But the computer software is really there, too. If one programs it, it will 'be'. It might not 'be' at the moment, but actually neither is the star. The star used to exist, but doesn't any more.

'Being' at a particular moment is not a necessary quality of  something being true. The difference between the star that was and the program that will be is trivial, they are both really there, albeit at different points in time, and we can know about both through explanatory theories of the world.

ONE CAN DISCOVER SOMETHING THAT ONE FIRST HAS TO CREATE.

Why Do We Need Science?

In The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch writes that no one would have ever wondered what stars are if there hadn't been expectations that unsupported things fall, and that light needs fuel which will eventually run out. Both of which made stars rather curious.

Why do we need science in the first place? This is the first question we should ask in ascertaining a philosophy of science. The answer is already familiar to us. We need science because we have explanations about how the world works and we know many of them are wrong.

If the explanation of physical phenomena were evidence in their appearance, as empiricism suggests, we would know things pretty easily. Science arises precisely because it is hard to explain the world. Or, more accurately, because it is hard for us to explain the world.

Deutsch writes about the scientific revolution being born out of a time where dogmatic, weak explanations gave way to critical search for strong, hard to vary explanations.

What does 'hard/easy to vary' mean?

People once accepted myths and these explanations were such that it was of no real consequence if you varied their details. For example, the ancient Greek myth explaining the weather stated that winter was caused by Hades, long ago, kidnapping the goddess of spring, Persephone. Persephone's mother negotiated a deal where Hades would let her go, but under the agreement that she would eat a magic seed that would compel her to still visit him once a year. This is fundamentally different to the tight explanations that we associate with science. Why a magic seed and not another kind of magic? This is a detail that could be changed. Likewise, it could be that her father made the deal. It could be that she visits once a year to get her revenge on Hades. Or he is obsessed and kidnaps her every year. They could even easily be different gods entirely. 

Scientific explanations, are hard to vary.   

When philosophy of science became prominent in the early 20th century it was in part to do with how impressed people were by science. There was an idea that it served some kind of noble function, and served it with unusual reliability. The philosophers were not interested because their passions lay with science, particularly, but because they wanted to know if there was anything philosophy could learn about itself. And indeed they were right. Science does serve a noble function. It is not just that we have expectations, and the world will occasional disagree with them by having things like stars not fall to the ground, science is important because we have a history of accepting our expectations and ignoring the problems with them. As Deutsch illuminates, science began when we stopped making it so easy to fool ourselves--when we began a trend of looking for problems and creating hard to vary explanations.

Karl Popper sums up why we need science:

“Science, one might be tempted to say, is nothing but enlightened and responsible common-sense—common-sense broadened by imaginative critical thinking. But it is more. It represents our wish to know, our hope of emancipating ourselves from ignorance of the expert, the narrow-mindedness of the specialist, or the fear of being proven wrong, or of being proved 'inexact', or having failed to prove or justify our case. And it includes the superstitious belief in the authority of science itself”

Most philosophies of science time and time again get this wrong. They treat science as almost obvious. Empiricists describe science as being something you can quite easily read in nature. Even more common is to treat scientific theories as easy to verify. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is for: to challenge what we think is obvious about reality.

(For more on the theme I recommend chapter one of Beginning of Infinity and Realism and the Aim of Science by Karl Popper).

We Created Civilisation, Not Evolution

I have heard it suggested that what makes us so special as a species is our ability to empathise. That it is only because of this that we get civilisation. After all, how could civilisation work without the ability to imagine how others feel?

Implying that civilisation is a logical consequence of empathy is paramount to saying we evolved to have civilisation. But the truth is we are not evolved to be part of civilisation at all. It is something we created, and empathy has little to do with how.

The way we evolved was to be part of a much smaller group known as a band. Large enough to haunt, small enough to feed. This is typical of mammals. It was this way for us for millions of years before we created civilisation. Civilisation is relatively new. Something we created in the last 12 thousand or so years.

It began with the agricultural revolution, also known as the neolithic revolution.

There was a time when we moved from eating grass to eating meat, because eating meat took less work for more energy. This was an evolutionary change. But once the ice age was over with, we were freed up to turn our creativity to take a stab at working on the work-energy problem ourselves, and here farming began.

There are still tribes around today that live similarly to how we did when all lived in bands. They live under conditions where a baby being born a girl and not a boy can endanger all the bands futures if she is not killed. Farming meant we could facilitate large number, and so this sort of thing was less of a problem. And as the numbers got larger, trade became possible.

Through the continued invention of new technologies to facilitate trade and farming we could, in turn facilitate continually more people. As time passed entire villages and towns were born, and by this point, we were inventing not only new technologies to help facilitate the numbers, but ideas on how to govern, such as religions, moralities, and law and order.

All of this--how we trade, what technologies we had, what ideas we had on how to govern--continued to improve, and as they did villages became empires. Today we live in a global village of billions. It is nothing evolution could have ever created. Civilisation required the rapid and innovative adaptivity of human creativity alone. And we are not done.

One day, chances are, as our ideas on how to govern and our technologies only continue to make progress we will move out into space and be able to facilitate trillions. This is preventable only if we stop making progress.

It's true that civilisation is a unique thing to people, but it is not the fundenental things that is special about us, it is one of many thing, all having their roots in our unique capacity to imagine, not just what others may be feeling, but anything.

To create. To solve problems.

(For more on this theme I highly recommend Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man and David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity)