[ExI] The difference between Discovery and Design (was Re: Rejecting Socrates)

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:

> If Einstein had never been born, would we have General Relativity now?  Of course we would.
> It would be associated with someone else's name, that's all.

Agreed. What Einstein did was discover a basic scientific law.

>Ditto the Dyson vacuum cleaner, the Fairlight synthesiser and the lightbulb.

I also agree that if Einstein had never been born we would still have
the Dyson vacuum cleaner, the Fairlight synthesiser and the lightbulb.
:-)

However, if James Dyson had not been born, we would obviously have
other very good vacuum cleaners, but probably not exactly the vacuum
cleaner that now bears his name. Perhaps, we would not even have one
that leveraged the same physics.

The difference between design and discovery is immense. The space of
possible designs is virtually infinite, whereas discovery of natural
laws is bound by what nature actually does. One is very highly
constrained, and the other is very unconstrained.

Would we have some method of using electricity to produce light? You
bet! But design indicates that you can solve problems in an
innumerable number of specific ways. It is unlikely that without the
inventors we actually had, that we would have screw in incandescent
bulbs of exactly the nature we have today. The plug would have been
different, the filament might have been made of a different material,
the frosting on the glass might have been different... It probably
would still be incandescent, but it could have been different in so
many meaningful ways, because design is constrained only by the
imagination of the designer.

The space of possible computer programs, as another example, is so
immense that I no longer even worry about people trying to steal my
ideas. The space is so infinitely large, that it is highly unlikely
anyone else will even care about my idea until it is proven to be
commercially viable, by me. Then I have first mover advantages.

So, to say that we would know the laws of gravity without Newton,
that's pretty easy to say. To say that cars would have the accelerator
to the right, and the break to the left, foot operated, and a steering
wheel, hand operated, well, that's a lot harder to say for certain.

-Kelly