#109 – The scale of creativity

Through understanding, we liberate ourselves.

“Science is not only, like art and literature, an adventure of the human spirit, but it is among the creative arts perhaps the most human: full of human failings and shortsightedness, it shows those flashes of insight which open our eyes to the wonders of the world and of the human spirit. But this is not all. Science is the direct result of that most human of all human endeavours—to liberate ourselves.”

— Karl Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science

Despite our better explanations on the subject, science is perceived by some as merely a cold collection of facts. Never to be mentioned in the same breath as the arts or literature, the supposed discoveries of science are seen only as mechanical inventions; its theories as nothing but instruments, devoid of depth or meaning. According to this view, science cannot reveal new worlds behind our everyday reality, for the physical world is just as it appears to be, and only the scientific theories are not what they seem. A scientific theory does not explain or describe the world; it is merely an instrument.

This view is not only depressing but also mistaken. It misses what science is really all about: explanation rather than prediction. Let us imagine that we are in possession of an oracle that can predict the outcome of every possible experiment for us but provides no explanations.¹ According to the view of science presented above, having that oracle would mean the end of scientific theories, for we could then predict everything. But would it really? The oracle only predicts the outcomes of experiments. To use it, we must first know which experiments to inquire about. If, for instance, we gave it the design of a bridge and the details of its structure, it could tell us whether the bridge would be able to hold so and so kilos of weight or not. But it could not design the bridge for us in the first place or explain the concept of weight. And even if it predicted that the bridge would collapse under so much load, it could not tell us how to prevent such a catastrophe! Before we were to improve the bridge in any way, we should first have to understand the structure of the bridge and how it works, among other things. Prediction in science—no matter how accurate—cannot replace the need for explanation.

Science and art are products of the same creative process of the mind. Discovering a new scientific explanation is inherently an act of creativity, as all knowledge creation occurs through the same method of creative conjecture, alternating with criticism. There is no “Book of Nature” from which one reads knowledge of the physical world by making observations. All observation is theory-laden, as Karl Popper would say. Scientific theories are creative guesses, and the discoverer of scientific knowledge—i.e., the scientist—is not its passive recipient but its creator.

Nor is science a threat to all or devoid of any cultural values. Science is itself a product of culture: a culture promoting the free discussion and criticism of ideas. And this culture is ultimately a product of the creative faculties of the human mind. Science will not dehumanize us. It enables us to do what is uniquely human: to understand the world by explaining the natural world and thus liberate ourselves from the burdens of ignorance.

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1. David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, Penguin Books, 1997, p. 4-5.