Technology and Knowledge

Abstract

Introduction Man is a restless animal. Apart from the appetites common to other animals — food, sex and a snooze — man conceives of innumerable things to do with his time which never occur to other species. If you ask 'Why?', you are embarking on philosophical enquiry. Activity and change require the expenditure of energy, an expenditure known as work when undertaken with reluctance, but as fun when embraced with enthusiasm. Inactivity, lack of change or snoozing need no work, but do not create fun. People like fun and put forth energy hoping to enjoy life. On many occasions they find only work, but with eternal hope, they will try again. These two sentences exemplify the product of philosophy: an explanation, a theory, an answer to the question 'Why?'. A different question you could ask is 'What is energy?'. I doubt that anyone can answer this. Answering 'What . . . ? ' questions will take the steam out of most people, even philosophers, because you never need stop. What . . . ? ' questions are answered by substitution of another word or phrase, which can always be countered by another 'What. . .? ' . When human animals are less than five years old, they drive their parents to desperation by asking penetrating chains of 'What's?'. Parents retaliate by switching their ears, or some other handy part in which exquisite pain may be induced. By age 5 the tendency to question is inhibited, a phenomenon which saves teachers enormous wear and tear. During centuries past philosophers have struggled to stem the endless regression of questions, by postulating concepts such as 'the First Cause', or 'Prime Mover', beyond which all questions are forbidden. A first cause would produce one pole of a satisfying symmetry. President Harry Truman of the USA provided the other with his justly famous phrase 'The Buck stops here'; the First Cause would answer the question 'But where did the Buck start?'. The unsatisfactory results of logical searches for a First Cause caused the concept to be abandoned in favour of things being uncaused, and to attempts to abandon causality completely, as discussed at length by Bunge. But the intellectual challenge of the First Cause persists, and its well-being has passed to the care of cosmology, where it is known as 'The Big Bang'.