UF (6) — The Intelligence of Freedom

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On UF.

The great American physicist J. A. Wheeler contends in his A Septet of Sybils: Aids in the Search for Truth:

“Our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible.”

The flip side of our unrivalled success in making the world ever more conveniently inhabitable for us, is our constitutive ignorance. We are so incredibly good at adapting to our environment because our ignorance forces us to keep on searching for more light. We – at least the wisest and the best thinkers and scientists among us – are aware of the limits of our knowledge, unlike the omniscient crocodile that thinks it knows all there is to know.

There are many reasons why we are necessarily ignorant, probably the most important one is this: our brain is an organ that evolved primarily to make us survive, serving at best secondarily to map truth accurately (truth being correspondence with the facts). Sure, had our precursors not developed a pretty good ability to adapt to, say, a three dimensional world, they would have dropped from the trees to their death and we would not exist.

But the fit between human cognition and the real world is no guarantee for command of the truth, not least because much of what is to be known and much of what affects us lies outside the mesocosmos (the world of medium dimensions to which we are adapted), this outside having evolved (1) prior to, (2) independent of and (3) with no need to be immediately accessible to our mesocosmic faculty of cognition.

A situation somewhat analogous to the epistemological fate of Lucky, the Dalmatian I dog-sit, who is fantastically well adapted to our mutual slice of the world, without knowing much about it. The assumptions he works on are often spectacularly erroneous, a circumstance that I amply exploit to create joy and harmony between us.

Adaptive competence (like following the right rules and behaving in a ceratin way) is an alternative to insight, especially when we are to deal successfully with information impossible to be collected and processed by the unaided human brain: markets are such an extension of the brain, they are indeed a veritable prothesis of the brain.

So, we cannot overcome our ignorance ever altogether, but we can reduce it incrementally and improve our conjectural knowledge of the world, by constantly calling into question what we think we already know.

This is precisely what markets do, and what science does. We achieve progress by incessantly discovering the flaws in our present and provisional knowledge. The faster we discover the flaws the more advancement we achieve in the course of our unending quest: 

“our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible.”

The theory of freedom is predicated upon the insight that our knowledge is fallible and highly restricted in scope, and that it is paramount to embrace as many human beings as possible in the process of pushing back the limits of our knowledge, so that information that is unique to the individual is set free to enhance the overall picture.

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

Hayek, F.A. (1978) The Constitution of Liberty, p.30

German twin post.

Written in March 2013