The End of Creationism and the Beginning of Infinity: Linking Evolution, Information, Knowledge and purpose
In this book, David Deutsch, a renowned British philosopher and physicist, covers a lot of heady ground in both of his chosen fields: from succeeding in linking evolution to information, knowledge, and purpose, to disposing of the remnants of creationism, to introducing a framework for his own invention, construction theory. It is an ambitious menu, handled with intellectual aplomb and grace.
Deutsch begins by positing that there are only two ways for knowledge to enter the world. Both are through evolution.
Knowledge first enters embedded in biological adaptations; and then thoughts enters expressed as ideas emanating from human brains.
There are no other ways to get knowledge into the world.
One of the important deep-structure connections to the universe is that both forms of knowledge are expressible as abstractions that have the power to actually move physical things around in the world.
Warming up to his main thesis, the author asks two guiding questions: (1) Does progress ever come to an end, or is it open-ended and boundless?
Put differently, is progress the beginning of a new infinity?
His answer is a resounding yes. Progress is indeed open-ended and unbounded, thus represents an unending quest that signifies the beginning of a new infinity.
It also implies that the universe itself, at least since the Enlightenment where it has been driven by constantly improving explanations, is also unbounded.
And the second thought-provoking question he poses is: (2) How do we know about the world even before we have had an opportunity to interact with it?
Inching ever-closer to his main thesis, that all progress is driven by a singular human endeavor-- the pursuit of good explanations, the author gives an example: How are we aware of a quasar jet that occurred billions of years ago on the far side of the universe?
And not only do we know that it once existed, but we have also created an explanatory theory that enables us to construct mathematical models of its behavior. As a result, we can predict the jet's future actions and gain insight into its underlying purpose for existing.
How is it possible that our man-made model somehow encapsulates the same mathematical relationships and causal structure as that of an object that existed billions of years ago on the other side of the universe?
The answer is that it is possible only through scientific knowledge, one of our most profound and most fundamental connections to the universe.
These two deep structure connections to the universe begin when our brains, the only organ capable of perceiving the world, respond to electrical impulses transmitted primarily to our eyes.
All we can do with what we see is make assumptions and then use them to make guesses about the nature and significance of objects out in the world. Surprisingly, guessing turns out to be a profound and robust act of creativity.
Ultimately, knowledge gets into the world by humans guessing about things they see, and then making sense of them -- like seeing the remnants of that quasar jet through the lens of a radio-telescope.
Only by making progressively better guesses, whose explanations are testable, have we arrived at the pinnacle of knowledge, the scientific method, which has guided human progress to new ways of accumulating knowledge since the Enlightenment.
Thus, the true deep connection to the universe lies in the fact that through evolution, we have brought knowledge into the world, learned how to abstract it, and then how to accumulate it.
Cultural knowledge
Our ancestral species colonized new habitats and adopted survival strategies based solely on biological adaptations. However, by the time our fully human ancestors had arrived, they were achieving the same results a thousand times faster by evolving cultural knowledge.
Because they had not yet learned how to do science, their cultural knowledge still lagged compared to what the Enlightenment was about to spring on them through the creation of explanatory knowledge and science and its eventual accumulation.
For instance, even before the Enlightenment, people had dreamed of flying to the moon, but it took the explanatory power of Newton's theory of gravity before they were able to do so.
This connection between being able to explain the world and being able to control it, is also part of the deep structure of the universe.
We link information to knowledge and purpose as we facilitate their entry into the world via guessing; we also cause knowledge to exist as abstractions, a non-physical form that can move things around out in the world.
By constantly testing and improving our explanations, we can use them to control the world, thereby proving that they are both universal and unbounded.
Through evolution, we have not only brought knowledge into the world but have learned how to accumulate it.
Constructor Theory
To see why this is so, the author invites us to consider the set of all conceivable transformations of physical objects.
Those that violate the laws of physics will never happen; some will occur spontaneously; and the rest are possible only in the presence of knowledge generated either through evolutionary adaptations or through human ideas. There are no other possibilities.
He then tells us that this momentous dichotomy exists because if there were other transformations that explanatory knowledge could not affect, then this fact itself would be a testable regularity in nature and such regularities would themselves constitute a new law of nature.
This deep connection between explanatory knowledge and transformations that leads to scientific development is why the cosmic reach of human cultural adaptations have a different character and cosmic reach than biological adaptations.
The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge in order to survive, gives humans a power to transform nature that is limited only by the laws of physics. And this is the ultimate cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge - as well as of the people who can create such knowledge.
For every other species on earth, their cosmic reach can be determined simply by making a list of all the resources and environmental conditions that cause the selection pressures reflected in their DNA, upon which their adaptations ultimately depend.
Richard Dawkins tells us that you can actually read their past environmental struggles through their DNA the same as you would read the rings on a tree.
However for humans, where genes end, knowledge begins. Our cosmic reach is limited only by the laws of physics.
We can create and apply whatever new knowledge we will need to adapt and survive in almost any environment.
The difference between us and other species is in the kinds of knowledge we each can use (explanatory vs rule of thumb), and in how we create it (conjecture and criticism of ideas vs variation and selection of genes).
It is precisely these differences that explain why every other organism can function only in a certain range of environments that are hospitable to it, while we humans can transform inhospitable environments into support systems for ourselves.
And while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such resources, human brains are factories for transforming everything into anything that the laws of physics will allow.
This connection between having the power to explain the world and being able to control it, is also part of the deep structure of the universe:
We link information to purpose and knowledge and facilitate their entry into the world via guessing.
By constantly testing and improving our guesses and explanations, we prove that explanatory knowledge is universal and unbounded and can exist as abstractions that can move things around in the world.
We can create models that encapsulate the mathematical relationships and causal structure of objects that exist deep in the universe.
We are thus universal constructors.
Humans as universal constructors
The fact that we are universal constructors, sets us apart from all other species on Earth and any potential extraterrestrial species.
The only truly unique aspect of humans, whether in the cosmic scheme of the universe or according to any rational standard, is our capacity to generate novel explanations.
The laws of nature, by granting us the ability to transform resources, demonstrates that we have universal reach.
Which prompts the question: Could there be aspects of reality that are beyond the comprehension of our brains? Is it possible that life and intelligence exist somewhere else in the universe in forms that we can't even imagine? Do extraterrestrial beings possess a greater cosmic reach than humans?
According to this author, the answer to all these questions is, no. It is impossible because if the capacity in question were a mere quantitative difference, such as the need for more computational speed or memory, we could understand these aspects simply by using a computer, which Alan Turing has already proven, has universal reach.
On the other hand, if the claim is that we may be qualitatively incapable of understanding certain forms of intelligence, then this is merely another assertion that the world is inexplicable, and reduces to the creationist's appeal for intervention of the supernatural.
However, the author dismisses all arguments for supernatural intervention as having outlived their usefulness and are now, not only passe', but are also composed of "bad explanations", of severely limited reach.
We can thus conclude that human reach is essentially the same as the reach of explanatory knowledge itself. Therefore, any environment within human reach has the potential to generate an open-ended, continuous stream of explanatory knowledge.
In other words, if knowledge of a suitable nature were manifested in such an environment through appropriate physical objects, it would self-perpetuate and continue to expand indefinitely.
The significance of Humans in the universe
Compared to cosmic events that occur almost daily, there are so many things that are obviously more significant in the universe than humans, that we seem to have no place in it.
Our history and culture, our aspirations and moral values, are all minimal side effects of a supernova explosion occurring a few billion years ago -- all of which could be extinguished tomorrow by another such explosion.
However, one can explain everything about supernovae and almost everything else without ever mentioning people or knowledge.
But does this mean that supernovae are independent of the presence or absence of humans, or what those humans know, their purpose and what they intend?
Beyond our narrow earthly perspective, the author tells us that the answer is no because astrophysics is incomplete without a theory of humans, just as it is without a theory of gravity or nuclear reactions.
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 be present near the phenomenon in question.
The point is that all explanations of what is out there in the physical world, mention knowledge and people, if only implicitly.
But knowledge is more significant even than that because in all cases, the class of transformations that could happen spontaneously, in the absence of knowledge, is negligibly small compared with the class that could be affected by intelligent beings who want those transformations to happen.
So, the explanations of almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would be applied to bring these phenomena about.
For instance, if you want to explain how an object might possibly cool down to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, you cannot avoid explaining in detail what humans would do to carry out such a measurement.
The laws of physics that explains it bare no resemblance to any rules of thumb that were ever in our ancestors' genes or culture. Yet, human brains today, know in considerable detail how such a measurement could be carried out.
Somehow a quasar jet happens in such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, humans can know and predict what the jet will do, and can understand why.
Here we have physical objects very unlike each other, and whose behavior is dominated by different laws of physics, embodying the same mathematical and causal structures, and doing so evermore accurately overtime.
Of all the physical processes that can occur in nature, only the creation of knowledge exhibits that underlying unity.
Note, for instance that the SETI detectors are exquisitely adapted to detecting something that has never yet been detected.
Biological evolution could never produce such an adaptation. Only scientific knowledge can. This illustrates why scientific knowledge is universal and non-explanatory knowledge is not.
Like all science, the SETI project can conjecture the existence of something, calculate what some of its observable attributes would be, and then construct an instrument to detect it.
Non-explanatory systems cannot cross this conceptual gap to engage with unexperienced evidence on nonexistent phenomenon.
Thus, the study of the behavior of champagne corks to be popped when an intelligent intergalactic signal is confirmed, as a proxy for that event, is logically equivalent to the study of everything significant.
It follows that humans, intergalactic people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomenon in the cosmos - the only phenomenon whose behavior cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.
100 stars!
