Wizards in the Gaps
I have to disagree with Simen’s critique of David Deutsch, whose theory of knowledge is based largely on the work of Karl Popper. Simen argues that Deutsch is wrong to criticize “explanationless theories” because explanation is itself a weak form of knowledge; in Simen’s argument, wizards underlie all explanations because one can endlessly question explanations: “We end up with an infinite regress: what caused that? What caused what caused that?”
Simen’s answer: at the root of all sciences are irreducible explanations which, because of their irreducibility, constitute “assumptions” which may as well be wizards for their magical role in the construction of our theories.
This is not the case, neither in physics nor in other fields (which do in fact materially reduce to physics: a major cause of tension between biologists and physicists in particular, as Schrödinger discussed in his lectures on the structure of life; we do not “kid ourselves” when we assert that no model of knowledge which cannot in principle scale in accordance with the physical structure of reality and its laws has any legitimacy). It is particularly untrue of the fecund territory at the roots of our sciences, where work to more deeply correlate high-level complexity with the fundamental rules of the universe is most exciting.
What is the case: our explanations are momentarily incomplete (we can assume they will remain so, ever-perfectable, asymptotically approaching completion). Simen’s assertions that where there is no knowledge there are wizards is like an anti-epistemological “God of the Gaps” game: if we posit a working model of the subatomic world and a cosmological timeline that explains how that world came into being over the life of the universe, he says, “Well, what caused that?” If we answer, “The nature of the universe at the Big Bang,” he repeats his question. We might answer this game of endless querying:
- The concept of causal relations depends on time, which language construes in a manner not consistent with its actual properties in the universe (and which has itself not always existed, so to speak); you are building sentences to query a universe that may not always follow the rules of sentences. (Indeed, many of Simen’s sentences are metaphysical, not scientific; they would not be sensible to a physicist: “How can we explain which [universe] we ended up with?” begs as many questions as it asks, both from language and physics).
- Perhaps something did cause, say, the Big Bang, and we don’t know what yet; that we don’t know yet what caused it does not mean we assume wizards, just as those who developed chemistry without understanding atomic properties weren’t assuming wizards.
Neither gods nor wizards live in the spaces where we don’t yet have explanatory models; nor are these spaces filled by “assumptions.” Instead, they await their explanations, which are not merely descriptive or observational in nature but in fact recreate the functional and formal structures they describe in model form, imaginatively. Once we explain something, we have virtualized it mentally. This is the most important property of knowledge, and one that I believe has special significance for humanity’s future in the cosmos. Popper and Deutsch are, in my view, quite right to argue that explanation is the basis of scientific progress, not the accumulation of predictions drawn from uncomprehended data.
