Conjecture Institute Glossary

Refers to systems whose attributes and regularities are independent of the physical world and whose underlying explanations make no reference to the physical world.

Refers to entities in the physical world whose defining attributes and regularities are independent of the physical system in which they are instantiated or embedded.

Commentary: Laws of Nature do not depend on events in the physical world. However, unlike mathematical theorems, the laws of Nature do determine how the physical world works.

Example: The regularities, theorems, and relationships that mathematical objects obey are not determined by the laws of physics, nor would they be different if the laws of physics were different. Whether or not one can explain, say, a mathematical theorem is indeed determined by what the laws of physics allow for. Nevertheless, whether or not that theorem is true is independent of whatever laws govern the physical world.

Example: Information is an abstract entity that retains its key properties even as it migrates from one physical substrate to the next. For example, someone may write down sheet music in a notebook. Someone else may read it, and so the information has been copied from paper to neurons. That person may then train a band to play the corresponding song, transferring the information to the band players not via written notes but by oral instruction. That band may then play the song to an audience, transferring the information via air vibrations that is the live song. Although the musical information jumped across vastly different physical media—a notebook, several minds, and the musical performance—the song could never have been successfully played had information itself not retained its defining attributes throughout the entire chain of events.

See Knowledge and Physical World.

The branch of philosophy concerned with issues such as what beauty consists of, what constitutes progress in art, and how to improve standards in art.

Commentary: Since progress in art is possible, aesthetics and beauty are objective, not a matter of subjective taste.

While individuals' subjective tastes in music, food, and other forms of art may differ, it is nevertheless true that some tastes are more objectively refined than others.

Much of aesthetics consists of explaining and discovering criteria of objective beauty.

The arbitrary insertion of people or their attributes into our explanations of the physical world.

Commentary: If our deepest explanations happen to refer to people or their attributes, that is not the anthropocentric mistake.

Both the veneration and denigration of people and their actions are anthropocentric if they are arbitrary. Therefore, religious claims about man's inheritance of the Earth and some environmentalists' claims that man is spoiling the Earth are both anthropocentric.

Example: The hypothesis that the universe was purposefully created for people is anthropocentrism (logically, 'people' could be replaced with 'elephants' or 'planets').

Example: The hypothesis that human values are arbitrary is anthropocentric, as it recasts objective morality as merely downstream from people's choices.

Example: The hypothesis that people can cause any physically possible transformation that is allowed by the laws of physics is not anthropocentrism, since this follows from our deepest explanations in science.

See Spaceship Earth.

A meme that spreads by suppressing criticism of it.

Commentary: Because progress consists of conjecturing candidate explanations and then criticizing all of them, anti-rational memes inhibit progress.

Whether a meme is rational or anti-rational refers to the mechanism by which it spreads, not to the merits (or demerits) of its content.

Credentialism, taboos, social pressure, and shame all help to spread memes by suppressing criticism. They are therefore vital components of many anti-rational memes in our culture.

Example: Adopting a subculture's memes not because those memes match a person's preferences but because of fear of ostracism, shame, or psychological terror is anti-rational. Such a subculture could be religious, political, or secular.

See Meme and Rational Meme.

A purportedly uncriticizable foundation upon which a theoretical edifice is built.

A statement that is purportedly self-evidently true and could not possibly be found to be false.

Commentary: Essential to foundationalism.

'Axiom' has a different meaning in mathematics, where an axiom is the starting statement in a formal theory. Such axioms can be criticized from outside the formal theory and subsequently improved upon.

See Foundationalism.

Knowledge that is taken for granted by an individual or culture.

Commentary: Background knowledge can be explicit or inexplicit. It can also ossify such that the underlying explanation is eventually forgotten or underappreciated, putting the knowledge and everything that depends on it at risk.

A false theory of knowledge that asserts that the past can be used to predict the future.

A form of induction that includes mathematical formalism.

See Inductivism.

A false theory of human psychology that ignores the contents of people's minds, their reasons and creative capacity to arrive at new ideas about what to do next. Instead, it attributes their behavior to irrelevant factors such as their genes or the behavior of similar people in research settings.

Commentary: Behaviorism is a particularly widespread and toxic combination of several false ideas, including scientism, dehumanization, inductivism, empiricism, instrumentalism, credentialism (privileging degree-holders and academics), and pessimism. Children are prime victims.

Behaviorism is instructive only when applied to non-human animals.

Genes can program behaviors, but these can be overwritten in people's minds. Genetic instructions for behaviors are like the default settings on a printer, and will persist among printers whose settings are not modified. But any user can modify the settings of their printer if they see a need to do so.

To accept an idea absent a good explanation for doing so.

Commentary: When someone says that they intuitively disbelieve a claim but cannot explain why, this is because they have inexplicit knowledge that conflicts with the claim.

Dogmatically judging a person, idea, institution, technology or any other creative output by attributes that have no bearing on its content, capabilities, ideas, merits, or choices.

Commentary: Applies not only to people but also to ideas, institutions, technology, and art.

Example: Dogmatically judging a person according to his skin color, genetics, country of origin, height, or weight is bigotry.

Example: Dogmatically judging an institution by its origins is bigotry (institutions evolve beyond their original purpose).

See Personhood and Institution.

A person who lacks the knowledge to live independently, and for whom those who brought him into existence are responsible until such a time as he acquires this knowledge.

Commentary: Personhood is determined by the ability to create explanatory knowledge, which is common to humans of all ages (as well as artificial general intelligences and intelligent aliens). All people acquire knowledge by the same fundamental process of creatively guessing an idea and then criticizing it. Children are therefore full-status people, which has all sorts of counterintuitive implications for a range of issues, from parenting to our education system.

See Personhood and Universal Explainer.

The thwarting of one part of the mind by another part of the mind, or by the mind of another person.

The arbitrary domination of one part of the mind over another.

Commentary: Coercion can be either intrapersonal or interpersonal.

It can come from physical force, but also from any method used to thwart the creation of knowledge, such as applying shame, fear, or trickery.

Coercion can cause a mind to adopt or act on an idea without understanding it.

The mistaken attempt to solve a problem by combining elements of two or more theories, rather than by testing the best version of at least one of them.

Commentary: It is generally considered wise or rational to combine bits of conflicting theories. However, this just deprives us of figuring out which one is superior.

The insistence on compromise is a form of pessimism.

Example: Imagine if Darwin and Lamarck solved their dispute by combining Darwin's natural selection with Lamarck's acquired characteristics. The proper epistemological move is to try to falsify both of them.

Example: In politics, compromise is considered a reasonable and necessary tactic. However, compromise obscures the failings of bad policies by enabling their supporters to claim it was the compromise that scuttled it.

See Pessimism.

A guess about how the world works, what to do next, what the world should be like, why something is a problem, why something is a solution.

Commentary: All knowledge is conjectural, and justification is impossible. Certainty is impossible, but we can make progress by guessing new ideas that improve upon their predecessors.

See Criticism and Justificationism.

Referring to ideas of which a person is aware.

Commentary: One of four classes of explanatory knowledge (the other three being explicit, inexplicit, and unconscious).

See Explicit, Unconscious, and Inexplicit.

A false epistemology that attributes errors, choices, and emergent regularities to a duplicitous cabal that places its own interests above those of the public, rather than to more 'mundane' explanations that make no appeal to such a cabal.

The state of a theory having survived a novel criticism.

Commentary: Corroboration could entail the successful accommodation of a new piece of data, having its predictions match the outcome of an experimental test that could have favored one of several rival theories, an examination of the theory's consistency with other theories we take for granted, a review of the theory's logical consistency, or any other sound criticism that someone can think of.

See Falsify.

The false idea that knowledge or otherwise complex entities can come about by fiat.

Commentary: Cosmological, Biological, Economic, and Educational Creationism are prominent examples. In all cases, the creative event is simply declared, independent of the underlying process of variation and selection or conjecture and refutation, or else assumed to not require a good explanation.

Example: Cosmological Creationism is the idea that the origins of the universe must be explained by the actions of an intentional Creator, rather than by an as-yet undiscovered philosophical or physical theory. Avoids the infinite regress problem by declaring the Creator to be the origin by fiat.

Example: Biological Creationism is the idea that the adaptations of the biosphere could only have come about via the actions of an Intelligent Designer, rather than by the bottom-up processes entailed by the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis.

Example: Economic Creationism is the idea that the emergent order of an economy cannot be a consequence of millions or billions of voluntary, spontaneous, and local actions but rather can only come about via top-down planning.

Example: Educational Creationism is the idea that knowledgeable people can mechanically pour select bits of knowledge into the minds of young, ignorant people.

The ability to generate new explanations.

See Explanation, Personhood, and Universal Explainer.

"...a way of thinking, and even a way of living: a readiness to listen to critical arguments, to search for one's own mistakes, and to learn from them…

'I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth.'"

–Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework

An argument for why a given idea is problematic.

Commentary: Arguments are themselves theory-laden, conjectural, and subject to error. Moreover, like explanations of the world, we can discover entirely new modes of criticism—deeper and more constraining criteria that our ideas must meet in order to be regarded as unproblematic.

Criticisms are products of creativity.

See Conjecture.

A set of memes, institutions, and background knowledge shared by a group of people.

See Meme, Institution, and Background Knowledge.

Explication of a label in terms of the concept(s) to which it refers, often erroneously assumed to be a necessary precursor of productive conversation.

Commentary: Because essentialism is false and because every person's internal dictionary is unique, defining terms 'more clearly' can never resolve a genuine disagreement over facts, worldviews, or what to do next. Even within one's own mind, an explicit label can only capture a fragment of an idea, as each idea contains inexplicit (and often unconscious) content.

See Essentialism and Inexplicit.

Unpredictability due to knowledge creation, rather than mechanical randomness.

Commentary: To be creative is to be disobedient, since every genuinely new act violates at least some incumbent expectations, rules, norms, or other 'rules of the road' that the culture had taken for granted.

Programmable machines like universal computers and universal constructors deterministically obey their programs, while people cannot be programmed, nor are they guaranteed to obey any instructions.

See Universal Constructor and Creativity.

A wide range of ideas, either within a single mind or across a collection of minds.

Commentary: There is more diversity in a single mind than in the entire biosphere.

A society in which rational memes have an advantage over rival anti-rational memes due to the society's traditions of criticism, optimism, and embrace of creativity.

See Anti-Rational Meme, Rational Meme, and Static Society.

The study of what universal explainers can do, in coordination and in solitude, given the inevitability of tradeoffs and the constraints of knowledge.

See Universal Explainer.

The manifestation of higher-level regularities in Nature.

Commentary: The insistence that emergent phenomena are necessarily less real or fundamental than lower-level ones is a mistake. Similarly, explanations of emergent phenomena should not be designated as second-class relative to explanations of lower-level phenomena. On the contrary, the degree to which an explanation is fundamental depends on how much of Nature it explains.

Sometimes, emergent theories are deducible from lower-level ones, but not always.

Example: Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon whose (eventual) explanation will appeal to concepts like knowledge and software, rather than to the atoms and smaller particles that any conscious entity consists of.

Example: History is an emergent field that is not explained by analyzing the dynamics of particles across time, but rather by analyzing the cultures, choices, and institutions entailed by a given historical event or period.

Example: Although it can be impossible in practice to track the behavior of every particle in a volume of gas, the field of statistical mechanics allows us to describe and explain regularities that emerge from the collective behavior of many, many particles. Whereas particles have attributes such as velocity and position, a collection of particles has emergent properties such as pressure and heat capacity.

See Reductionism.

A false theory of knowledge that asserts that all knowledge is derived from the senses.

Commentary: Empiricism rules itself out, as it is a purported piece of knowledge that does not come from the senses.

If empiricism were true, then every person subject to the same sensory inputs would acquire the exact same knowledge. In reality, people routinely interpret evidence and events in wildly different ways.

If empiricism were true, then science would be a mechanical process whereby people would obtain complete knowledge of Nature upon receiving sensory input.

Scientists do not read from the Book of Nature, since sensory input is itself interpreted by individual minds. Moreover, the mind must creatively decide which aspects of Nature deserve attention, investigation, and explanation. The overwhelming majority of reality cannot be sensed, anyway. Our senses—even when augmented by technology and experiments—help us criticize our conjectures, but they are not their source.

Example: Witnessing the Sun in the sky did not mechanically give us our best current theory of how the Sun works, nor why it moves the way it does across the sky. In explaining both, we refer to entities that no one has ever seen—nuclear reactions at the Sun's core (no one's been there) and gravity (which has no color), respectively.

The branch of philosophy that deals with what knowledge is and how it grows.

The act of solving problems (in a person's worldview, in a society's culture, in a person's life) and changing course accordingly. Because errors are inevitable, correcting errors is what it means to make progress.

Commentary: Creating knowledge is the means by which we correct for errors in our worldview. Therefore, the growth of knowledge is synonymous with error correction.

Morally, preserving the means of error correction (that is, those institutions, memes, and ideas more generally that foster the growth of knowledge) is more fundamental than the correction of any particular error.

The false idea that a given concept, event, or physical system has an ultimate character and correspondingly perfect description that cannot be improved upon.

Example: The popular notion of discovering one's true self assumes that there is an ultimate, unchanging version of the self. In reality, the self is constantly changing in light of new conjectures and criticisms.

Example: The insistence on a word having a particular meaning is essentialistic. For one thing, no two people have the exact same mental dictionaries. For another, languages evolve over time.

Any piece of the physical world that people necessarily interpret via theory.

Commentary: Evidence can either corroborate, falsify, or problematize a theory. When two or more theories purport to explain the same explicanda, a crucial experiment may adjudicate between them. The outcome of this experiment will be evidence that corroborates one of the candidate theories and refutes the others.

When we only have one good explanation for a given explicanda, it is irrational to abandon it in light of evidence that contradicts the explanation's predictions. This conflict is a problem, but one that may be resolved in a number of ways: the evidence may have been misinterpreted, the theory may have been misinterpreted, or the theory may have to be supplanted by a deeper theory.

Example: Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's general relativity make different predictions about a number of phenomena, including the trajectories of objects in the vicinity of mass. Therefore, evidence from, say, the trajectory of Mercury as influenced by the Sun is capable of falsifying one of the theories while corroborating the other.

Example: even before Einstein discovered general relativity, it was known that Mercury's motion contradicted what Newtonian mechanics predicted. This evidence therefore rendered Newtonian mechanics problematic.

See Corroboration, Explicanda, and Falsify.

A mental model that accounts for some aspect of the world, either physical or abstract.

Solutions to any problem that can be stored in the form of mental models.

See Genetic Knowledge.

What an explanation purports to explain.

Example: The explicanda of Darwin's theory of evolution includes all of the apparent designs in the biosphere.

Example: The explicanda of Austrian economics includes the emergence and changes in prices.

See Explanation.

Referring to ideas that are expressed in words or equations, as distinct from inexplicit ideas.

Example: The equations of motion in Newtonian mechanics that describe the trajectory of planets in spacetime, as well as the concepts to which the terms in the equations correspond, are explicit knowledge.

Example: A verbal account of who won the NBA Finals in 2015 is explicit knowledge.

Example: A chemistry textbook consists of explicit knowledge.

See Implicit and Inexplicit.

Referring to a piece of data or experimental outcome that corroborates one theory at the expense of at least one rival theory.

See Corroboration and Evidence.

The mistaken attempt to build knowledge from irrefutable or unimprovable foundations.

See Axiom.

A state of mind in which no part of the mind thwarts, inhibits, or arbitrarily dominates any other part; a state of mind in which all institutions of the mind are affecting each other freely.

Commentary: Feelings like joy, exhilaration, and good humor are indications of the fun state. Unfun states requiring self-discipline, willpower, and self-bullying are characterized by thwarting the growth of knowledge. Unfun states can always be made fun through problem solving.

The mistaken idea that genes determine or control the contents of people's minds.

Commentary: As universal explainers, any person's mind can conjecture any idea, regardless of their genes. Genes are not even relevant to a likelihood or probability of producing certain conjectures.

See Universal Explainer.

Solutions to the biological problems of replication.

Commentary: Genetic knowledge is stored in DNA, RNA, and some proteins.

Genetic knowledge grows by random variation and natural selection. Its speed is limited by how long it takes the organism that is sustaining the molecules to reach reproductive maturity.

Genetic knowledge cannot grow during a living thing's lifecycle and instead grows only across generations. Therefore, organisms whose genetic knowledge is severely problematic relative to its environment are helpless to do anything about it.

The set of transformations that genetic knowledge can cause is vastly smaller than the set of transformations that explanatory knowledge can cause.

See Explanatory Knowledge and Knowledge.

A mental block within a single mind established to protect an idea from criticism; a form of self-thwarting.

Commentary: A hangup need not be a meme. On the contrary, it need not spread at all to have an effect on the world. For instance, someone with a hangup about eating in front of people may appease the hangup by eating privately. A hangup does, however, necessarily impede personal progress, as it thwarts a person from improving an idea in his own mind via emotional intimidation.

Choosing not to engage with a given activity does not imply that a hangup is the reason behind the disinclination. On the contrary, the reason(s) why a person does or does not engage in a given activity determines whether or not a hangup is operating in his mind.

Hangups are often taken up after the introduction by others, passed on from adults to children, and produce unpleasant behaviors to get around or 'deal with' the resultant self-thwarting.

Example: An adult may have a hangup about eating sweets because his inquiries into sweets as a child were thwarted by his parents, and now he reprimands himself around sweets as an adult.

Example: A student may develop a sense of dread about math that persists into adulthood.

Example: A person may have a fear of commitment because of a traumatic event in a previous relationship.

See Criticism.

Refers to an explanation whose components cannot be arbitrarily changed without rendering the explanation inconsistent (either internally or with respect to our other theories of the world), incoherent, or otherwise problematic.

Commentary: Good explanations are those that are hard to vary, and bad explanations are those that are easy to vary.

Not all bad explanations are false, and not all good explanations are true. For example, explaining why the Earth revolves around the Sun with "Because of the laws of physics" is easy to vary (it could 'explain' anything), even though it's true. And the steady-state model of an eternal universe was a good explanation, but it turned out to be wrong.

Because errors are inevitable, every good explanation has shortcomings that could be resolved with a deeper (good) explanation.

All progress—whether scientific, political, moral, or technological—is underlain by good explanations. Scientific theories, policies, answers to moral dilemmas, ideas for new technologies can all be rejected out of hand if they follow from bad explanations.

In the absence of knowledge, big things tend to significantly affect small things, but small things tend to have little effect on big things.

Commentary: Knowledge enables little things to affect big things in stark reversal of the hierarchy rule.

Example: Knowledge embedded in microscopic bacteria caused the chemical composition of Earth's atmosphere to dramatically change during the so-called Great Oxidation Event.

Example: Absent knowledge, the Sun has enormous effect on nearby asteroids' trajectory, while nearby asteroids hardly affect the Sun's motion. But explanatory knowledge created by people on Earth can cause asteroids and the Sun alike to veer dramatically off of their baseline trajectories.

A unit of information in a person's mind. Can be explicit, inexplicit, conscious, or unconscious.

See Explicit, Inexplicit, Conscious, and Unconscious.

A purportedly self-consistent set of ideas, some of which are moral.

Commentary: Ideologies are bundles of ideas whose clarity makes them easy to criticize.

A rational use of ideology is as a criticism of ideas outside the ideology's boundaries. An anti-rational use of ideology is as a shield for its own ideas from criticism through moralizing, ostracism, and dogmatism.

Because our ideas are always improvable, no ideology can ever capture the whole truth (moral or otherwise). However, some ideologies contain more errors than others.

Christianity, Islam, environmentalism, techno-optimism, socialism, and libertarianism can all be thought of as ideologies.

Example: Christianity is not useful for its ontological claims (it is easy to vary, as there is no reason to accept Christianity's ontological claims over those of any other religion), but some of its moral components are useful (such as the specialness of people).

Example: Utilitarianism is a useful criticism (rather than a roadmap) of other theories of morality, as well as a criticism of individual and political choices.

Example: "My position on immigration is the libertarian position" say libertarians on all sides of the immigration debate. They are mistakenly trying to shoehorn their political position into their ideology, rather than apply their ideology as one of several criticisms of all of the immigration positions on offer.

Referring to ideas that logically follow from the idea(s) at hand.

Commentary: The reach of an explanation is a special case of an idea having implications.

Whether an idea is explicit or inexplicit is determined by the idea's structure in and across minds, while whether an idea is implied is determined by the parent idea's content.

Example: Dawkins' selfish gene hypothesis implies that genes may sometimes have effects that are deleterious to its host organism's well-being.

See Reach.

Piecemeal and easily reversible, typically referring to attempts at making progress in an individual's life, society as a whole, or any institution in between.

Commentary: Incremental change stands in contrast to revolutionary change.

The degree to which an attempted institutional change is incremental or revolutionary is determined by the magnitude of the change relative to the wealth and knowledge embedded in said institution.

Incremental change is preferable to revolutionary change, since the latter is far more difficult to reverse and puts hard-won institutional knowledge at risk. Moreover, because of the magnitude of revolutionary changes, it is difficult to determine which aspects of the revolution improved society, which made things worse than they were before, and which did not solve the problems they were designed to solve.

See Revolutionary and Utopian.

A false theory of knowledge that asserts that repetition begets certainty, that more repetitions increases the probability that something is true, that the future will resemble the past.

Commentary: Inductivism takes our explanations for granted. In reality, which aspects of the future we think will resemble the past depends on our explanations of the phenomena at hand, not on additional observations.

Example: We do not acquire more certainty that the Sun will forever rise in the morning with each observation that it does. On the contrary, our best current explanations imply that the Sun will die one day. Moreover, inductivists do not 'blindly' observe the Sun rising each morning. Rather, their observations are theory-laden—even on cloudy days, they (rightly) assume that the Sun rises and falls.

Example: One billion confirmations of the boiling temperature of a liquid is refuted with a single measurement at a higher elevation.

Referring to ideas that are not expressed in words or equations.

Commentary: Perhaps because it takes effort to put inexplicit ideas into words, this class of ideas is underappreciated. Therefore, any institution that consists of a significant amount of inexplicit knowledge tends to be undervalued and vulnerable to rash attacks.

Example: The rules of grammar are largely inexplicit. For instance, when a sentence instinctively 'sounds wrong' to your ear but you cannot explain why, this is because the sentence contradicts a grammatical rule that you hold in your mind inexplicitly. Similarly, when you seamlessly utter a stream of sentences, your speech typically conforms to an entire complex of interrelated grammatical rules that you'd struggle to put in explicit terms.

Example: Body language is largely inexplicit (though it can be made explicit far more easily than can grammatical rules). Facial expressions, hand gestures, and posture all play a role in communication, even though they transmit information wordlessly.

Example: Intuitions (moral or otherwise) are inexplicit. Sometimes they can be made explicit in short order, while other times it can take entire books to spell out what they get wrong or right.

See Explicit.

A catalyst composed of knowledge whose purpose is to foster the propagation of ideas that wouldn't be possible in its absence.

Commentary: because inexplicit knowledge is undervalued in even the most advanced of today's cultures, any institution of which inexplicit knowledge is a significant component is at risk of rash deletion or revolutionary overhaul.

Much as a hammer is a technology that allows people to solve a wider set of problems than they could solve with their bare hands, an institution is a kind of memetic technology that similarly expands the set of problems that people can solve.

Example: Language is an institution that allows us to put ideas in explicit terms. This makes our ideas more easily criticizable and communicable.

Example: A company is an institution that allows us to more efficiently aggregate social, economic, and physical capital for the purpose of creating a consumer good or service.

Example: Norms are institutions that allow us to adopt readymade solutions to problems that come up over and over again in a given domain. These solutions can then be creatively and dynamically built upon.

Example: Robust and individuated parts of a single mind become familiar to us over time, much as other people do. As we grow more familiar with each part of ourselves, we may interact with them more flexibly, selectively, and creatively. Parts of minds are institutions.

Example: The scientific community offers social capital, a peer review system, traditions of integration, tutelage, criticism, and collaboration, and channels for resource acquisition.

See Inexplicit Knowledge and Tradition of Criticism.

The false idea that the sole purpose of scientific theories is to make predictions.

Example: The infamous 'shut up and calculate' motto common in the quantum physics community is a prime example of endorsing instrumentalism. The motto suggests that one ought not worry about what quantum mechanics' equations tell us about the physical world, but that they should be used solely to make calculations and predict the final state of quantum mechanical systems.

Problems that a person has fun trying to solve.

Commentary: Interests are as diverse in scale and kind as problems themselves.

See Fun and Problem.

A discovery that increases the reach of an idea from a bounded set to an unbounded set.

Example: DNA replication expanded the repertoire of biological forms producible by evolution to an unbounded size.

Example: Switching from Roman numerals to base ten, from hieroglyphs to an alphabet, or from barter to money are all jumps to universality.

See Universality.

A false theory of knowledge that asserts that all ideas must be justified according to some fixed criterion or authority.

See Foundationalism.

Information that, once instantiated, tends to cause itself to remain so; information that solves a problem; information that is capable of causing a particular set of physical transformations.

See Explanatory Knowledge and Genetic Knowledge.

Explanations that account for and describe the constraints on the behavior of physical systems.

Example: The Shrodinger equation in quantum mechanics tells us how the so-called wavefunction evolves over time.

Example: The field equations in general relativity tell us how the geometry of spacetime changes in accordance with the distribution of matter.

Example: Coulomb's law relates the electrostatic force on one charge by another to the distance between them.

See Principles of Physics.

An idea that spreads from mind to mind by causing an observable (and, therefore, copyable) behavior.

Commentary: Not all ideas are memes, but all memes are ideas. An example of a non-memetic idea is one that a person conjectures but quickly rejects before ever acting on it. Because we only ever act on a tiny fraction of all of our conjectures, most ideas are not memes.

Example: A joke, a song, a religion, norms, copycat suicides, dietary fads, scientific theories, and traditions are all memes.

See Anti-Rational Meme, Dynamic Society, Rational Meme, and Static Society.

A class of explanations that share a common set of characteristics.

Commentary: Just as all of our ideas are infinitely improvable, we should expect our most cherished modes of explanation to be similarly supplanted by even deeper ones.

Example: Explaining a higher-level regularity in terms of the dynamics of the underlying constituent parts is a mode of explanation.

Example: Explaining the dynamics of changing systems in terms of laws of motion is a mode of explanation.

Example: Explaining the emergence of apparent design in terms of cycles of variation and selection is a mode of explanation.

Example: Explaining particular features of a system in terms of principles such as the principle of locality or the principle of conservation of energy is a mode of explanation.

Example: Explaining the significance of an object such as a universal computer or universal constructor in terms of what it could do, rather than what it actually does, is a mode of explanation.

The branch of philosophy dealing with what one ought to do next, and why.

Commentary: Much of conventional moral philosophy deals with finding the right moral foundations and applying them to various scenarios. However, there can be no ultimate foundation in morality any more than there can be in the other two branches of philosophy. There are only problems and error-riddled conjectures that solve them.

Moreover, many of the famous thought experiments in moral philosophy have no bearing on what choices people ought to make in the real world because these thought experiments do not allow for knowledge creation and the subsequent expansion of possible choices.

Although these thought experiments almost always involve other people, morality is about one's own decisions. These can involve other people, but only as a limiting case. A person alone on a desert island still faces moral problems of what to do next.

Like science, art, politics, and culture, morality is objective and can be improved upon by the process of conjecturing novel moral theories and new ways of criticizing existing moral theories. Relatedly, increases in wealth expand people's range of options, which may allow for more morally sound choices than had been previously possible.

Example: The trolley problem is meant to highlight moral issues related to utilitarianism, choice, and responsibility. Yet the most prevalent variants of the thought experiment assume that the man with the lever is confined to make one of two choices. In reality, the man is capable of creating new knowledge about how to solve the problem. He could create a new option for himself such that he saves the lives of everyone at risk.

Example: A culture that rejects slavery and understands why it is evil is, in this respect, an objectively more moral culture than one that sanctions slavery.

Referring to anything that is independent of a person's experience, state of mind, and worldview.

Commentary: While an individual's subjective experience is inaccessible to other minds, the facts about his experience are objective and explicable.

Example: Knowledge in human minds is objective in the sense that it encodes information that corresponds to the world and causes itself to remain instantiated, regardless of whether anyone accepts it or is conscious of it.

Example: Knowledge encoded in genes is objective in the sense that it causes its own replication and reflects the environment in which it evolved, even though no organism is aware of it.

Example: Beauty is objective in the sense that it can be improved upon by some universal standards, even if people subjectively disagree over the beauty of a particular creation.

Example: Morality is objective in the sense that some explanations about what to do next are better than others.

See Subjective.

The branch of philosophy that deals with what the world, or an aspect of the world, consists of, and why; the concepts and tools that define a particular theory.

Commentary: Science may be regarded as a subset of ontology.

Example: Theories in, say, physics and biology are ontological in that they explain why the physical world is the way it is.

Example: Population genetics is a subfield of evolutionary biology that aims to explain the dynamics of genes as they spread (or fail to spread, as the case may be) throughout a population. Its ontology includes concepts like alleles, natural selection, genomes, selection coefficient, reproduction rates, generations, and populations. The field explains phenomena such as genetic drift, spreading to fixation, and extinction in terms of those concepts.

The state—physical, moral, epistemological—of being a universal explainer.

Example: A baby is a young, extremely ignorant, and unskilled person for whom those who brought him into the world are responsible.

Example: An artificial general intelligence is a person made of (say) silicon.

Example: A foreigner is a person who was born in a different polity than you.

Example: An intelligent alien is a person whose line of ancestry traces back to a different abiogenesis than yours does.

See Universal Explainer.

The false idea that there exist problems that cannot be solved; the attitude that we should accept the current state of things or, worse, return to a simpler time with fewer problems; the attitude that people who solve problems, especially those who produce wealth, are evil.

Commentary: People who solve problems necessarily introduce new problems, and the very newness can be understandably destabilizing and anxiety-inducing. However, this is a necessary condition of progress, and all new problems can themselves be solved.

Example: Thinking that death and taxes are inevitable is pessimism.

Example: Thinking that one's current lot in life can never improve is pessimism.

See Compromise and The Principle of Optimism.

The aspect of science concerned with mapping models onto physical phenomena absent an underlying explanation.

The domain of reality comprising all phenomena whose effects can, in principle, be detected.

The false idea that it is a priori better to err on the side of stasis over change; the pessimistic idea that we should never do anything new because we don't know how harmful the unintended consequences will be.

Commentary: The precautionary principle is touted as being safe, but it is profoundly unsafe, as it hampers our ability to solve problems of human suffering and existential risk. A static society will necessarily go extinct eventually, as existential threats are unavoidable.

The false idea that a theory in physics must be expressed in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion.

Example: Newton's laws of motion follow the prevailing conception, while the principle of conservation of energy does not.

The false idea that people are cosmically insignificant.

Commentary: The Principle of Mediocrity is expressed in various forms, such as that humans are merely talking apes, that the Earth is insignificant in the context of the vastness of space, or that an attitude disposed to solving problems is hubristic and risky. These expressions are bolstered by ideas such as relativism, nihilism, pessimism, all of which are false in turn.

Contrary to the Principle of Mediocrity, people are the only agents who are capable of creating any knowledge and bringing about any physical transformation that the laws of physics allow. This implies that only people are capable of making unbounded progress in every domain, and that only people can change anything that it is physically possible to change.

See Personhood, Universal Explainer, and Progress.

Explanations that account for and constrain the laws of physics.

Commentary: The laws of physics are a special case of the principles of physics, which are deeper, more general, and more constraining.

Example: The principle of conservation of energy asserts that the total energy of an isolated system cannot be changed. Every physical system that conforms to the laws of quantum mechanics, general relativity, electromagnetism, and so on must respect this principle, even though the principle is not apparent in any of those theories' primary equations.

Example: The principle of testability does not refer to any particular theory in physics, yet it deeply constrains every theory in physics, both known and unknown.

The branch of mathematics that deals with events whose possible outcomes are assigned distinct weights.

Commentary: Probability only applies when an explanation or model of a physical system is known and is assumed to be kept insulated from the impact of knowledge growth.

A conflict between ideas; The starting point of all knowledge growth.

Commentary: Problems are one of the broadest categories in reality, because ideas of any kind—explicit or inexplicit, moral or ontological, conscious or unconscious, mathematical or verbal, scientific or aesthetic—can conflict with ideas of any other kind.

Moreover, a problem can refer to a gap in our understanding of reality (a scientific or ontological problem), a conflict with respect to deciding what to do next (a moral problem), what brush strokes to apply next (an aesthetic problem), or a shortcoming in our ability to transform the world in a way we'd prefer (a technological problem).

In common parlance, problem has a negative connotation. On the contrary, problems as we've defined them are the starting point of all progress and fun.

Example: It follows from our best explanations in physics and epistemology that creating an artificial general intelligence is possible, yet we do not have a good theory of how to create one. This is a gap in our understanding of reality.

Example: our two deepest theories in physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, are radically inconsistent with each other—a conflict between two ideas about what the world is like. There must be a deeper theory that resolves this conflict.

Example: The observed energy of empty space is 120 orders of magnitude greater than what quantum field theory predicts. This is a problem between our current best explanation and evidence.

Example: We'd prefer to live in a world without war, yet wars continue to break out. This is a conflict between ideas about what we want and the state of the world as it is. We have solved the problem of how to live without war within Western societies, but we have not extended the requisite culture, wealth, institutions, and ideas to enough of the world such that war is yet extinct.

Example: Having a vague sense that something is wrong, doesn't quite fit, or isn't quite right represents a conflict between ideas within a single mind when one or more of them is inexplicit.

Example: Two roommates disagree over how to arrange the furniture in the commons. This is an interpersonal conflict between preferences.

Example: An athlete loves the state of his body resulting from his current diet but hates his current diet. This is a conflict between preferences in a single mind.

The evolution from an objectively worse state to an objectively better state. Applies to individuals' lives as well as to society as a whole. Applies to knowledge across all fields: science, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, epistemology, etc.

Commentary: Progress can be thought of as optimism in action in the sense that, whenever someone solves a problem, they necessarily thought that the problem was both solvable and worth solving.

The impossible act of showing that an idea is irrefutably true.

a meme that spreads by surviving criticism of it.

Commentary: Because progress consists of conjecturing candidate explanations and then criticizing all of them, rational memes foster progress.

Example: A scientific theory that spreads from mind to mind, textbook to textbook, by surviving the criticisms that each exposed person levies at it is a rational meme.

Example: A joke that makes receivers laugh joyfully, who go on to tell the joke to others in the hope of garnering the same reaction is a rational meme.

See Meme and Anti-Rational Meme.

The ability of an explanation to solve problems and explain phenomena beyond those it was created to solve and explain.

Example: Karl Popper initially developed his epistemology to solve the problem of induction, but he (and others) later applied his epistemological ideas to problems in education, politics, and elsewhere.

Example: Einstein initially developed his theory of general relativity to integrate gravity into his theory of special relativity. General relativity turned out to shed light on questions in cosmology, such as whether or not the universe had a beginning.

See Implicit and Jump to Universality.

is featured in our explanations of reality.

Commentary: Declaring phenomena as not real for any reason other than that they do not appear in our explanations is arbitrary and irrational. It is a mistake to classify phenomena as not real simply because they are emergent, or not directly detectable, or abstract.

Example: the game of chess is abstract yet real because we need to refer to it in order to explain why some people spend their time hunched over chess boards.

Example: morality is real because better moral ideas change the world in better ways than worse moral ideas do. For example, being open to new ideas creates more opportunity for knowledge growth and resultant reduction in suffering than being closed to new ideas does.

Example: beauty is real because it explains why some pieces of art have more lasting appeal, and why a later draft of a work of art is more appealing than an earlier draft.

Example: unicorns are not real, but the idea of unicorns is real.

See Abstract and Physical World.

The mistaken idea that features of lower levels of emergence are fundamental to, necessarily cause, or must explain phenomena at higher levels of emergence.

Commentary: reductionism is a form of foundationalism.

Example: explaining free will in terms of the motions of particles rather than the development of reasons for what to do next is reductionism.

Example: explaining a game of chess in terms of the physics of the pieces and their locations, not the rules and the reasons that people discover for making particular moves, is reductionism.

See Emergence and Foundationalism.

A physical system that a person or society knows how to employ towards a particular end or ends.

Commentary: the value that a resource has to a person, a subculture, or an entire society is largely determined by the people's knowledge of what they can do with it, rather than by the resource's physico-chemical properties.

Example: trees were a resource used primarily for shelter and rudimentary toolmaking for a long time. Later peoples discovered how to transform parts of trees into paper, thereby increasing the value that trees had to them.

Example: people must have been aware of coal long before they began to use it as a fuel source around six thousand years ago. Prior to using it this way, it would have had very little value to them. Once they created the knowledge of how to use coal to generate heat, its status as a resource would have drastically increased.

Example: uranium was a toxic rock and became a resource only after the knowledge of atomic energy was discovered.

A dramatic type of change that ignores or undervalues the partial solutions already present in the status quo, typically with respect to attempts at making progress in an individual's life, society as a whole, or any institution in between; a change that refuses to improve on tradition and instead aims to start anew, usually with a sense of moral purity.

Commentary: The degree to which the attempted institutional change is incremental or revolutionary is determined by the magnitude of the change relative to the wealth and knowledge embedded in said institution.

See Incremental and Utopianism.

The false idea that the Earth in its natural state already provides everything humanity needs to survive and thrive so long as we don't modify it too much (such as by consuming too many of its finite resources), and that only the universe outside of the Earth's boundaries is hostile to humanity.

Commentary: Any environment, whether on Earth or outside it, has the capacity to kill us. It is not the Earth's natural resources that keep us safe but the creation of new solutions by people--whether on Earth or in any other environment in which we find ourselves.

Example: The development of desalination technology transformed seawater into a new source of fresh water, effectively expanding the resource base beyond what was previously considered available.

Example: The Green Revolution in agriculture demonstrated how knowledge and technology could dramatically increase food production, challenging the notion of fixed resource limitations.

See Anthropocentrism.

A state in which an individual, culture, or society stays the same and, therefore, makes no progress; a state of ignoring problems and producing no solutions to them nor the resultant new problems.

Commentary: Stasis is bolstered by pessimism.

Stasis is ultimately caused by an absence of the growth of knowledge.

Suffering is always caused by stasis.

See Pessimism and Suffering.

A society in which anti-rational memes have an advantage over rival rational memes due to the society's pessimism, lack of traditions of criticism, and hostility to creativity.

See Anti-Rational Meme, Rational Meme, and Dynamic Society.

Referring to a person's experience, qualia, state of mind, and idiosyncratic worldview.

Commentary: Subjectivity is not to be confused with relativism. While an individual's subjective experience is inaccessible to other minds, the facts about his experience are objective and explicable.

See Objective.

A certain kind of conflict between ideas that (1) is causing pain (physical or psychological) and (2) is not being resolved because of either a hangup or an external entity.

Commentary: Simple pain or discomfort are not necessarily suffering because the context within which they are occurring may be such that there is no conflict.

Suffering is an epistemological phenomenon, having to do with the state of interacting ideas in a creative mind. It is therefore something that only people—rather than genetically preprogrammed animals—can experience.

Example: The pain from spicy food or the muscle burn at the gym may all be welcome indications of alignment among the relevant ideas and therefore do not constitute suffering.

The roughly ten-billion-year period from the Big Bang until abiogenesis on Earth, during which hardly anything new came about.

Commentary: During the Great Monotony, the universe repeatedly produced objects like stars, atoms, metals and other elements, planets, black holes, and galaxies, but very little else. That is, although the universe was a place of staggering scale and power, there was no novelty, no creativity, no surprises. With the emergence of life on Earth, genuinely new objects proliferated in the form of genetic knowledge, biomolecules, organisms, and every other facet of the biosphere that had been utterly alien to the bland universe in its first ten billion years. With the rise of people and, eventually, dynamic societies, novelty once again exploded in the objects that only explanatory knowledge could produce.

See Dynamic Society, Genetic Knowledge, and Personhood.

The compulsion to preserve the legitimacy of hurting Jews because they are Jews.

Commentary: the Pattern is distinct from anti-semitism, as people can exhibit the Pattern while also opposing anti-semitism.

The Pattern is a peculiar meme complex that is replicated in many cultures throughout the world, yet does not have the features of rational or anti-rational memes.

The true idea that all problems are solvable; the attitude that it is the duty of people to seek solutions and never declare that a problem is unsolvable or won't be solved.

Commentary: Because people will not work to solve problems that they think are inevitable, rejection of the principle of optimism causes stasis.

A culture that tolerates, indeed expects, criticism of established and novel ideas alike.

Commentary: Traditions of criticism can be formal (the institution of science) or informal (a business venture between two longtime friends).

It's not enough to replace a worse idea with a better idea once. For a culture to make sustainable progress, it needs institutions that foster continuous cycles of conjecture and criticism. This includes within one's own mind, where a culture of criticism might entail removing self-imposed blocks and hangups that otherwise protect ideas from criticism.

See Criticism, Dynamic Society, Institution, and Static Society.

Preferring to ideas of which a person is unaware.

Commentary: One of four major classes of explanatory knowledge (the other two being explicit, inexplicit, and conscious).

Unconscious knowledge is inexplicit knowledge of which we are not conscious.

Example: The 'muscle memory' formed when learning to ride a bike.

Example: The precursor processes leading up to a sudden 'aha' moment, such as when, after fumbling for someone's name, it suddenly comes to mind.

See Conscious, Explicit, and Inexplicit.

A hypothetical machine that can be programmed to transform any input into any output that the laws of physics allow for.

A programmable machine that can produce anything that the laws of physics allow for.

A programmable machine that can cause any physical transformation allowed by the laws of physics.

The ultimate generalization of a 3D printer—a machine that can be programmed to transform any input into any output allowed for by the laws of physics.

Commentary: The universal constructor can be thought of as a generalization of the universal computer, which is a single machine that is capable of performing any computation that the laws of physics allow for. That is, a universal computer can transform any informational input (such as a sequence of bits) into any informational output (such as another sequence of bits). Such transformations, although instantiated in some hardware, are defined by changes to software. But there are many other transformations in the universe that can only be explained in terms of changes in 'hardware'. The universal computer is capable of simulating those transformations, but it can never realize them. For example, it could simulate the evolution of a star to arbitrary accuracy, but we could never feed the machine raw materials and a program from which it could build a star. The universal constructor would be capable of doing both: simulating and realizing any physical system, provided we feed it the right ingredients and program. That is, it could transform any input into any output allowed by the laws of physics, whether they are informational or physical.

If a universal constructor is possible, it means we live in a Lego-type universe, where any type of matter can be used as building blocks for any other arrangement of matter constrained only by the laws of physics. It is not yet clear from the laws of physics as we now understand them that ours is a Lego-type universe, within which a universal constructor is possible. Therefore, proving the possibility of a universal constructor would not have merely engineering implications but would yield profound insight into the nature of physical reality.

An entity that is capable of creating any possible explanation.

An entity that can explain anything that can be explained.

An entity that can create all physically possible explanations.

An entity that can make any conjecture within the unbounded set of all possible conjectures.

Commentary: On Earth, and perhaps in the entire universe, only humans are universal explainers (there may be alien universal explainers as well).

See Explanatory Knowledge and Personhood.

Applying to every element in a class of elements. Can refer to a system's capability or a theory's domain of applicability.

Commentary: When explanations are universal, it is rational to regard any apparent or suggested exceptions as regularities that can be explained via the universal theory in question, even if the detailed connection has not yet been discovered. For instance, even if we do not have a detailed explanation for why an animal evolved a particular phenotypic trait, we expect that its explanation will be in terms of, and consistent with, the modern theory of evolution (which is universal for the growth of all genetic knowledge).

Example: The universality of personhood refers to the fact that every person creates knowledge via the same process, has the same capacity to suffer and prosper, and is of similar moral and epistemological status. Moreover, people are universal explainers in the sense that every person is capable of explaining anything that can be understood.

Example: A universal computer is capable of running every program that any other computer can execute.

Example: Money is universal in that, contrary to barter, a singular good can, in principle, serve as the denomination in which every good and service is priced in terms of.

Example: Unlike hieroglyphics, an alphabet is universal in that a finite set of symbols can express any word, including newly created words.

See Jump to Universality.

A vision for an impossible state in which a society (a nation, a community, a company) faces no problems.

See Utopianism.

A mistaken form of problem solving in which one aims to jump straight to the end state without solving the intermediary steps.

Commentary: Utopianism is prone to several mistakes: (1) Speech controls in order to preserve the vision, because the end state of any venture must change as new knowledge about the situation is acquired, but changing the vision necessarily involves giving up on older versions of the vision, which is indistinguishable from abandoning the utopia. (2) Revolutionary change, burning down the old ways and building anew among the morally pure. (3) Stasis, as the end goal is a state with no problems, and therefore no progress, which itself is a problem.

Example: A student obtains a degree in a field he has no experience in and, after years of study, finds the available jobs do not interest him.

See Incremental, Revolutionary, Stasis, and Utopia.

The set of all transformations that an entity is capable of bringing about.

Commentary: The conventional view is that wealth is an anthropocentric idea, that it makes little or no sense to attribute some amount of wealth to a black hole or a squirrel. Moreover, wealth tends to refer to things like GDP, or capital stock, or the set of all goods and services that a given individual or society could purchase. But all three of those are primarily determined by knowledge, and not by the physical assets in possession. For instance, a society whose capital stock includes silicon becomes far wealthier after said society acquires the knowledge of how to build computers out of it. That is, the society becomes wealthier by dint of learning how to achieve novel transformations—even without acquiring any new physical assets, it increased the set of transformations it could cause.

To be sure, human civilization is vastly wealthier than inanimate entities and life forms, which may be why it is counterintuitive to apply this conception of wealth to the latter. Yet a star and a squirrel do have wealth—a star is capable of transforming hydrogen into helium, and a squirrel (including, crucially, its DNA) is capable of transforming oxygen into carbon dioxide and an egg into another squirrel.

Every physical transformation can be brought about if one has the right recipe. Therefore, to grow wealthier is to become capable of rendering more and more such recipes.

Example: The United States is wealthier than North Korea because the former is capable of creating more capital goods and consumer goods. Because the United States has institutions that better foster the growth of knowledge than the latter society (the United States is more dynamic and North Korea is more static), the wealth gap between the two societies is expected to only widen—unless, of course, the United States' institutions degenerate and/or those of North Korea improve.

Example: A bear is wealthier than a bacterium. The single-celled organism can cause many different biochemical reactions, but so can the cells of the bear. However, the bear (and its DNA) can also transform its environment on scales inaccessible to the bacterium—it can turn prey animals into energy and bear eggs into cubs.

Example: A star has far less wealth than even a bacterium, even though stars are capable of transforming lesser elements into higher elements like carbon and oxygen.