A rant on the pre-Socratics and Popper
Why should we value boldness and critical rational discussion?
Google X Analogy
‘X’ is Google’s top-secret moonshot factory. It makes huge investments in risky bold ideas or ‘moonshots’. If actualized, these risky bold ideas would be able to produce significant value. But because of the challenging and high-risk low-success nature of these endeavors, ‘X’ runs at a financial loss.
‘X’ here is a variable that can be replaced with any radical idea. Think of ‘X’ here in terms of Popper’s hypothesis. Once you have the hypothesis, you can go ahead and try to build it up, find a reasonable path that leads to it and turn it into a solution.
If you can’t, then you move on to the next hypothesis.
‘X’ projects include radical things like self-driving cars and electricity storing salt. While most of X’s radical ideas fail, some do actualize successfully. Google Search itself was once an X project.
Do we need Google X?
It seems like we do. It brings out the importance of bold and critical thinking. It’s okay to approximate at the beginning and approach a problem from different angles. In fact, it is a valuable methodology. Refutation and non-refutation, both point towards advancement and make possible future advancements.
The Bold Pre-Socratics
Pre-Socratic philosophy was the first rational enterprise away from mythology. These thinkers mostly lived in Ionia and Elea (present-day Turkey). They had a strong insistence on logic, coherence and reason.
But why are we talking about them?
Popper implores that we need to return to the ‘simple, straightforward rationality of the Pre-Socratics’. What he appreciates is the simplicity and boldness of the questions that they asked and the critical attitude that they ‘invented’ and encouraged.
They did not ‘zoom in’ and ask questions like “How can we know anything about this orange?” but asked big questions like “How can we know anything about this world?”. For Popper, all of philosophy is cosmology.
Anaximander said, “The earth … is held up by nothing, but remains stationary owing to the fact that it is equally distant from all other things. Its shape is . .. like that of a drum . .. We walk on one of its flat surfaces, while the other is on the opposite side.”
The reason he celebrates Anaximander’s thought is because of its boldness and revolutionariness. Popper believes that it is what made possible the theories proposed by Aristarchus and Copernicus, and even Newton (his conception of immaterial and invisible gravitational forces). Even though Anaximander was clearly wrong (we know that now), it is important that we recognize the value his theories hold and inspire. Right and wrong should not be taken as the only determinants of value, because in science, we see that theories which have been held as true are often shown to be wrong, but we still study them.
Pythagorean vs Ionian Ideology
Popper drew a contrast between the Pythagorean school, which was dogmatic and did not allow critical rational discussion that could go against the founder’s doctrine, and the other Greek philosophy schools like the Ionian school founded by Thales, which did the exact opposite. He emphasized upon the latter’s “astonishing freedom and creativeness”. In the system that Thales developed, critical attitude was actively encouraged. Thales’ own theory was refuted by his disciple Anaximander’s theory, and then his by his disciple Anaximenes. In sharp contrast, the dogmatic and authoritarian nature of the Pythagorean school, in which refuting the founder’s doctrine with proposals of new, contradicting theories was prohibited to the extent that Pythagoras (allegedly) drowned one of his pupils for doing so.
What we can learn from the pre-Socratics is the attitude of free critical discussion, creativity and boldness in conjectures. These are valuable traits that aid in advancement of science and thought.
(This rant is inspired by a reading of ‘The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Pre-Socratic Enlightenment’ and ‘Back to the Pre-Socratics: The Presidential Address’ by Karl Popper)
