The Beginning of Infinity

There is only one way of making progress: conjecture (guesses) and criticism. We create theories by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories, not to be the source of new ones.

Experience is indeed essential to science, but it's not the source from which theories are derived. Its main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed. 

Enlightenment represents a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. Enlightenment's quintessential idea is that progress is both desirable and attainable.

The Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge: by trying not to rely on authority. Mainly Religion. That is the context in which empiricism – purporting to rely solely on the senses for knowledge – played such a salutary historical role, despite being fundamentally false and even authoritative in its conception of how science works.

Science is not about prediction. But explanations. Predictions are used to validate new explanations.

• Knowledge that is both familiar and uncontroversial is background knowledge. 
• A predictive theory whose explanatory content consists only of background knowledge is a rule of thumb. Because we usually take background knowledge for granted, rules of thumb may seem to be explanation-less predictions, but that is always an illusion.

Problems are conflicts between explanations or theories. Expectations are theories too.

Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have the conflict.

Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.

2 interpretations of human progress inspired 2 broad branches of the Enlightenment:

1. The Continental Enlightenment understood that problems are soluble but not that they are inevitable
2. The British Enlightenment understood both equally.

The Continental type was impatient for the perfected state – which led to intellectual dogmatism, political violence & tyranny - The French Revolution & the Reign of Terror are the archetypal examples.

The British one, which was evolutionary & cognizant of human fallibility, was impatient for institutions that did not stifle gradual, continuing change.

Are ideas that replicate.

The world’s major cultures – including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions – have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them, including the inexplicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another. That makes these ideas memes – ideas that are replicators.

A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour.