Why We Need To Talk About Kevin

When Lionel Shriver's novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, appeared in 2003, it was greeted as a taboo-breaking success. Yet with hindsight and despite the gory plot, I remember Kevin not for the story or the drama, but the subtle afterthought - that living is worth it, even if it makes no sense.

After Kevin Khatchadourian, not yet sixteen, decides to kill nine of his fellow high school students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker, how should blame be split between the boy and the grieving mother? Could things have gone differently? This, Eva Khatchadourian ponders at length and with indelible insight, in letters to her estranged husband Franklin.

The mental atmosphere is that of slow smouldering rage. The apparent cause is that Franklin wants a child - Eva does not and the cake cannot be had and eaten. In binary relationships, zero-sum happiness is really just unhappiness by a different name. To remain barren is for Eva to wound the man she loves, deeply and sincerely. To have a child is to become "hopelessly trapped in someone else's story", a mere body "designed to expel its own replacement". There is no winning third option. There is only that archetypal human conundrum: to be sincere or not lonely?

Ostensibly, Eva aims this rage at every stock argument in favour of reproduction. Meaning? She pulls no punches and there are notes of raw bitterness in her reproof for those who "foist their own aimlessness onto their offsprings". Love? Try cowardice, Franklin, she taunts: having children because "you can never become their ex-father, as I might become your ex-wife". And in any case, "if there is no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation".

Yet what is the rage really about? Some clues in the remarks that "you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and.. it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive".

At one end, there is Franklin, who "disparaged people (people like [Eva]) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fitness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character". Here too are Franklin's parents, a pair unique in their living "so exclusively in three dimensions". These are people who do not struggle, like Eva, "against convention as a constraint", but who are "grateful for the rules". (There is the side remark that childhood and maturity are both, in their extremes, "all about following the rules"). They are "still and present" and Eva, at length, concedes: "the capacity is existential, that ability to just be, with a profundity that I have seen elude some very well educated people".

At the other end, of course, is Kevin: beset by an indifference "so absolute that it's like a whole you might fall in". It is not rage that ultimately moves Kevin to massacre, as much as an unbearable apathy. Because in his experience, there is no joy or simple fitness of living: reality is lame, if only because "it is real and therefore finite and fixed". Why was life "foisted" on him? he seethes. The promise of life is that it's worth living - but "expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed". As Eva puts it: nothing is interesting if you are not interested. This is existence through the joyless eye of the depressed, who suffers not from unbridled melancholy, but a deadly lack of vitality, sheer and true. Poignantly, Kevin feels cheated. Moreover, he rightly feels unloved ("what does it mean that Dad loves you and hasn't a bleeping clue who you are?"). Eva alone understands why. For if Franklin's parents (and most people) manage to forget the uncanniness of existence through their "forever puttering, greasing the machinery of daily life", Kevin refuses "to deceive himself that by merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use". The line lies between those who have the character to face the void and those who don't. There is no real point to life and no good reason to do anything. "The difference", she concludes mournfully, "is that your father would wittingly install the water softener for no good reason and Kevin would not".

Eva knows this because she is caught in the middle. Franklin's parents might be silly, "well-meaning but unimaginative" and blind to "why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn't pretty", but they are happy. And unlike Kevin, she does not seem to begrudge their capacity for immersion or their enthusiasm for doing the living thing. (Or if she does, it's only to the extent of passive aggression.) Their wholesome unselfconsciousness is not "the string and arrows of other people's outrageous fortune" (no accident that Kevin's weapon is a crossbow). She recognises that "it may not be fair to call it a character flaw that someone's life has always gone well with minimal impedance". If anything, that might be the aspiration: to be "too busy attending to a flourishing business and a marvellous marriage to bother about what it all amounts to". Yet she never quite gets there. Mingled with her "cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions" and despite the permanent goings to and fro, her own struggle with meaning festers unacknowledged. That Kevin should come to embody this secret void of vitality is more than a parent's nightmare of a child she cannot love. It is our communal horror of genuine self-knowledge. For after all, "who could live day after day with the deficiencies of their own imagination made solid as brick"?

Under the circumstances, the question of blame has particular significance. This is a quintessentially human obsession, for we are staunch believers in free will. Eva's acerbic dismissal of people who spurn accountability through lawsuits, is telling - as is Kevin's derision of "amateurs" who try to justify their atrocities with paltry excuses ("I was bullied", "I was misunderstood"). For his own, he insists to take responsibility. Yet there is subversive ambivalence on both sides. Kevin's defence makes use of his Prozac prescription, at Kevin's own suggestion. And Eva herself asks with revealing poignancy: why so much guilt and shame, attached so vehemently, to events regarding which one feels at once "responsible and helpless"? Is mental illness, lacking the simple vitality of living - a curse or a character flaw?

Nevertheless, both Eva and Kevin cling to blame as to a life boat. Why, when "there's a freedom in apathy, a wild dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk [and] do anything [like] Kevin"? As Eva herself observes: "you can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good". Like Roman Romanovich Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, Eva and Kevin accept blame because it is the necessary payment for something neither is ultimately prepared to abandon: membership in the human race.

And there is another reason: because it does not matter. When one victim's mother sues her for negligence, Eva writes: "The problem was not who was punished for what. The problems was that her daughter was dead". Likewise, the problem is not whether society ever deigns to forgive Eva and Kevin - the problem is that life has no meaning.

Ultimately, the high-minded reasons for living, like the reasons for having children, are just dirigibles: "immense, floating, and few; optimistic large-hearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded". Happiness perhaps is possible only in the negative, as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky once remarked: we feel it briefly in the the lack of suffering, the lack of deprivation. This reminded me of a passage in George Orwell, from the review of Mein Kampf (1940): "[Hitler] grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. (...) because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, [he] knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. (...) Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time", Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death" and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet"¹. As Eva reflects bitterly to Franklin: "when your life was wholly in your lap you didn't know what to do with it". Struggle, hardship and self-sacrifice are an easy way out.

Thus we are come, full circle, back to the "simple fitness of being" - and our communal perplexity before it. For in the end, Kevin's rejection of just being is no more baffling to us than it is to Eva. We've all peeked at the void. If not exactly struggle, certainly work is a vital distraction from the vast meaninglessness of it all.

And if it's true of individuals, it's true of collectives. Every so often, societies are driven to despair by their own success - unsure how to find meaning in a life largely void of real hardship. In Eva's world, the hate-mail is "meet-red", whereas the kindness of condolences is "pastel and processed" and nobody uses "nice" to mean anything other than "boring". In the midst of progress, there is an atavic yearning for violence, "raw and unleashed", to tear away the veil of civilisation which "comes between us as much as it makes life possible". Is it rash to put progress on a pyre and light it? Yes. Then again, "desperate people will often opt for short-term relief in exchange for long-term losses".

Despite this, I don't think Kevin's conclusion is pessimistic. On the contrary. The book ends with a certain softness. Needing kindness herself, Eva is kinder now. In the end, there is something of Franklin's attitude in her remark that maybe "you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile". More importantly, she finally discovers how to love Kevin and through him - the nihilistic impulse in her own heart. In the end, she does love life, in full awareness of its ultimate meaninglessness.

And unlike Franklin's - who hasn't a bleeping clue, who loves not his real country or his real son or life as it really is, but delusive shadows of those things built with squinting eyes in his own heart, Eva's love is real.

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The Beginning of Infinity: Optimism, Societies, Ethics

Good books have reach. You know them because they stick around in your mind for weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes years. I reckon The Beginning of Infinity (2011) may just be such a book. I recommend it. Meanwhile, here are a few more highlights¹.

All Evils Are Caused by Insufficient Knowledge

Why would anyone want to change a bad leader? At first glance, this might sound rather absurd: why would anyone not want that? Yet the question does conceal a certain assumption: hope. We hope that the next leader will be better - or, at any rate, less bad. However - why? Change is both risky and expensive, forecasts are often unreliable and the leadership selection process far from guaranteed to deliver the best outcome. Surely, better the devil you know?

This is an open question. People can, and often do, argue in favour of keeping bad leaders (if less often in their own countries). For Thomas Hobbes, to take a classic example, merely stifling opposition and crippling the economy were not reasons enough to depose an absolute ruler ("humane affairs cannot be without some inconvenience", he wrote). Constant change can be chaotic. And life in a power vacuum - "nasty, brutish and short". No sober advocate of change would seriously dispute that. Indeed, Karl Popper pointed out that democracy is not about electing the best possible leaders, but about changing leadership without bloodshed. There is no guarantee of improvement, only the promise of change. For Mr Deutsch, how a society settles the question of bad leadership is a special case of how it settles the question of progress in general. Both questions turn on a certain attitude: optimism.

For Mr Deutsch, optimism follows from the reality of living in a "computation-friendly, prediction-friendly and explanation friendly" universe. If the only requirements for knowledge creation are conjectures and criticism, then the only requirements are human intelligence, mass, energy and evidence (for the purpose of testability). These are all things we have, so "problems are soluble". In other words, "if something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing [preventing] it from being technologically possible is not knowing how".

Whether or not you agree with Mr Deutsch that optimism is self-evident, it is certainly worth considering his notion that there can be no progress (and no democracy) without it. Change is not an unalloyed good. We may try to improve things and fail. Misunderstandings are ubiquitous and neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate can guard against them. Knowledge is fallible. Bad leaders emerge, mistakes happen and it takes optimism to push through when they do. Optimism is the hope that future choices will be better than present ones. Optimism is the willingness to accept the gamble of change. It is "a way of explaining failure, not of prophesying success". It is a stance towards the future: the belief (perhaps the hope) that "all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge". At their core, progress and democracy are both expressions of optimism. Perhaps a better leader can be found, perhaps new ideas will prove better than existing ones, and perhaps problems are, in principle, soluble.

Progress / knowledge creation = creative conjectures + rational criticism. Democracy is a special case of progress, in politics. Both are expressions of optimism: they express the hope that change is likely to prove beneficial.  

So whether a society is open or closed rests largely on how it settles the question of its optimism. "A pessimistic civilisation considers it immoral to behave in ways that have not been tried and tested many times before, because it is blind to the possibility that the benefits of doing so might offset the risks", writes with declared partisanship Mr Deutsch. An optimistic one, on the other hand, will be "open to suggestion, tolerant of dissent, and critical of both dissent and received opinion". Closed societies are static: they follow tradition. Open societies are dynamic: they embrace change. Closed societies discourage creativity and criticism, open societies encourage them2.

Moreover, both tendencies are self-perpetuating. Open societies expect change to bring about improvement. Consequently, they encourage creativity and criticism, which does (eventually) bring about improvement, and this confirms their original assumption. Closed societies, on the other hand, fear that change leads to decline. Consequently, they discourage creativity and ban criticism, which in turn makes the emergence of bad ideas more likely, and this confirms their original assumption. Bad ideas are more likely to emerge in closed societies because without a tradition of critical thinking, they are left vulnerable to false and harmful conjectures. Besides, "almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic". So in a closed society, change is more likely to lead to decline because "in the absence of criticism, true ideas no longer have the advantage".

Progress relies on creativity and criticism. Creativity is important, but criticism is more important still, for it is our best mechanism for detecting and eliminating errors. In the absence of criticism, true ideas no longer have the advantage.

Side note on "I told you so". I rather enjoyed Mr Deutsch's deconstruction of why the answer "I told you so" is bad. It is bad because it could be used to "explain" anything (see point about good explanation needing to be precise, in part one). It is bad because it answers the form of the question rather than its substance: it focuses on who asked it, rather than what was asked. It is bad because it reinterprets a request for true explanation as a request for justification. It is bad because it confuses epistemological authority (which does not exist3) with human authority, meaning power. And, finally, it is quite dangerous because it implies that through such power, it stands outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism. So yeah - fuck you, Mr Adult.

Side note on emotional triggers. A short comment on his observations around the mechanisms static societies (or static subcultures within societies) employ in order to suppress change. They are the usual mechanisms employed to prevent deviation from the norm: triggers of uneasiness, embarrassment and shame, together with positive triggers (such as pride and endorsement) which can be used to reward conformity. Moreover, there is the mechanism of socialising children to derive their sense of selves from enacting that society's memes. From then on, such people "not only enact those memes, they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them". Psychology has shown that a strong sense of self (identity) is correlated with feelings of high self-esteem, purposefulness, connection and love; so bundling a person's identity with the need to conform to certain norms can be pretty effective. I sometimes wonder - is doing so infringing on a child's right to freedom or is it a requisite part of creating a new person? A bite for thought.

Side note on communication. Finally, I enjoyed his argument that communication is an act of creativity. It goes like this. Memes cannot be downloaded from one mind to another like software or inherited like genes. Memes spread by being enacted. Person A enacts a meme, Person B observes Person A's behaviour and tries to guess what the meme might be from this observation. It's a process of reverse engineering. Person B is building an entirely new instance of the meme in their own mind. How? You've guessed it: conjecture and criticism. Person B makes an intelligent guess with regards to the meme in Person A's head (using evidence, logic, experience, creativity), then subjects this to criticism and testing before tentatively adopting it. We call this conversation. "The puzzle of how one can possibly translate [a meme from one mind to another] is therefore the same puzzle as where scientific theories come from". Creativity, argues Mr Deutsch, must have evolved as a solution to the problem of perpetuating culture, by making meme-copying as accurate as possible. The trouble with generic solutions, however, is that they can be repurposed :)

Only progress is sustainable

What if you disagree that optimism is self-evidently the better choice and that it follows from the laws of physics? Is there another argument in favour of adopting it? Yes, says Mr Deutsch.

The answer is subsumed by the rather amusing anecdote of the prisoner who escapes a death sentence, by promising to make the king's favourite horse talk within a year (as a child I heard this story starring Nasreddin Hodja, a famous character in Middle Eastern folklore). Fellow prisoners are appalled on hearing of Nasreddin's bold proposal: what if he failed?! Well, says Nasreddin, a lot can happen in a year. The horse might die. The king might die. I might die. Or the hose might talk! If Nasreddin "is going to escape by creating a new idea, he cannot possibly know that idea today, and therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist condition his planning". However, the story's moral is not just that "progress cannot take place at all unless someone is open to, and prepares for, those inconceivable possibilities". The moral is also that the alternative to progress is not stasis, but death.

If we are inclined to believing 1) that problems are not soluble (and that to think otherwise is sheer hubris) and 2) that stasis is sustainable, we are inclined to do so because of bad philosophy. In particular, Mr Deutsch embarks on an arduous debunking of two popular ideas: the Principle of Mediocrity (physics laws are majestically indifferent to humans affairs, there is nothing special about our species) and the Spaceship Earth metaphor (this planet is highly adapted to sustaining human life, humans are but its stewards, they should never aspire to more than keeping it as it currently is). Nonsense, says Mr Deutsch. Humans are special, they are "universal constructors" of knowledge. And their habitat is only hospitable inasmuch as they possess the knowledge of how to make it so. On a time scale long enough, "Mother Earth" is guaranteed to kill us.

In reality there is no sustainable lifestyle, only progress is sustainable. Antibiotics have saved many lives, but may soon become obsolete. Industrialisation lifted millions out of famine and poverty, but the resulting climate change means new discoveries will soon be needed. Sooner or later, an asteroid will lay waste to the whole planet. All triumphs of progress are temporary. Rather than hankering after an irretrievable past that was never sustainable in the first place and rather than aspiring to reproduce, endlessly, our current lifestyles, with their misconceptions and mistakes - better to look to the future and "embark on an open-ended journey of creation and exploration whose every step is unsustainable until it is redeemed by the next". Survival requires progress.

Moral imperative: do not destroy the means of detecting and eliminating errors

In conclusion, if progress requires optimism and survival requires progress, then this moral imperative naturally follows: do not destroy the means of detecting and eliminating errors. In others words, do not suppress criticism. Doing so is a "rare and deadly sort of error: it prevents itself from being undone".

Enlightened people accept that all knowledge is fallible. Indeed, the mechanism of conjecture-criticism relies precisely on allowing ourselves to be wrong. Not just sometimes and not just incidentally, but always and inherently. This should be fine. Progress, as Mr Popper put it, is precisely about allowing our theories "to die in our place". It is the mature pledge to criticising our ideas without staking our lives on them. And it is about discriminating between ideas, not between people. Such a process is self-correcting. We may temporarily be deceived by bad explanations. But in the long run, what other path is there to Truth?

-------------------

Notes:

1 The better to grasp/remember/index a worldview (Weltanschauung, to use the fancy term), I look out for these two features: call them Pursuit and Attitude. Between them they cover the two questions all Weltanschauungen must address: What sort of employment gives Life meaning? and What sort of outlook makes Life bearable? The first is about what to do, the second is about how to feel. Here are some examples. In the worldview of Herman Hesse, the Pursuit is wisdom, the Attitude is reverence. Marcel Proust proposes art and curiosity, Tolstoy - love and piety, Alain de Botton - reflection and ambivalence, Kurt Vonnegut - creativity and forbearance. Certainly, worldviews that have taken great minds lifetimes to create should not in earnest be folded neatly into pairs of words, but I find Pursuit/Attitude nevertheless a useful mnemonic. In David Deutsch, I reckon the Pursuit is progress. The attitude is optimism. (Note: George Orwell in Why I Write, "but before [the writer] beings to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape")

2 Of course, no society is either always closed or always open (Mr Deutsch's didactic examples are Sparta and Athens); instead, all societies nurture both impulses: open and closed, liberal and conservative, relativist and absolutist. Most of us possess both tendencies. It is clear which of the two Mr Deutsch prefers. However, just for the sake of championing the middle ground, I would like here to mention Jonathan Haidt's TED talk, in which he argues that thriving societies honour both liberal and conservative values.

3 Karl Popper in Knowledge without Authority (1960): "I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of knowledge by the entirely different question: how can we hope to detect and eliminate errors?"

The Beginning of Infinity: Good Explanations

What good were five weeks reading the cult classic by David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (Allen Lane, 2011)? Other than being seen reading it on the Tube, here are a few ideas.

Knowing

Mr Deutsch takes issue with the idea that testability is the only requirement of a good theory.

Some background. The scientific method is understood to mean that a theory must be both "falsifiable" and "testable". Falsifiability means its predictions ought to be such that certain outcomes can be imagined which could in principle prove the theory wrong. Testability means that those outcomes can be sought in practice. Religious doctrines are unfalsifiable because they do not, even in principle, admit outcomes which could prove them wrong: they predict the world being exactly the way it is, so that any observation cannot but confirm them. By contrast, String Theory is said to be falsifiable but untestable, because its predictions can only be evaluated in scenarios where both quantum and gravitational effects are simultaneously observable - meaning inside either a black hole or a big bang or a large hadron collider the size of a galaxy. By these definitions, testability subsumes falsifiability.

Mr Deutsch's argument is that making predictions (even accurate ones) does not amount to having a theory. In a conjuring trick, predicting that the person sawn in half would later appear on stage unharmed may prove accurate. And one could even acquire a bundle of such predictions and call them "A Theory for the Outcomes of Conjuring Tricks". However, while being testable, such a theory would not address, let alone solve, the question of how conjuring tricks actually work. What is missing is "an explanation: a statement of the reality that accounts for the appearance". In other words, we need a story. Not everyone agrees: instrumentalists prefer to "shut up and calculate", rather than aspire to make any grand claims about the nature of reality. They, says Mr Deutsch, are wrong.

However, not any story will do. Plenty of theories, while both testable and explanatory, are nevertheless wrong. Ancient Greeks, for instance, ascribed the bleakness of winter to Demeter's sorrow, each time her daughter Persephone had to go on an annual trip to Hades (god of the underworld), which was stipulated in their marriage contract and enforced by a magic seed. Such a theory is testable (seasons can be observed) and provides an explanation. However, the explanation is bad. It is bad because "nothing in the problem of why winter happens is addressed by postulating specifically a marriage contract or a magic seed". The details are completely arbitrary and "whenever it is easy to vary an explanation without changing its predictions, one could just as easily vary it to make different predictions if they were needed". So if the Greeks had travelled to the southern hemisphere and had encountered Summer in winter time, instead of abandoning their myth, they could have simply altered it to match this new observation: Demeter only "banishes warmth from her vicinity", say. Think - Problem of Evil and how flexibly religions bend their explanations to take it into account, without however changing their conclusion (that God is omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent). By contrast, consider the good explanation for why seasons happen: Earth's rotational axis is tilted relative to the plane of its orbit and this varies the angle at which sun rays encounter Earth's surface; this changes - throughout the year - the amount of energy bestowed on any given area of land. This explanation cannot have any of its details changed arbitrarily and still make sense. In other words, along with being testable and explanatory, it is also precise. There is no superfluity. Moreover, it obeys the laws of logic and finally, it fits in neatly with all other good explanations: those concerning gravity, geometry, thermodynamics and so on.

Finally, good explanations have reach. The axis-tilt explanation was proposed to explain variations in the sun's angle of elevation throughout the year, but combined with some knowledge about heat and spinning bodies it also explains seasons and, without further modifications, the differences in seasons between hemispheres, the lack of seasons in tropical regions and the months-long days around the poles. Good explanations have reach because they elucidate underlying laws of reality, which themselves have reach. This is a consequence from the nature of reality: "the reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat". It is good fortune that we live in a "computation-friendly, prediction-friendly and explanation friendly" universe (the fine-tuning problem is discussed at length).

Knowledge is the accumulation of "good explanations": stories that are testable, explanatory, hard to vary while still fulfilling their function, consistent with logic and consistent with each other. Good explanations have reach.

*** 

How do these good explanations come about? Not through observation, argues Mr Deutsch, against the grain of empiricism. "[No] amount of observing will correct [a] misconception until after one has thought of a better idea". Instead, the seeds of progress are creative conjectures, that is - imaginative educated guesses. These are candidates which, to become good explanations, must survive the arena of critical thinking, where their explanatory prowess, consistency with logic and consistency with existing good explanations are challenged and settled. Testability, then, is just one of the many tools employed by the tradition of criticism in its pursuit to turn the best candidates into new good explanations. "We do not test every testable theory", remarks Mr Deutsch, only the plausible ones.

Moreover, testability actually relies on existing good explanations: all observation is laden with theory. The book recounts the anecdote of Karl Popper starting his lectures with the single instruction "Observe!", followed by a long silence; eventually, someone would ask "What?", proving his point that knowledge is required in advance of any observation. To observe a distant galaxy, astrophysicists interpose a lot more technology between it and their eyes than those ancient astronomers staring at the night sky: a telescope, a camera, software for aiming and tuning its lenses, software for sifting through the large piles of raw data, another camera, a photographic lab and a microscope. Yet, they "see" the galaxy much clearer, for all that.

In other words, "theories aren't testable in isolation". Since observation is laden with theory, any experiment ends up testing a whole bundle of hypotheses, not just the one under investigation. Consequently, a negative result can be ambiguous: maybe your hypothesis was false, but maybe the machine was miscalibrated or the protocol forgone, or indeed perhaps an altogether unknown phenomenon interfered.

Finally, theory cannot be derived from observation because: there is no shortage of data points. We are drowning in evidence of real phenomena. However, as any company now sitting atop a mountain of raw information can attest, such evidence is useless unless someone knows what to do with it. Creative conjectures must come first. I was once told that programming is the future of journalism, but I reckon programming merely helps with testing a conjecture, that is - once and only once one has been creatively imagined. If programming was the only skill required of a data scientist, I would be typing this from Mars.

Good explanations are formed through the alternating process of creatively generating new conjectures and pitting them against one another in the arena of rational criticism (where testability is but one of the tools).

*** 

From this epistemic outlook, it follows that there is such a thing as objective reality. That is, Mr Deutsch opposes postmodernism with its claim that "because all ideas, including scientific theories, are conjectural and impossible to justify, they are essentially arbitrary". Nonsense, he replies: conjectures can be evaluated in the arena of critical thinking. And rejecting all criticism as mere "narrative", as postmodernism would have it, is deadly - for it removes the means of identifying and correcting errors.

In other words, while on a timescale long enough all explanations are wrong, right now some are objectively less wrong than others.

The aim of knowledge creation is not certainty, however pleasant an emotion that might be. The aim of knowledge creation is progress - from being wrong, to being less wrong and from these problems to other, ever better problems. (He reckons science would be better served if its theories were known as 'misconceptions': thus, "Einstein's Misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton's Misconception, which was an improvement on Kepler's".) Such thinking might prevent people from needing to be reminded "that science claims neither infallibility nor finality". Or, as Karl Popper put it: "It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal".

Hence his rejection of instrumentalism, with its coyness in making statements about reality. He notes the split within the scientific community. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics prefers to "shut up and calculate", while paleontology speaks of dinosaurs' existence as an "explanation of fossils" (rather than "an interpretation of our best theory of fossils").

Objective knowledge therefore is attainable because competition in the arena of critical thinking is a real possiblity. There are real criteria by which competing conjectures may be assessed: reasonableness, testability, usefulness, consistency with logic, consistency with our current best explanations and so on. In the end, all good explanations are pieces of the same puzzle: the puzzle of reality.

In conclusion, people who converge on truth, converge with each other. And progress is the best defense against irrationality, postmodernism, pessimism and relativism.

Footnote. Elsewhere in the book: "And then we hone our guesses, and then fashion the best ones into a sort of waking dream of reality.. A waking dream that corresponds to reality. But there is more. It is a dream of which you then gain control".

This got me thinking: his epistemology works even if you accept the postmodernist view that all theories are mere "narratives". After all, existence is just energy and mass, a spasmodic stream of sensations, chaos. It lends itself to various interpretations. It doesn't really matter if the explanations represent "what is really there": they just have to be precise, compelling, consistent with observation (meaning physics), with logic and with each other. Who cares if they are not what the universe intended? More power to us. The universe has no intentions.

However, "reality" exists in the sense that it is the name by which we call the external, shareable story we are all weaving together. It is made "real" and "objective" through our communal participation. No single human can alter it substantially, but as a species there is nothing really preventing us from changing the story any way we want (subject to physics, logic etc). Individually, we are restricted. Together, we are free. (I feel compelled to appreciate the irony.)

The reality of abstractions

Next, Mr Deutsch attempts to show that, in addition to accepting good explanations as being statements about reality, it is important also to accept that the higher-level abstractions which these explanations often reference are realities too. This is his anti-reductionist stance.

To this end, he uses a thought experiment created by Douglas Hofstadter in I am a Strange Loop (2007). Imagine a computer built out of dominoes. The pieces are spring-loaded (they both fall and rise), there are loops. bifurcations, junctions and logical gates. A stretch of fallen dominoes represents 1; left standing - 0. One domino represents the 'on' switch. The input is a number (say 641). The output is binary: a particular domino left standing if the number is prime and knocked over otherwise. Now the calculation begins. There is a flurry of motion, dominoes falls and rise in waves and loops and complicated patterns. It all goes on for some time (a computer made out of dominoes is not very efficient). Now imagine that an external observer notices the particular domino which, despite the general commotion, remains standing. Why, she asks, is that domino never knocked over? To this sort of question, there are two types of answer.

The first type of answer, the reductionist answer, will try to give an account in terms of basic principles, meaning dominoes: the domino in question never falls because none of its neighbours ever fall, which is to say none of the patterns of motion initiated by knocking over the 'on'- switch domino ever included it. This is correct. But we knew that already. The reductionist answer feels unsatisfying because it attempts an explanation at the wrong level of emergence.

The second type of answer will simply say: because 641 is prime. This answer certainly seems to make a lot more sense. However, it makes no reference to the dominoes at all. Instead, it explains why the domino is left standing by referencing a pure abstraction: primality. And that is the point: Hofstadter's argument is that primality must be part of any explanation attempting to elucidate why the domino did not fall. In fact, the notion of causation itself is emergent and abstract. We cannot perceive causation, remarked David Hume, only a succession of events.

As another example, take trying to explain why "one particular copper atom at the top of the nose of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill stands in Parliament Square in London". An explanation in terms of atoms alone may well exist, perhaps a law that describes the trajectory of that atom from the mine via the smelter to the sculpting studio, given a known earlier state of the universe. But a more satisfying and potentially more useful explanation, would be one which referenced war and politics and the culture of celebrating influential people by moulding their shapes in copper and mounting them onto the pedestals of public squares.

"There is no inconsistency in having multiple explanations of the same phenomenon, at different levels of emergence".

Consequently, he rejects the notion, supported by Dan Dennett and eventually even Hofstadter, that consciousness, or indeed Artificial Intelligence, is just a bag of tricks. He would like an explanation at a higher level of emergence.

And in Ethics, he rejects the claim that, just because "you can't derive an ought from an is", there can be no morality justified by reason. "Certainly you can't derive an ought from an is, but you can't derive a factual theory from an is either. That is not what science does". Reductionism in philosophy, he continues, therefore fails in just the same way. Rather than deriving an ought from an is, better to attempt an explanation at a higher-level of emergence (using concepts such as tolerance or virtue). And in any case, what is (pleasure, pain, preference) may very well be shaped by the high-level abstraction of what constitutes a good life.

Read on: David Deutsch on optimism, societies and Ethics

Eating vs Thinking

After watching Daniel Kahneman's TED talk about the experiencing vs remembering selves, the following thing happened: previously unintelligible arguments which I observed occurring, with frequency of varying predictability, between the various voices in my head, suddenly became both plain, predictable and revealing. They usually go on like this.

EXPERIENCING SELF: Make me feel good
REMEMBERING SELF: I'm really trying, but some of the stuff you do..
ES: Like what?! Look how cute and lovable I am..
RS: You ate an entire box of Ferrero Rocher..
ES: Oh yeeaah... That was very delicious. But I've not had Ferrero Rocher in years!
RS: You ate one and a half Franco Manca pizzas yesterday!
ES: Mmmm Franco Manca.. Yum yum. Franco sounds like a great idea..
RS: YOU SEE?!
ES: See what? I'm hungry..
RS: You're driving me crazy
ES: Well, you're driving me crazy. Why are you even making me sit here and stare at these black marks in these bound stacks of..whatever these white things are. I mean they smell nice and everything but you can't even eat them (I tried)
RS: Because they make me happy.
ES: But eating makes me happy.. How about stew? Mmmm stew. I'm hungry!
RS: But, in the long run, that stuff never makes you happy!
ES: In the what?
RS: In the...ffs. Look. Reading gets you new ideas and new ideas make you feel good.
ES: But so does chocolate..
RS: Sure, but that's not sustainable.
ES: Explain..
RS: You're a hopeless idiot!
ES: YOU SAID YOU WOULDN'T CALL ME THAT ANYMORE!!!
RS: OK. OK. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Look. Let's just calm down. I know it hurts right now, this very minute, but if you lean into the pain and stay with it, after a while you forget all about it and you actually begin to enjoy it. Like.. like running! You remember running don't you?
ES: Not fondly..
RS: Sure, but you do like it sometimes, no? And if we don't do it for a while, you do miss it.
ES: I suppose..
RS: Well, there we go! It's like that. It's just like that. Right now it hurts when we try to keep all these ideas in our working memory, all at once, so we can build something higher-level out of them, but once the thing is built, then we can put it away and next time we can use that to build something bigger still. You see? And so on and on until one day we have something that we can show to other people. And then maybe they will find it useful. Maybe they'll even find it so useful that they'll pay us enough money for us to manage to carry on building things! Then in a few decades - I mean think of the possibilities!
ES: Right..I'm not hearing anything about either boys or chocolate in all of this. And didn't we say something about Franco? I told you I'm hungry. Are you slow or something? I. Am. Huuungryyyy. Food. Pa-pa. Here - I'll generate some images.
RS: No no no no. Don't do that! Yes, yes, alright, food, we're getting food. Let me see.
ES: Wait what?! Let you see?! You're joking, right? Last time we let you "see", we ended up having this yucky colourless goo. I mean what even was that?! I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anyone else eat that stuff.
RS: That stuff is better for you than whatever..
ES: OK, OK, calm down. Maybe we should let me decide what's "better" for me, alright cowboy? I think I know..
RS: No you don't!
ES: YES I DO! STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO.
RS: I'm only trying to make things better for you.
ES: By making me sit with books and computers all day long?! By painstakingly having me decipher the writings of some crazy old guy who thinks quantum physics has somehow something to do with the genealogy of morals? Are you actually mad?!
RS: I just..
ES: Right, Franco it is then..


Isn't consciousness fun..