The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (40 page)

SOCRATES
: Perhaps not . . .

HERMES
:
Perhaps
not? Come now, Socrates, you were boasting earlier that you and your fellow citizens are always open to persuasion.

SOCRATES
: Yes, I see.

HERMES
: Now, if I
am
only a figment of your imagination, then who has persuaded you?

SOCRATES
: Presumably I myself – unless this dream is coming neither from you nor from within myself, but from some other source . . .

HERMES
: But did you not say that you are open to persuasion
by anyone
? If dreams emanate from an unknown source, what difference should that make? If they are persuasive, are you not honour-bound as an Athenian to accept them?

SOCRATES
: It seems that I am. But what if a dream were to emanate from a malevolent source?

HERMES
: That makes no fundamental difference either. Suppose that the source purports to tell you a fact. Then, if you suspect that the source is malevolent, you will try to understand what evil it is trying to perpetrate by telling you the alleged fact. But then, depending on your explanation, you may well decide to believe it anyway –

SOCRATES
: I see. For instance, if an enemy announces that he is planning to kill me, I may well believe him despite his malevolence.

HERMES
: Yes. Or you may not. And if your closest friend purports to tell you a fact, you may likewise wonder whether
he
has been misled by a malevolent third party – or is simply mistaken for any of countless reasons. Thus situations can easily arise in which you disbelieve your closest friend and believe your worst enemy. What matters in all cases is the explanation you create, within your own mind, for the facts, and for the observations and advice in question.

But the case here is simpler. As I said, I reveal no facts. I’m only making arguments.

SOCRATES
: I see. I have no need to trust the source if the argument itself is persuasive. And no way of using
any
source unless I also have a persuasive argument.

Wait a moment – I’ve just realized something. You ‘reveal no facts’. But the god Apollo
does
reveal facts, hundreds of them every day, through the Oracle. Aha, I understand now. You are not Apollo, but a different god.

HERMES
: [
Is silent.
]

SOCRATES
: You’re evidently a god of knowledge . . . but several gods have an interest in knowledge. Athena herself does – but I can tell that you are not she.

HERMES
: No you can’t.

SOCRATES
: Yes I can. I don’t mean from your appearance. I mean I can infer it from the detached way you speak of Athens. So – I think you are Hermes. God of knowledge, and of messages, and of information flow –

HERMES
: A fine thought. But, by the way, what makes you think that Apollo
reveals facts
through the Oracle?

SOCRATES
: Oh!

HERMES
: We have agreed that by ‘reveal’ we mean telling the supplicant something that he doesn’t yet know . . .

SOCRATES
: Are
all
its replies just jokes and tricks?

HERMES
: [
Is silent.
]

SOCRATES
: As you wish, fleet Hermes. Then let me try to understand your argument about knowledge. I asked where knowledge comes from, and you directed my attention to this very dream. You asked whether it would make any difference to how I regard the knowledge I am learning from you if it turns out not to have been supernaturally inspired after all. And I had to agree that it would not. So am I to conclude that . . . all knowledge originates from the same source as dreams? Which is within ourselves?

HERMES
: Of course it does. Do you remember what Xenophanes wrote just after he said that objective knowledge is attainable by humans?

SOCRATES
: Yes. The passage continues:

So there he’s saying that, although objective knowledge is attainable, justified belief (‘certain truth’) is not.

HERMES
: Yes, we’ve covered all that. But your answer is in the next line.

SOCRATES
: ‘For all is but a woven web of guesses.’ Guesses!

HERMES
: Yes. Conjectures.

SOCRATES
: But wait! What about when knowledge
does not
come from guesswork – as when a god sends me a dream? What about when I simply hear ideas from other people?
They
may have guessed them, but I then obtain them merely by listening.

HERMES
: You do not. In all those cases, you still have to guess in order to acquire the knowledge.

SOCRATES
: I do?

HERMES
: Of course. Have you yourself not often been misunderstood, even by people trying hard to understand you?

SOCRATES
: Yes.

HERMES
: Have you, in turn, not often misunderstood what someone means, even when he is trying to tell you as clearly as he can?

SOCRATES
: Indeed I have. Not least during this conversation!

HERMES
: Well, this is not an attribute of philosophical ideas only, but of all ideas. Remember when you all got lost on your way here from the ship? And why?

SOCRATES
: It was because – as we realized with hindsight – we completely misunderstood the directions given to us by the captain.

HERMES
: So, when you got the wrong idea of what he meant, despite having listened attentively to every word he said,
where did that wrong idea come from
? Not from him, presumably . . .

SOCRATES
: I see. It must come from within ourselves. It must be a guess. Though, until this moment, it had never even remotely occurred to me that I had been guessing.

HERMES
: So why would you expect that anything different happens when you do understand someone correctly?

SOCRATES
: I see. When we hear something being said, we
guess
what it means, without realizing what we are doing. That is beginning to make sense to me.

Except – guesswork isn’t knowledge!

HERMES
: Indeed, most guesses are not new knowledge. Although guesswork is the
origin
of all knowledge, it is also a source of error, and therefore what happens to an idea
after
it has been guessed is crucial.

SOCRATES
: So – let me combine that insight with what I know of
criticism. A guess might come from a dream, or it might just be a wild speculation or random combination of ideas, or anything. But then we do not just accept it blindly or because we imagine it is ‘authorized’, or because we
want
it to be true. Instead we criticize it and try to discover its flaws.

HERMES
: Yes. That is what you
should
do, at any rate.

SOCRATES
: Then we try to remedy those flaws by altering the idea, or dropping it in favour of others – and the alterations and other ideas are themselves guesses. And are themselves criticized. Only when we fail in these attempts either to reject or to improve an idea do we provisionally accept it.

HERMES
: That can work. Unfortunately, people do not always do what can work.

SOCRATES
: Thank you, Hermes. It is exciting to learn of this single process through which all knowledge originates, whether it is our knowledge of a sea captain’s directions to Delphi, or knowledge of right and wrong that we have carefully refined for years, or theorems of arithmetic or geometry – or epistemology revealed to us by a god –

HERMES
: It all comes from within, from conjecture and criticism.

SOCRATES
: Wait! It comes from within,
even if revealed by a god
?

HERMES
: And is just as fallible as ever. Yes. Your argument covers that case just like any other.

SOCRATES
: Marvellous! But now – what about objects that we just
experience
in the natural world. We reach out and touch an object, and hence experience it
out there.
Surely that is a different kind of knowledge, a kind which – fallible or not – really does come from without, at least in the sense that our own experience is out there, at the location of the object.
*

HERMES
: You loved the idea that all those other different kinds of knowledge originate in the same way, and are improved in the same way. Why is ‘direct’ sensory experience an exception? What if it just
seems
radically different?

SOCRATES
: But surely you are now asking me to believe in a sort of all-encompassing conjuring trick, resembling the fanciful notion that the whole of life is really a dream. For it would mean that the sensation of touching an object does not happen where we experience it happening, namely in the hand that touches, but in the mind – which I believe is located somewhere in the brain. So all my sensations of touch are located inside my skull, where in reality nothing can touch while I still live. And whenever I think I am seeing a vast, brilliantly illuminated landscape, all that I am really experiencing is likewise located entirely inside my skull, where in reality it is constantly dark!

HERMES
: Is that so absurd? Where do you think all the sights and sounds of
this dream
are located?

SOCRATES
: I accept that
they
are indeed in my mind. But that is my point: most dreams portray things that are simply not there in the external reality. To portray things that
are
there is surely impossible without some input that does not come from the mind but from those things themselves.

HERMES
: Well reasoned, Socrates. But is that input needed in the
source
of your dream, or only in your ongoing criticism of it?

SOCRATES
: You mean that we first guess what is there, and then – what? – we test our guesses against the input from our senses?

HERMES
: Yes.

SOCRATES
: I see. And then we hone our guesses, and then fashion the best ones into a sort of waking dream of reality.
*

HERMES
: Yes. A waking dream that
corresponds
to reality. But there is more. It is a dream of which you then gain
control.
You do that by controlling the corresponding aspects of the external reality.

SOCRATES
: [
Gasps.
] It is a wonderfully unified theory, and consistent, as far as I can tell. But am I really to accept that I myself – the thinking being that I call ‘I’ – has no direct knowledge of the physical world at all, but can only receive arcane hints of it through flickers and shadows that happen to impinge on my eyes and other senses? And that what I
experience
as reality is never more than a
waking dream, composed of conjectures originating from within myself?

HERMES
: Do you have an alternative explanation?

SOCRATES
: No! And the more I contemplate this one, the more delighted I become. (A sensation of which I should beware! Yet I am also persuaded.) Everyone knows that man is the paragon of animals. But if this epistemology you tell me is true, then we are infinitely more marvellous creatures than that. Here we sit, for ever imprisoned in the dark, almost-sealed cave of our skull,
guessing
. We weave stories of an outside world –
worlds
, actually: a physical world, a moral world, a world of abstract geometrical shapes, and so on – but we are not satisfied with merely weaving, nor with mere stories. We want true explanations. So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of. And when we can change them no more, we have understood some
objective truth.
And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real. We are like gods!

HERMES
: Well,
sometimes
you discover
some
objective truth, and exert
some
control as a result. But often, when you think you have achieved any of that, you haven’t.

SOCRATES
: Yes, yes. But having discovered some truths, can we not make better guesses and further criticisms and tests, and so understand more and control more, as Xenophanes says?

HERMES
: Yes.

SOCRATES
: So we
are
like gods!

HERMES
: Somewhat. And yes, to answer your next question, you can indeed become ever more like gods in ever more ways,
if you choose to
. (Though you will always remain fallible.)

SOCRATES
: Why on earth would we not choose to? Oh, I see: Sparta and suchlike . . .

HERMES
: Yes. But also because some may argue that
fallible gods
are not a good thing –

SOCRATES
: All right. But,
if
we choose to, are you saying that there is no upper bound to how much we can eventually understand, and control, and achieve?

HERMES
: Funny you should ask that. Generations from now, a book will be written which will provide a compelling –

[
At that moment there is a knocking at the door.
SOCRATES
glances towards the sound, and then back to where
HERMES
had been, but the god has vanished.
]