There are also lunatics congregating on the other side of the tightrope: those who are treating the mere appearance of rationality as a fetish. Communists loved to overrule science, for instance, even though they cloaked themselves in language and even clothing styles that were supposed to evoke rationality. In the Soviet Union, the ideas of Trofim Lysenko, an anti-Darwinian pseudoscientist, were preferred over reality, contributing to disastrous agricultural policies. Similar things are happening today when business interests suppress global-warming research.
You can always tell when an idea comes from fake rationalists. The telltale sign is a premature decline in mystery, specifically the kind of mystery that can be tackled through testable hypotheses. Intelligent design falls into this category. If you believe a biological structure is nothing more than a fashion decision made by God (or an alien), there's nothing you can do to explain it beyond that; you're done. While it might at first seem to enshrine mystery, intelligent design actually insulates us from the endless, intriguing mysteries of nature by providing one answer in advance for everything.
It would have been possible to treat Darwin's insights in exactly the same way. A lazy, nonscientific Darwinian could say "Everything evolved" and be done with it. Some of my misguided colleagues do just that when they say things like, "Computers will inevitably evolve to correct flaws in our posthuman visions, such as the fact that software is endlessly buggy and needs to be fixed by human programmers."
The reason Darwin's ideas are so powerful is that there was another option. His ideas opened a type of path not opened by intelligent design: methodically challenging the initial base of ideas and refining it until it becomes something far more specific and useful. Biology benefited from an intellectual revolution provided by Darwin but has in many ways left him behind. Biologists now deal in genes, viruses, and a world of other objects and ideas Darwin didn't know about.
Lately the problem of premature mystery reduction has cropped up more than once within technical cultures. The tone taken by some string theorists reminds me of what I'm criticizing in recent Silicon Valley thinking (see "Tangled Up in Strings").
Is reality a giant information system and people just arbitrarily defined portions of it? Wrong question! Information theory is tremendously useful, but it doesn't tell us anything until it's been used. The idea that you might someday understand something is different from actually understanding it, or even knowing the right questions to ask. The big idea behind the new fake rationality is so diffuse that it's useless, except as a cultural badge.
That brings me back to my misguided colleague and his ideas about the future of music. There are a multitude of mysteries prematurely reduced by his point of view. We don't know what music is, exactly. We don't know much about how the brain works. We don't even have good experimental methods to tell when we're bending over backward to make a computer merely seem smart.
If I really believed that science was reducing the mystery of life, I would feel claustrophobic, but just the opposite is true. The more science I learn, the more mysteries I learn about, and the richer life becomes. I wonder if a technical culture that was better at avoiding premature claims of mystery reduction would find more friends among the sensitive, "spiritual" people I referred to earlier. Some extreme religious people will probably never embrace science, but I often wonder if the harshness of the way some scientists talk about the nerd future is driving reasonable people away.
Avoiding a premature decline in mystery is also a great principle for making better software. You don't have to pretend to know what music is to give musicians new ways to work together, but you do have to believe that human musicians are important. The genuinely radical ideas in computer science come when people work honestly within the boundaries of what we don't know.
Previous Jaron's World columns:
| Sing a Song of Evolution | I Smell, Therefore I Think |
