Progress

Language as Technology

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Genesis tells the story of the Tower of Babel:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

The account suggests that language is a cause of technology, as when the Lord says, “this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

But is possible to understand language here as a technology itself, one which gives rise to other technologies. It is a technology by which men communicate with each other. In the story, God weakens the technology, making it harder for people to communicate with one another, and therefore making it harder for them to accomplish other goals.

But language is not just a technology that exists for the sake of communication; it is also a technology that exists for the sake of thought. As I noted in the linked post, our ability to think depends to some extent on our possession of language.

All of this suggests that in principle, the idea of technological progress  is something that could apply to language itself, and that such progress could correspondingly be a cause of progress in truth. The account in Genesis suggests some of the ways that this could happen; to the degree that people develop better means of understanding one another, whether we speak of people speaking different languages, or even people already speaking the same language, they will be better able to work together towards the goal of truth, and thus will be better able to attain that goal.

 

Those Who Deserve to be Raised in Status

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Tyler Cowen comments on the comments on his blog:

Imagine if I wrote a post that just served up a list like this:

The people who deserve to be raised in status:

Norman Borlaug, Jon Huntsman, female Catholics from Croatia, Scottie Pippen, Yoko Ono, Gordon Tullock, Uber drivers, and Arnold Schoenberg,

And

The people who deserve to be lowered in status:

Donald Trump, Harper Lee, inhabitants of the province Presidente Hayes, in Paraguay, doctors, Jacques Derrida, Indira Gandhi, and Art Garfunkel

You might get a kick out of it the first time, but quickly you would grow tired of the lack of substance and indeed the sheer prejudice of the exercise.

Yet, ultimately, the topic so appeals to you all.  So much of debate, including political and economic debate, is about which groups and individuals deserve higher or lower status.  It’s pretty easy — too easy in fact — to dissect most Paul Krugman blog posts along these lines.  It’s also why a lot of blog posts about foreign countries don’t generate visceral reactions, unless of course it is the Greeks and the Germans, or some other set of stand-ins for disputes closer to home (or maybe that is your home).  Chinese goings on are especially tough to parse into comparable American disputes over the status of one group vs. another.

I hypothesize that an MR blog post attracts more comments when it a) has implications for who should be raised and lowered in status, and b) has some framework in place which allows you to make analytical points, but points which ultimately translate into a conclusion about a).

Posts about immigration, the minimum wage, Greece and Germany, the worthiness of entrepreneurs vs. workers, and the rankings of different schools of thought or economists all seem to fit this bill.

Sometimes I am tempted to simply serve up the list and skip the analytics.

Tyler is right that debate is often for the sake of the end of raising or lowering the status of various groups or individuals. More importantly, though, it is also often a motive for belief in the claim that would tend to do this.

This is frequently the case in political discussions, as Tyler notes. Bob Seidensticker provides a good example of this in a post on same sex marriage:

These Christian leaders see themselves as fighting the good fight, but how will this fit with the judgment of history?

Here’s one answer. Jennifer Morse, president and founder of the Ruth Institute (“Helping the Victims of the Sexual Revolution”), was asked if she feared being embarrassed by the seeming inevitability of same-sex marriage. She replied:

I am not the slightest bit worried about the judgment of history on me. This march-of-history argument bothers me a lot.… What they’re really saying is, “Stop thinking, stop using your judgment, just shut up and follow the crowd because the crowd is moving towards Nirvana and you need to just follow along.”

You’ve got to admire that. She’s standing up for what she feels is right, unconcerned about whether it’s popular or how history will judge that position.

But let’s not pretend that the judgment of history is irrelevant. Remember George Wallace’s infamous 1963 declaration, “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Was Wallace fighting the good fight with his stand for racial segregation? He would’ve said yes. History says no.

Those opposed to freedom for Southern slaves, women’s suffrage, and minorities’ civil rights were all fighting the good fight, like those opposed to same-sex marriage today. Just remember that history wins in the end.

Indeed, Jennifer Morse does think about the evaluation of history, it’s just that she thinks that she’ll be on the right side of it:

[Same-sex marriage proponents] are the ones who are going to be embarrassed. They are the ones who are going to be looking around, looking for the exits, trying to pretend that it had nothing to do with them, that it wasn’t really their fault.

No one fighting the good fight thinks that they won’t eventually be judged on the right side of history. I’ll propose that as the definition of fighting the good fight: taking a minority position now that you think will eventually, if only decades in the future, be seen as the morally correct one.

And there’s the problem—reading the tea leaves to see where society is moving. There is no reliable route to objective moral truth (I argue that what we imagine as objective moral truth is actually just widely shared or strongly felt moral beliefs). There is no celestial library where the answers to all moral questions are in a big book. The judgment of history is the best we’ve got, and we fool ourselves when we think that moral rightness is determined by anything more lofty.

It might seem shallow to base one’s moral convictions on what society will conclude fifty years in the future rather than on one’s conscience today. But make no mistake: the strength or sincerity of your convictions—about same-sex marriage or any moral issue—are irrelevant. Your stand today will be judged by the conclusions of that future society, and being on the right side of history is all that ultimately matters. Lose that, and you’re just another George Wallace.

Seidensticker makes his motives clearer than most by the denial of the existence of objective moral truth. According to him, objectively there is no true answer to the question of whether same sex marriage should be permitted or forbidden. Thus he concludes that it is important to “read the tea leaves” about “where society is moving,” so that we can hold the position that most people will hold in the future.

The purpose of this would be to raise our personal status, by having people in the future think well of us, and to lower the status of other people who thought differently. In Seidensticker’s case in particular, his concern is to raise the status of atheists and to lower the status of Christians and of religious people in general. According to him, it is “worse than you think” to be on the “wrong side of history,” because ultimately status is the only issue here.

In reality, of course, the “judgment of history” does have some weight because of the nature of progress in truth. But this is not an absolute weight, because such progress is not guaranteed, and especially over a short period of time such as a few decades. In contrast, far from making it more important, Seidensticker’s position actually would imply that future opinion has no weight, from the standpoint of truth. If there is no objective moral truth, the fact that some people in the future will mistakenly suppose that I was wrong in my morality (since I was neither right nor wrong) is basically meaningless.

In other words, Seidensticker’s position on same sex marriage is only intelligible as entirely motivated by status seeking, and in no way by truth, and he essentially makes this point himself.

We saw earlier that in many cases, we do not personally verify the truth of our beliefs, but trust some body collectively to present us with the truth of the matter. Trusting a certain body of people, and not trusting others, however, will tend to raise the status of the people who are trusted, and lower the status of the people who are not trusted. Consequently, a desire for raising the status of certain groups will often manifest itself by believing the claims of that group, and a desire to lower the status of certain groups will often manifest itself by disbelieving the claims of that group.

This often occurs in the evaluation of conspiracy theories. It seems that most theories of this kind are actually false, and so before investigation it is usually better to give the benefit of the doubt to the position that the theory is false.

For example, some people say that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and consequently should be considered ineligible for the presidency according to the constitution of the United States. I have not investigated this claim, and I assume that it is false, based on the fact that most such claims seem to be false. However, the claim is surely not crazy or insane in the way that many people suppose. Suppose that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and that this fact was noticed by someone on his team while he was running for president. If he were already in the situation where being elected president was a reasonable possibility, what is the probability that he and his team would attempt to hide the fact that he was born outside the United States?

It would be unreasonable to estimate less than 10% for this probability. It might be reasonable to give a much higher estimate, such as 75%. In any case, the probability of the conspiracy theory will end up being not dramatically lower than the prior probability that he in fact was born outside the United States, and there is no special reason for this prior probability to be particularly low.

But people notice that this claim would seem to vastly lower the status of Barack Obama, his team, the United States government, and perhaps of Democrats in general, and for these reasons they say that this theory is insane and crazy. It is not, even if it is false.

In other words, the fact that such theories in general do not seem to be correlated much with truth confuses the matter to some extent, and thus people who are in fact motivated by status appear to be motivated by truth more than they actually are.

Ray Kurzweil’s Myth of Progress

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I have taken an optimistic view of progress on this blog, but it is possible to take any position to an extreme. Ray Kurzweil’s position on progress, as expressed in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, is wild enough to seem almost a caricature.

He constantly asserts that nearly every kind of change is accelerating exponentially:

The key idea underlying the impending Singularity is that the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace. Exponential growth is deceptive. It starts out almost imperceptibly and then explodes with unexpected fury— unexpected, that is, if one does not take care to follow its trajectory. (pp. 7-8)

…

We are now in the early stages of this transition. The acceleration of paradigm shift (the rate at which we change fundamental technical approaches) as well as the exponential growth of the capacity of information technology are both beginning to reach the “knee of the curve,” which is the stage at which an exponential trend becomes noticeable. Shortly after this stage, the trend quickly becomes explosive. Before the middle of this century, the growth rates of our technology— which will be indistinguishable from ourselves— will be so steep as to appear essentially vertical. From a strictly mathematical perspective, the growth rates will still be finite but so extreme that the changes they bring about will appear to rupture the fabric of human history. That, at least, will be the perspective of unenhanced biological humanity. (p. 9)

In other words, Kurzweil believes that the ends of the ages have come upon us, although in a new, secular way. However, he cannot say that we have reached the “explosive” point quite yet, because if that were true, everyone would notice. In order to explain the fact that people haven’t noticed it yet, he has to say that we are just about to reach that point. It should be noted that this was written 10 years ago, so it is pretty reasonable to say that it has already been falsified, since we still haven’t noticed any explosion.

He uses the “exponential” idea to make definite claims about how much progress is made or will be made in various periods of time, as for example here:

Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential” view. My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade, as I will discuss in the next chapter. Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today’s rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We’ll make another twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century. (p.11)

If this is not clear, he is claiming here that the amount of change in the world that was made between the year 1900 and the 2000 was the same as the amount of change between the year 2000 and the year 2014. It is possible for him to make this claim because he was writing in the year 2005 and expected impossible changes in the next 10 years. But if someone in the year 1900 were to use a time machine to travel to the year 2000 and then to the year 2014, there is simply no way they would claim that the two periods contained an equal amount of change. I’m not sure how one would mathematically formalize this but Kurzweil’s claim here would be a lot like saying that the difference between blue and pink is about the same as the difference between two shades of pink.

He is quite definite about what he expects to happen by various dates:

The current disadvantages of Web-based commerce (for example, limitations in the ability to directly interact with products and the frequent frustrations of interacting with inflexible menus and forms instead of human personnel) will gradually dissolve as the trends move robustly in favor of the electronic world. By the end of this decade, computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality. Thus, “going to a Web site” will mean entering a virtual-reality environment— at least for the visual and auditory senses— where we can directly interact with products and people, both real and simulated. (pp. 104-105)

“By the end of this decade” refers to the year 2010.

The full-immersion visual-auditory virtual-reality environments, which will be ubiquitous during the second decade of this century, will hasten the trend toward people living and working wherever they wish. Once we have full-immersion virtual-reality environments incorporating all of the senses, which will be feasible by the late 2020s, there will be no reason to utilize real offices. Real estate will become virtual. (p. 105)

This is not yet completely disproved but there is not much more time for the “ubiquitous” virtual reality environments.

Returning to the limits of computation according to physics, the estimates above were expressed in terms of laptop-size computers because that is a familiar form factor today. By the second decade of this century, however, most computing will not be organized in such rectangular devices but will be highly distributed throughout the environment. Computing will be everywhere: in the walls, in our furniture, in our clothing, and in our bodies and brains. (p. 136)

No comment on this prediction is necessary. Along the same lines:

Early in the second decade of this century, the Web will provide full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality with images written directly to our retinas from our eyeglasses and lenses and very high-bandwidth wireless Internet access woven in our clothing. These capabilities will not be restricted just to the privileged. Just like cell phones, by the time they work well they will be everywhere. (p. 472)

Apart from particular predictions, there are obvious general problems with his claims about exponentially accelerating change. A day lasts 24 hours, and that isn’t going to change. It takes a human being 18 years (or more, depending on how you define it) to grow to adulthood, and that isn’t going to change.  Ray apparently believes that such things make no difference:

Each example of information technology starts out with early-adoption versions that do not work very well and that are unaffordable except by the elite. Subsequently the technology works a bit better and becomes merely expensive. Then it works quite well and becomes inexpensive. Finally it works extremely well and is almost free. The cell phone, for example, is somewhere between these last two stages. Consider that a decade ago if a character in a movie took out a portable telephone, this was an indication that this person must be very wealthy, powerful, or both. Yet there are societies around the world in which the majority of the population were farming with their hands two decades ago and now have thriving information-based economies with widespread use of cell phones (for example, Asian societies, including rural areas of China). This lag from very expensive early adopters to very inexpensive, ubiquitous adoption now takes about a decade. But in keeping with the doubling of the paradigm-shift rate each decade, this lag will be only five years a decade from now. In twenty years, the lag will be only two to three years. (p. 469)

In the first place, his description of what happened with cell phones is not historically accurate. The use of cell phones in the USA in 1995 was indeed rare, but it was already quite a bit more common in Europe, and certainly did not indicate that someone must be wealthy or powerful (e.g. in 1996 one of my many European acquaintances who possessed cell phones was a teen-age girl from a broken family.) In general he shortens various actual time frames in this way in order to cause the appearance of greater acceleration; the actual process of cell phone adoption would be better assigned a 20 year period. It is also a fallacy to confuse movement which people see as being within a single technology, e.g. from cell phones in general to smart phones, with the adoption of a new technology. And it doesn’t matter here whether or not there is really a new technology or not; what matters is whether people see it as adopting something new, because people are much more unwilling to adopt a new technology than to upgrade a presently used one. As one example, Ray was right to predict the coming of virtual reality technologies, even though his time frame was wrong, and these are currently being developed. But according to him, their wide-spread adoption should take less than five years, and it is already obvious that this will turn out to be entirely false.

Ray’s book is hundreds of pages long, and one could easily write an entire book in refutation. In addition to being wrong in his specific expectations, there are many religious, philosophical, and moral issues that are raised by many of his proposals, which I have not discussed. However, it should be noted that for the most part his predictions are probably physically possible, although exaggerated, and may actually happen sooner or later, with the exception of some of the more extreme claims. But I suspect that there is more going on than simply exaggerating and predicting that various technologies will arrive sooner than they actually will.

Rather, it seems that Ray’s motives are quasi-religious; as I stated above, he believes that the end of the ages is upon us. He discusses this comparison himself:

George Gilder has described my scientific and philosophical views as “a substitute vision for those who have lost faith in the traditional object of religious belief.” Gilder’s statement is understandable, as there are at least apparent similarities between anticipation of the Singularity and anticipation of the transformations articulated by traditional religions. But I did not come to my perspective as a result of searching for an alternative to customary faith. The origin of my quest to understand technology trends was practical: an attempt to time my inventions and to make optimal tactical decisions in launching technology enterprises. Over time this modeling of technology took on a life of its own and led me to formulate a theory of technology evolution. It was not a huge leap from there to reflect on the impact of these crucial changes on social and cultural institutions and on my own life. So, while being a Singularitarian is not a matter of faith but one of understanding, pondering the scientific trends I’ve discussed in this book inescapably engenders new perspectives on the issues that traditional religions have attempted to address: the nature of mortality and immortality, the purpose of our lives, and intelligence in the universe. (p. 370)

But the fact that someone recognizes the possibility of undue influences upon his beliefs and claims to be free of them does not mean that he is actually free of them. Ray Kurzweil is currently 67 years old. He will likely die within 25 years. It is perfectly clear that one of his main preoccupations is how to prevent this from happening:

Biotechnology will extend biology and correct its obvious flaws. The overlapping revolution of nanotechnology will enable us to expand beyond the severe limitations of biology. As Terry Grossman and I articulated in Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, we are rapidly gaining the knowledge and the tools to indefinitely maintain and extend the “house” each of us calls his body and brain. Unfortunately the vast majority of our baby-boomer peers are unaware of the fact that they do not have to suffer and die in the “normal” course of life, as prior generations have done— if they take aggressive action, action that goes beyond the usual notion of a basically healthy lifestyle. (p. 323)

And this is not merely some vague hope, but a belief that he acts upon:

I have been very aggressive about reprogramming my biochemistry. I take 250 supplements (pills) a day and receive a half-dozen intravenous therapies each week (basically nutritional supplements delivered directly into my bloodstream, thereby bypassing my GI tract). As a result, the metabolic reactions in my body are completely different than they would otherwise be. Approaching this as an engineer, I measure dozens of levels of nutrients (such as vitamins, minerals, and fats), hormones, and metabolic by-products in my blood and other body samples (such as hair and saliva). Overall, my levels are where I want them to be, although I continually fine-tune my program based on the research that I conduct with Grossman. Although my program may seem extreme, it is actually conservative— and optimal (based on my current knowledge). Grossman and I have extensively researched each of the several hundred therapies that I use for safety and efficacy. I stay away from ideas that are unproven or appear to be risky (the use of human-growth hormone, for example). (pp. 211-212)

In other words, it is very likely that Kurzweil’s predictions are as ridiculous as they are because he insists on a time frame to his “Singularity” that will allow him personally to avoid death. It won’t help him, for example, if all his predictions come to pass, but everything happens after he is dead.

But it won’t work, Ray. You are going to die.

Aristotle and Bacon on the Sciences

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Aristotle, as stated in the last post, held that the highest knowledge is for its own sake, not for the sake of other things. Francis Bacon, on the other hand, is famous for saying that knowledge is power (Novum Organum, Bk. 1, Aphorism 3):

Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.

Although Aristotle is correct regarding the purpose of the sciences, this difference between the two of them may partly explain their difference of opinion regarding the state of completeness of the sciences. Aristotle basically believed the sciences complete, as I said in the last post, but part of the reason for this may be that he did not care much about potential improvements in the mechanical arts. Bacon, on the other hand, was concerned precisely with such improvements. In particular, he wishes to make gold, as he suggests here in Bk. 2, Aphorism 5:

The rule or axiom for the transformation of bodies is of two kinds. The first regards a body as a troop or collection of simple natures. In gold, for example, the following properties meet. It is yellow in color, heavy up to a certain weight, malleable or ductile to a certain degree of extension; it is not volatile and loses none of its substance by the action of fire; it turns into a liquid with a certain degree of fluidity; it is separated and dissolved by particular means; and so on for the other natures which meet in gold. This kind of axiom, therefore, deduces the thing from the forms of simple natures. For he who knows the forms of yellow, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solution, and so on, and the methods for superinducing them and their gradations and modes, will make it his care to have them joined together in some body, whence may follow the transformation of that body into gold.

This desire for gold in particular is probably a desire for money, which seems to be a kind of universal power, although one might question whether money would be necessary for someone who can change anything into anything else whenever he pleases. In any case, Bacon is engaging in a kind of wishful thinking here. He recognizes, in fact, that human beings have a limited ability to transform nature (Bk. 1, Aphorism 4):

Toward the effecting of works, all that man can do is to put together or put asunder natural bodies. The rest is done by nature working within.

From this it should follow that it may be impossible to effect certain transformations, if they will not follow upon such putting together or asunder of natural bodies. But instead of waiting to learn from experience, Bacon simply assumes (and this is the wishful thinking) that any possible transformation, such as the transformation of lead into gold, will definitely be possible. Since the sciences of his day could do nothing of the sort, he concluded that the sciences still had a great deal of room for improvement.

There are good reasons to think that Bacon’s assumption was false. For example, the no-cloning theorem says that perfectly copying a quantum state is impossible. There may be no particular reason why you would need to do this, but that is not the point. Rather, Bacon claims that any form can be induced upon anything, and this seems to be false.

Nonetheless, his conclusion that the sciences of his day were very imperfect was indeed correct. Thus, although his idea of the purpose of the sciences was inferior to Aristotle’s position, his idea of the state of their progress was superior.

Progress in Technology

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In a certain way this post is not distinct from the previous one, since I noted there that progress in the truth is mainly the result of improved “technologies” for the learning of truth and for the transmission of truth. In a similar way, improvement in technology in general can be seen as improvement in the knowledge of how to make things, which is the truth of the mechanical arts.

Pope Francis is certainly right to say that “scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history.” Nonetheless, these are related. It is normal that a technological improvement will disrupt some aspect of human life, if only because it is different from what has so far been done, and in this way it is likely to have some bad consequences. But when people notice the bad consequences of the new technology, instead of rejecting the technology, they usually try to look for other adjustments which will remove or reduce the bad consequences. I maintain that over time this results in overall improvement of the world through technological change. It is clear enough that basically everyone recognizes this through their own choices. If someone really believes that a technology makes life worse, we would expect him to refrain from using that technology. Now it is certainly true that some people refrain from using some technologies for this reason, but for most people it is not a general response to new technology. Rather, almost everyone is happy to adopt all sorts of new technologies, implying that they believe that their lives are improved by them. Even with particular groups such as the Amish, they reject only particular technologies, and usually the number of accepted technologies tends to grow over time even with such groups, but at a slower pace than in mainstream society.

We could look at the whole picture of progress in this way: people desire the good. They may not be completely successful, but they have some success in attaining it. And to the degree that they attain the good, they become even more capable of attaining what they seek, which overall leads to progress in attaining the good. Consequently the world overall tends to be successful in the way defined here, although it remains possible for things to become worse locally. The world as a whole may also become worse at times, but this is likely to happen infrequently and for relatively short periods of time.

Progress in the Truth

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Individuals start out knowing nothing, and then they learn things over time, which constitutes progress in the knowledge of the truth.  Of course sometimes they adopt false views, but even false views contain some truth. And sometimes they regress, as by forgetting some truth that they knew, or by abandoning true views and adopting false ones. But surely for most people most of the time, they are learning new things, refining true views, or improving false views so that they are less false. Naturally this will not apply to everyone at all times, but surely it is the norm.

This growth in knowledge will automatically carry over to some degree to communities and institutions, and to humanity as a whole, insofar as each of these is composed of individuals. However, this applies mainly over short periods of time, and there is no such guarantee for communities over longer periods, since individuals die and are replaced by other individuals who need to learn everything over again.

Over time, people have devised ways to overcome this problem to a greater or lesser extent, beginning with tradition. The wise man who has arrived at some knowledge by experience can pass it on to others simply by telling them about it, without the need for everyone to have the same experience. However, this is an imperfect method of transmission, since without experience the thing is not known as well, and sometimes the tradition is distorted, misinterpreted, or ultimately forgotten. Writing was a still stronger means of passing on knowledge, preserving knowledge intact for longer periods of time and allowing a greater possibility for building on the knowledge of the past. The internet is a still stronger means, more or less in the same vein, with a greater guarantee of common knowledge over the entire planet. Thus for example many Eastern European countries under communism used textbooks stating that Galileo was burned at the stake, a historical falsehood. With the internet it becomes easier to eliminate mistakes of this kind.

There are also protocols that apply mainly to certain topics, more convincing ways to transmit truth so that all or the great majority accept it. Thus mathematics and various sciences have become more or less universal, not in the sense that everyone knows them, but in the sense that those who study them basically agree on the conclusions. This allows for the possibility of progress in mathematics, physics, and the like over periods of time much longer than a human lifetime.

There are also many areas which do not have such protocols, such as religion, philosophy, politics, ethics, and the like. This does not mean that there has been no progress in these areas, but it may mean that there has been less. Thus the fact that polytheism is now very uncommon suggests progress in religion.

There are various possible ways that the transmission of truth might be improved in the future, both in general and in regard to specific topics. But even if these ways are not devised, the worst that can happen is that certain areas will stagnate on account of the original problem mentioned, the fact that individuals die and are replaced by others. There is no reason to believe that in these areas considered overall, knowledge will decrease over long periods of time. This means that the overall trend will be one of growth in the truth (since the combination of stagnating areas and growing areas will be an overall trend of growth).

Another way to summarize all of this is that “ways of learning the truth” and “ways of transmitting the truth to future generations” are two technologies, and humanity has been improving both of these technologies, resulting in overall growth in the truth for humanity.

The Progress of Humanity and History

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Pope Francis says in Laudato Si’:

113. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.

Here he denies that technological progress is the same as progress for humanity, and elsewhere he criticizes those “who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change.” This criticism seems to be related to the above statement. The Pope is not saying that progress does not exist; the “myth of progress” is not that progress exists, but that it is constituted by “the application of new technology.” In the same way, although he begins paragraph 113 by saying “people no longer seem to believe in a happy future,” he continues by saying that there is a “growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.” In general, then, the myth may consist in saying that technological growth is sufficient for progress, and that progress is guaranteed without any special effort.

I stated in the previous post that a successful world will in fact tend to grow in goodness. This however does not guarantee that a world will always be successful in this way, and it is clear enough that improvement in one respect, such as technology, does not guarantee improvement overall. So it remains a question whether or not the world we live in is in fact successful, if it is in fact getting better, or not. It is certainly not staying the same, which means that it must be getting better or getting worse, but it could be that overall things are constantly getting worse, or that they go back and forth such that on average it is much the same as staying the same. The following posts will consider this issue.