Memes

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.

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.

Is the possibility of the unlimited growth of knowledge in the future.

David Deutsch, a renouned phisicist, postulates that Knowledge consists of explanations (assertions about what is out there beyond the appearances). For most of the history , we had almost no success in creating such knowledge. 

Deutsch’s worldview is that reality is comprehensible. Problems are solvable. Progress is inevitable as long as we have good explanations. 

• Empiricism: said that we derive it from sensory experience. False, We interpret experiences through explanatory theories, but true explanations are not obvious. We create new explanations through conjecture. One cannot derive predictions from experience, one certainly cannot derive explanations.
• Inductivism the theory that the present resembles the past, ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. But that's also false.
• Authority: religions, kings etc. Who-ever is in power can decide what truth is. 

All of these are intitively right, and some even sound scientific. But they are not. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.