Letter to Mike Skiba on his video, “The Force of Knowledge”

Mike,

Ok I got another watch of your video in. I think the talk could benefit most from a clarification of the relationship between problems, conjectures and explanations. I think many people do not realize how those two things are really related. The Popperian perspective on this is actually counterintuitive for most people. They believe truth is true, and false is false, and a problem once solved never appears again. Thats why they are so furious and frustrated that problems are multiplying.

I think of nearly everyone today as a pessimist. What they think of as optimism is this: When you ask them about their fundamental beliefs, they have a rational explanation of the world, and if you follow their logic it leads straight to disaster. If you ask them if we are headed for disaster they say “No, Im an optimist.” They mean that they dont take their own best explanation of the world seriously. If you ask them if they have another explanation they say “No.” Thats what I call a pessimist.

For me the best way to illustrate the Popperian version of (real) optimism is the Pascal quote, “Knowledge is like a sphere, the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown. “ For the purposes of your talk, the unknown is the set of our problems. Problems are the issues raised by using our new knowledge to help ourselves. I sent you some sketches with examples of how this sphere grows and the new issues that are raised by each greater volume of knowledge.

Then the next key point, Popper’s grand slam, is the realization that in order to grow the sphere of knowledge, we have to realize that all of the existing knowledge is false, that it is only a conjecture. It was approximately correct, but in order to grow the sphere we need a deeper explanation that makes even more precise predictions about the world. You could show each sphere fracturing as the better, larger one takes shape. Knowledge is not secure truth, but only a partial truth that was good enough to overcome the problems we had. Truth retreats forever, because new problems always require deeper truths. Thats why conjectures are critical to solving problems.

I think if you illustrate it this way it might help people to understand that we can expect problems to proliferate as our knowledge grows deeper, but also they will begin to get an intuition for why the new problems are likely to be much better, since we have solved our core problems, like hunger, thirst, and lions, and now we have more subtle and less severe problems, like covid, brexit, and climate change, etc.

I have been wanting to illustrate this for my friends and loved ones for a long time. This misunderstanding is causing tremendous real suffering in the world. Way to go to try to set it down in a better way.

As a side note, my own personal version of this belief is that I disagree with Deutsch’s claim that we have a choice to make, that we can try to beat our problems or let them overwhelm us. I agree that it is possible for problems to overwhelm us, but I think we do not have a choice about whether to solve problems, because the human body is a synchronizer. We do not have free will to decide whether or not to try to solve problems. We are a device that is built to synchronize to the rhythms of its niche, which means solving all the problems we can perceive. In my view there is no way to remain alive if you stop solving problems, because that is what life consists of. It’s a physical process of conjecture and refutation. That’s what I’m trying to express in my epistolution paper.

Best, C