Digressions - 1

Several years ago I came across a TED talk by a famous physicist called David Deutsch and I thought that it was the best talk that I had ever seen. He talked about our place in the universe in the context of how humans figure out new knowledge about our surroundings and then he went on to connect his talk with the current problems facing the human race and what's the right way to go about figuring out the solutions. I went ahead and bought his book called "the fabric of reality" and was immensely impressed by the ideas presented in the book.

In his book, he tried to put forth the case that four of our current theories, put together, may already suffice well enough to serve as the theory of everything. A critique of his claim is beyond both the scope of this post and perhaps even my intelligence but one of the theories that he talks about is Karl Popper's theory of the growth of human knowledge. I was very intrigued by Popper's idea that the process of new scientific advance is deductive as opposed to inductive. This means that revolutionary new scientific understanding almost never comes from observing nature but simply by a process which, for all practical purposes, is the same as guessing. Obviously verification and fine tuning are still within the domain of observing and learning but the seed of new science is basically just a hunch. I came across this concept yet again in a YouTube video of a physics lecture that Feynman gave in Cornell (highly recommended again). But it was only recently that I got the chance to read Popper's original paper which first presented his theory. He presented it in the context of the philosophy of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.

The great Carl Sagan begins his TV series Cosmos, which to me is the greatest TV series ever made, with an introduction to the philosophies of such names as Thales, Anaximander, Democritus, Heraclitus and more. These people lived around 500 BC in the geographical region which now constitutes parts of southern Italy, Greece, and western Turkey and they wondered about the deeper questions of life. Specifically, they tried to explain the inner workings of the world around them. By modern standards, their explanations would appear ad-hoc and childish but it is easy to see that their ideas must have been groundbreaking in their time. They presented a distinct break from the anthropocentric Greek legends and they tried to give a mechanistic explanation of the world. And by criticizing each other and building upon each other's theories, they laid the foundation of the Western scientific tradition. It is also fascinating to see how 'far out' their explanations are and it is evident that their understanding is more guesswork than studied induction.

It takes a special society to tolerate such imagination and creativity, especially when the creative energies are focused towards the deepest questions that there are. It was not before long that this frail tolerance was lost to dogmatic views of the world with the advent of Plato and Aristotle. While western science finally recovered from the dark ages with Galileo, and the western thought with the beginning of Rennaisance, it is interesting to note that this success was never repeated anywhere else. I'm sure that the ancient Indian philosophers asked the same questions that the Greeks did and I'm sure that their answers were equally insightful and beautiful. I'm sure that there existed a time when the philosophers were merely feeling their way in the dark and their theories and thoughts were open to severe criticisms. But today the Bhagwad Gita, for example, is used to ensure that witnesses do not lie in court, thereby imparting to it a rigidity which would have been anathema to the philosophers who contributed to the great work. Other religions have similar stories but I find it odd that the Hindu equivalent of Bible and Koran is the Gita.

So what's the point of this post? Digressions!