I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?
We look for questions that inspire unpredictable answers — that provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called “beautiful” or “elegant.”
It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.
Of course it has to be Darwin. Nothing else comes close. Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed of any kind of selection — natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science. This simple 3-step algorithm explains, with one simple idea, why we live in a universe full of design.
It seems as though you are saying nothing when you say that “Things that survive survive” or “Successful ideas are successful.” To turn these tautologies into power, you need to add the context of a limited world in which not everything survives and competition is rife, and also realize that this is an ever-changing world in which the rules of the competition keep shifting.
In that context, being successful is fleeting, and now the 3-step algorithm can turn tautology into deep and elegant explanation. Copy the survivors many times with slight variations and let them loose in this ever-shifting world, and only those suited to the new conditions will carry on. The world fills with creatures, ideas, institutions, languages, stories, software, and machines that have all been designed by the stress of this competititon.
Deep, elegant, beautiful? Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little. Here, Darwin’s natural selection wins hands down. The ratio of the huge amount that it explains (everything about life: its complexity, diversity, and illusion of crafted design) divided by the little that it needs to postulate (nonrandom survival of randomly varying genes through geological time) is gigantic.
Most pixels seem the same as their immediate neighbors. The exception are those pixels which lie on edges, boundaries. If every retinal cell faithfully reported its light value to the brain, the brain would be bombarded with a hugely redundant message. Great economies can be achieved if most of the impulses reaching the brain come from pixel cells lying along edges in the scene. The brain then assumes uniformity in the spaces between edges.
The notion of a transcendent force that moves the universe or history or determine what is right and good — and whose existence is fundamentally beyond reason and immune to logical or empirical disproof — is the simplest, most elegant, and most scientifically baffling phenomenon I know of.
As Darwin noted, the virtuous and brave do what is right, regardless of consequences, as a moral imperative.
There is an apparent paradox underlying the formation of large-scale human societies. The religious and ideological rise of civilizations — of larger and larger agglomerations of genetic strangers, including today’s nations, transnational movements, and other “imagined communities” of fictive kin — seem to depend upon what Kierkegaard deemed this “power of the preposterous”. Humankind’s strongest social bonds and actions, including the capacities for cooperation and forgiveness, and for killing and allowing oneself to be killed, are born of commitment to causes and courses of action that are “ineffable” — that is, fundamentally immune to logical assessment for consistency and to empirical evaluation for costs and consequences. The more materially inexplicable one’s devotion and commitment to a sacred cause — that is, the more absurd — the greater the trust others place in it and the more that trust generates commitment on their part.
If anything, evolution teaches that humans are creatures of passion and that reason itself is primarily aimed at social victory and political persuasion rather than philosophical or scientific truth. To insist that persistent rationality is the best means and hope for victory over enduring irrationality — that logical harnessing of facts could someday do away with the sacred and so end conflict — defies all that science teaches about our passion-driven nature. Throughout the history of our species, as for the most intractable conflicts and greatest collective expressions of joy today, utilitarian logic is a pale prospect to replace the sacred.
Monogamy today compares with heterosexuality not too many decades ago, or tolerance of slavery 150 years ago. Quite a lot of people depart from it, a much smaller minority actively advocate the acceptance the departure from it, but most people advocate it and disparage the minority view.
Now, is it generally considered reasonable for a friend with whom one sometimes plays chess to feel aggrieved when one plays chess with someone else? Indeed, if someone exhibited possessiveness in such a matter, would they not be viewed as unacceptable overbearing and egotistical?
My claim is probably obvious by now. It is simply that there is nothing about sex that morally distinguishes it from other activities performed by two (or more) people collectively. In a world no longer driven by reproductive efficiency, and presuming that all parties are taking appropriate precautions in relation to pregnancy and disease, sex is overwhelmingly a recreational activity.
The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can’t see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind — much like the visible aspect of the universe — is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable.
What do beauty and truth have to do with each other? Is there any good explanation of why the central notion of aesthetics (fluffy) should be inserted into the central notion of science (rigorous)?
You might think that rather than being a criterion for assessing explanations, the sense of beauty is a phenomenon to be explained away. Take, for example, our impression that symmetrical faces and bodies are beautiful. Symmetry, it turns out, is a good indicator of health and consequently of mate-worthiness. The upshot is that we don’t want to mate with people because they’re beautiful; rather, they’re beautiful because we want to mate with them, and we want to mate with them because our genes are betting on them as replicators.
We all have intuitive sense of what “simplicity” means. In science, the word is often used as a term of praise. We expect that simple explanations are more natural, sounder, and more reliable than complicated ones. We abhor epicycles, or long lists of exceptions and special cases. But can we take a crucial step further, to refine our intuitions about simplicity into precise, scientific concepts? Is there a core to “simplicity”? Is simplicity something we can quantify and measure?
When I think about big philosophical questions, which I probably do more than is good for me, one of my favorite techniques is to try to frame the question in terms that could make sense to a computer. Usually it’s a method of destruction: It forces you to be clear, and once you dissipate the fog, you discover that very little of your big philosophical question remains. Here, however, in coming to grip with the nature of simplicity, the technique proved creative, for it led me straight toward a (simple) profound idea in the mathematical theory of information — the idea of description length.
Interesting data files might be very big, of course. But big files need not be genuinely complex; for example, a file containing trillions of 0s and nothing else isn’t genuinely complex. The idea of description length is, simply, that a file is only as complicated as its simplest description. Or, to put it in terms a computer could relate to, a file is as complicated as the shortest program that can produce it from scratch. This defines a precise, widely applicable, numerical measure of simplicity.
Einstein, in his genius, realized the profound implication of this situation: If gravity affects everything equally, it’s not right to think of gravity as a “force” at all. Rather, gravity is a feature of spacetime itself, through which all objects move. In particular, gravity is the curvature of spacetime. The space and time through which we move are not fixed and absolute, as Newton had it; they bend and stretch because of the influence of matter and energy. In response, objects are pushed in different directions by spacetime’s curvature, a phenomenon we call “gravity.”
Complex life is a product of natural selection, which is driven by competition among replicators. The outcome depends on which replicators best mobilize the energy and material necessary to copy themselves and on how rapidly they can make copies which in turn can replicate. The first aspect of the competition may be called survival, metabolism, or somatic effort; the second, replication or reproductive effort. Life at every scale, from RNA to DNA to whole organisms, implements features that execute — and constantly trade off — these two functions.
Among life’s tradeoffs is whether to allocate resources (energy, food, risk, time) to pumping out as many offspring as possible and letting them fend for themselves or eking out fewer descendants and enhancing the chances of survival and reproduction of each one. The continuum represents the degree of parental investment expended by an organism.
Conflict is a part of the human condition. Notwithstanding religious myths of Eden, romantic images of noble savages, utopian dreams of perfect harmony, and gluey metaphors like attachment, bonding, and cohesion, human life is never free of friction. All societies have some degree of different prestige and status, inequality of power and wealth, punishment, sexual regulations, sexual jealousy, hostility to other groups, and conflict within the group, including violence, rape, and homicide. Our cognitive and moral obsessions track these conflicts. In the real world, our life stories are largely stories of conflict: the hurts, guilts, and rivalries inflicted by friends, relatives, and competitors.
Men are more prone than women to infidelity. Women are more vulnerable than men to desertion. Sex therefore takes place in the shadow of exploitation, illegitimacy, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, harassment, and rape.
This is not to say that beauty and truth are synonyms. Sometimes the truth turns out to be dull and flat. Many of the loviest explanations — the ones we adore with almost parental fondness — turns out to be dead false. This is what T. H. Huxley called scientific tragedy, “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
It hurts to surrender a beloved idea, one that you just knew was true, one that was stamped into your mind by lived experience, not statistics. And I’m not yet ready to consign this one to the boneyard of lovely but dead science.
Athletic contests are important across culture. Around the world, sport is mainly a male preserve, and winners gain more than mere laurels: They elevate their cultural status; they win the admiration of men and the desire of women. This raises a broader possibility — that our species has been shaped more than we know by the survival of the sportiest.
Ergo, one elegant and socially significant explanation of diverse observations is simply this: opinion-segregation + conversation -> polarization.