I have been slogging through David Deutsch’s upbeat philosophical book “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that transform the world”, ISBN 978-0-14-312135-0 (2011). Although Deutsch is a good writer and addresses a number of interesting topics – such as religion, quantum theory, why flowers are beautiful, what happened on Easter Island – I found this volume to be a slog because a number of his explanations seemed unconvincing, at least to me.
Nevertheless, Deutsch starts from a highly defensible premise – that all progress results from the human quest for better explanations.
The evidence of our eyes is that the Sun travels across the sky, but a better explanation is that the Earth rotates. Deutsch’s reasonable assertion is that such better explanations are born in the creative human mind and then are tested against reality. When an explanation does not match observation, humans seek to invent a better theory. It is that never-ending search for better explanations that opens up the path to infinite progress.
It would be hard to disagree with any of that – except that Deutsch’s view does not seem to fit the world we live in. Human beings have repeatedly been oppressed by bad explanations – the Peak Oil Scam, the AIDS-Scam, the Climate-Scam, the Green Energy Scam, the Covid-Scam. Despite lots of evidence to the contrary, those bad explanations became (and still are) unshakeable Popperian paradigms. The scientific method – where there can never be any such thing as AlGore’s “Settled Science” – has clearly failed in a number of important areas.
Well, perhaps that is because those specific bad explanations brought political benefits to important individuals? But perhaps it could also be that the scientific method is a neo-religious dogma, often invoked but generally honored more usually in the breach.
To step outside Deutsch’s examples, look at an important but politically-neutral topic in medicine – the asserted impact of cholesterol on heart attacks. The prevailing wisdom is that cholesterol in the bloodstream causes build-up of plaque in the circulatory system, blocking blood flow and resulting in cardiac events. Millions of human beings take statin medications to combat cholesterol. However, there are dissenting voices like Dr. Kendrick, interviewed by a bitcoin enthusiast (strangely enough) in this rather long video.
One of the many anomalies Dr. Kendrick points to is that plaque builds up in the arteries and only very rarely in the veins, even though the same cholesterol-laden blood is pumped through both. Strange! Even more odd is that when cardiac surgeons take a patient’s vein from a leg to replace a clogged artery, that vein (now artery) then can become clogged with plaque. Whatever is happening in the body, the evidence would suggest it is not simply a matter of cholesterol. Yet any doctor who expresses doubt about the cholesterol hypothesis is banished to the outer darkness – which seems completely inconsistent with Deutsch’s premise about human beings seeking better explanations.
The question which Deutsch sidesteps in this book is why the scientific method, which works so well when it is used, is so often NOT used? That points to a problem not with the scientific method, but with us human beings. It is very difficult for us to accept Oliver Cromwell’s famous advice: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken!”
It seems that the road to infinity will require a lot more willingness to sacrifice sacred cows than we humans are comfortable doing.
