Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I hope that nothing is axiomatic with me, but it comes from somewhere. Yes, it’s not a conjecture in its own right. Basically, it comes from the way the laws of physics are. The capacity to suffer, if it is different from the capacity for explanations (by the way, I think it’s unlikely that it is), but if it is different, that’s a whole other can of worms, and I’d have to change my view about a number of things. Whether it is distinct or not, it is not very effective from the perspective of physics. That is, nonexplanatory knowledge, like the knowledge of how to do photosynthesis, has had a gigantic effect on the surface of the planet, down to a depth of 1,000 meters or something and up to the top of the atmosphere — that all the iron ore in the world, and all the chalk and limestone and all the oxygen in the atmosphere, and the fact that there’s almost no carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere now — all that was the result of a single molecule, at some time. I forget when it was, something like two billion years ago. A single molecule being an enzyme for capturing energy in light and converting it into ATP, or whatever it did. Or maybe it was a few molecules. But anyway, this happened in a very small number of locations at a molecular level. That entity changed the whole surface of the earth — and human knowledge hasn’t yet changed that much. That is, we’ve changed maybe a little bit of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We’ve removed a little bit of the iron ore in the crust, and so on, but we haven’t yet matched the ability of those blue-green algae genes, but we’re catching up very fast. We can do things that no biological evolution ever could do. My favorite example being, ours may well be the only planet in the universe that deflects asteroids coming towards it rather than attracts them. If somebody was watching the earth from a distant galaxy with a powerful telescope, they would see that this planet alone among all the other planets in the galaxy, as far as we know (maybe there are many inhabited planets, in which case they would all have this property, and none of the other planets do) — the ones which have explanatory knowledge on them can deflect asteroids. If I were Nietzsche and I heard this, I would say you’re making the importance of being explanatory subordinate to some notion of the will to power. I don’t mean that in a critical way. But is that a misunderstanding? Well, power is an ambiguous term. Usually, and especially with these romantic philosophers, it means power over humans.…

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