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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Explanations That Transform the World
No human has ever stepped on the surface of a star, let alone visited its core. And yet scientists know a lot about what’s happening deep inside stars, light years away.
How come?
Because experiencing is not the only way of knowing.
Empiricism is a theory that claims we derive all our knowledge from sensory experience – but as you’ll see, this is wrong.
Empiricists imagine that our mind is like a blank piece of paper on which sensory experiences are written. This would mean that we are the passive recipients of knowledge, not its creators.
But contrary to the empiricist view, our knowledge can’t be based on individual observations alone.
For instance, even though you’ve seen the sun rise repeatedly, you don’t base your knowledge that it will rise tomorrow solely on these observations. If you did, on a cloudy day you’d assume the sun was not rising because you couldn’t see it!
Moreover, appearances can be deceptive. For example, the Earth looks and feels as if it is immobile, even though it is really rotating.
So although experience is essential to science, it is not the source from which knowledge is derived. If it was, our knowledge of the stars, for example, would be limited to what we learn from gazing at the night skies.
Instead, the real source of our knowledge is theory and conjecture.
Consider the stars again: the fact that at their core is an energy source equivalent to billions of power plants is something we can’t see. We know it only from theory.
Such scientific theories are derived from conjectures – guesswork and speculation – which can be tested by experience in the form of observations and experiments.
Everyday, we benefit from huge advances in both scientific theory and practice. What triggered this progress? In The Beginning of Infinity (2011) – a journey through the fundamental fields of science and philosophy – physicist David Deutsch argues that all progress results from one single human activity: the quest for explanations. Human creativity opens up limitless opportunities for progress, making knowledge the “beginning of infinity.”
The harm that can flow from any innovation that does not destroy the growth of knowledge is always finite; the good can be unlimited.
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Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 7,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trialBlink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma