What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove?
<p>I wrote this for John Brockman&#8217;s 2005 Edge Question.  Can&#8217;t see<br />
any good reason not to blog it as well.</p>
<hr />
<p>I believe that nature is understandable, that scientific inquiry is<br />
the sharpest tool and the noblest endeavor of the human mind, and that<br />
any &#8220;final answers&#8221; we ever get will come from it rather than from<br />
mysticism, religion, or any other competing account of the universe.<br />
I believe these things without being able to prove them despite &mdash; or<br />
perhaps because of &mdash; the fact that I am a mystic myself.</p>
<p>Science may be the noblest endeavor of the human mind, but I believe<br />
(though I cannot prove) that the most crippling and dangerous kind of<br />
ignorance in the modern West is ignorance of economics, the way<br />
markets work, and the ways non-market allocation mechanisms are doomed<br />
to fail.  Such economic ignorance is toxic, because it leads to insane<br />
politics and the empowerment of those whose rhetoric is altruist but<br />
whose true agenda is coercive control.</p>
<p>I believe that the most important moment in the history of philosophy<br />
was when Charles Sanders Peirce defined &#8220;truth&#8221; as &#8220;predictive power&#8221;<br />
and made it possible to talk about confirmation of hypotheses in a<br />
non-circular way.</p>
<p>I believe the most important moment in the foreseeable future of<br />
philosophy will come when we realize that mad old Nazi bastard<br />
Heidegger had it right when he said that we are thrown into the world<br />
and must cope, and that theory-building consists of rearranging our<br />
toolkit for coping.  I believe the biggest blind spot in analytical<br />
philosophy is its refusal to grapple with Heidegger&#8217;s one big insight,<br />
but that evolutionary biology coupled with Peirce offers us a way to<br />
stop being blind.  I beleve that when the insights of what is now<br />
called &#8220;evolutionary psychology&#8221; are truly absorbed by philosophers,<br />
many of the supposedly intractable problems of philosophy will vanish.</p>
<p>I believe, but don&#8217;t know how to prove, a much stronger version of the<br />
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis than is currently fashionable.  That is, I<br />
believe the way humans think is shaped in important ways by the<br />
linguistic categories they have available; thinking outside those<br />
categories is possible but more difficult, has higher friction costs.<br />
Accordingly, I believe that some derivation of Alfred Korzybski&#8217;s<br />
discipline of General Semantics will eventually emerge as an essential<br />
tool of the first mature human civilizations.</p>
<p>I believe, but don&#8217;t know how to prove, that Julian Jaynes was on to<br />
something very important when he wrote about the origin of<br />
consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.</p>
<p>I judge that that &#8220;dark matter&#8221; is no better than phlogiston as an<br />
explanatory device, and therefore believe without being able to prove<br />
it that there is something very deeply wrong with the standard model<br />
of cosmology.</p>
<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that the &#8220;knowledge interpretation&#8221; of<br />
quantum mechanics is pernicious nonsense, and that physical theorists<br />
will essentially develop some testable form of nonlocal realism.</p>
<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that global &#8220;AIDS&#8221; is a whole cluster of<br />
unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for<br />
essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as<br />
the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal<br />
blunders in the history of medicine.</p>
<p>Much of the West&#8217;s intelligentsia is persistently in love with<br />
anything anti-Western (and especially anti-American), an infatuation<br />
that has given a great deal of aid and comfort to tyrants and terrorists<br />
in the post-9/11 world.  Besides these obvious political consequences,<br />
the phenomenon Julian Benda famously called <em>le trahison des<br />
clercs</em> has laid waste to large swathes of the soft sciences<br />
through ideologies like deconstructionism, cultural relativism, and<br />
postmodernism.</p>
<p>I believe, but cannot prove, that <em>le trahison des clercs</em> is<br />
not a natural development of Western thought but a creation of<br />
deliberate propaganda, directly traceable to the successes of Nazi and<br />
Stalinist attempts to manipulate the climate of opinion in the early<br />
and mid-20th century.  Consequently I believe that one of the most<br />
difficult and necessary tasks before us in the next half century will<br />
be to banish the influence of totalitarian nihilism from science in<br />
particular and our culture in general.</p>
<p>I know how to prove, or at least convincingly demonstrate, that<br />
open-source software development produces better results than<br />
secrecy and proprietary control.  I believe that the same advantage<br />
applies to any other form of engineering or applied science in which<br />
the limiting factor of production is skilled human attention, but I<br />
don&#8217;t know how to prove that general principle.</p>
