All Life Is Problem Solving: Does Every Solution Open a New Problem?

our obsession with solutions

The natural as well as the social sciences always start from problems, from the fact that something inspires amazement in us, as the Greek philosophers used to say. To solve these problems, the sciences use fundamentally the same method that common sense employs, the method of trial and error. To be more precise, it is the method of trying out solutions to our problem and then discarding the false ones as erroneous. This method assumes that we work with a large number of experimental solutions. One solution after another is put to the test and eliminated. At bottom, this procedure seems to be the only logical one. It is also the procedure that a lower organism, even a single-cell amoeba, uses when trying to solve a problem. In this case we speak of testing movements through which the organism tries to rid itself of a troublesome problem.

Higher organisms are able to learn through trial and error how a certain problem should be solved. We may say that they too make testing movements — mental testings — and that to learn is essentially to try out one testing movement after another until one is found that solves the problem. We might compare the animal’s successful solution to an expectation and hence to a hypothesis or a theory. For the animal’s behaviour shows us that it expects (perhaps unconsciously or dispositionally) that in a similar case the same testing movements will again solve the problem in question. The behaviour of animals, and of plants too, shows that organisms are geared to laws or regularities. They expect laws or regularities in their surroundings, and I conjecture that most of these expectations are genetically determined — which is to say that they are innate. A problem arises for the animal if an expectation proves to have been wrong. This then leads to testing movements, to attempts to replace the wrong expectation with a new one. If a higher organism is too often disappointed in its expectations, it caves in. It cannot solve the problem; it perishes.

I would like to present what I have said so far about learning through trial and error in a three-stage model.

The model has the following three stages:

1. the problem;

2. the attempted solutions;

3. the elimination.

So, the first stage in our model is the problem. The problem arises when some kind of disturbance takes place — a disturbance either of innate expectations or of expectations that have been discovered or learnt through trial and error. The second stage in our model consists of attempted solutions — that is, attempts to solve the problem. The third stage in our model is the elimination of unsuccessful solutions. Pluralism is essential to this three-stage model.

The first stage, the problem itself, may appear in the singular; but not the second stage, which I have called ‘attempted solutions’ in the plural. Already in the case of animals we speak of testing movements, in the plural. There would be little sense in calling one particular movement a testing movement.

Stage 2, the attempted solutions, are thus testing movements and therefore in the plural; they are subject to the process of elimination in the third stage of our model.

Stage 3, the elimination, is negative. The elimination is fundamentally the elimination of mistakes. If an unsuccessful or misguided solution is eliminated, the problem remains unsolved and gives rise to new attempted solutions. But what happens if an attempted solution is eventually successful? Two things happen. First, the successful solution is learnt. Among animals this usually means that, when a similar problem appears again, the earlier testing movements, including unsuccessful ones, are briefly and sketchily repeated in their original order; they are run through until the successful solution is reached.

….

‘Now I can even rejoice in the falsification of a hypothesis I have cherished as my brain-child, for such falsification is a scientific success.’

This last point is extremely important. We are always learning a whole host of things through falsification. We learn not only that a theory is wrong; we learn why it is wrong. Above all else, we gain a new and more sharply focused problem; and a new problem, as we already know, is the real starting point for a new development in science.

You will perhaps have been surprised that I have so often mentioned my three-stage model. I have done this partly to prepare you for a very similar four-stage model, which is typical of science and the dynamics of scientific development. The four-stage model may be derived from our three-stage model (problem, attempted solutions, elimination), because what we do is call the first stage ‘the old problem’ and the fourth stage ‘the new problems’. If we further replace ‘attempted solutions’ with ‘tentative theories’, and ‘elimination’ with ‘attempted elimination through critical discussion’, we arrive at the four-stage model characteristic of scientific theory.

So it looks like this:

1. the old problem;

2. formation of tentative theories;

3. attempts at elimination through critical discussion, including experimental testing;

4. the new problems that arise from the critical discussion of our theories.

…

Error correction is the most important method in technology and learning in general. In biological evolution, it appears to be the only means of progress. One rightly speaks of the trial-and-error method, but this understates the importance of mistakes or errors — of the erroneous trial.

Biological evolution is full of mistakes, and their correction takes place slowly. So we may excuse our many mistakes by recalling that they only imitate sweet verdant Nature — and that we usually correct them rather faster than verdant Nature does. For some of us consciously try to learn from our mistakes. All scientists, technologists, and technicians do this, for example, or at least they ought to do it. For that is precisely what their profession requires.

Life, beginning with unicellular organisms, invents the most astonishing things. New inventions or mutations are usually eliminated, being much more often bad mistakes than successful trials. We may recognize many of our ideas as mistaken before we seriously criticize them, and others may be eliminated through criticism before they reach the production process. In conscious self-criticism and in friendly or hostile criticism made by colleagues or others, we perhaps appear rather superior to Nature. In the trial-and-error method, in the method of selection through critical experiments, Nature has up to now been far superior. Many of its inventions — for example, the conversion of solar energy into an easily storable form of chemical energy — we have so far tried vainly to imitate. But we shall succeed in the foreseeable future.

All life is problem solving.

All organisms are inventors and technicians, good or not so good, successful or not so successful, in solving technical problems. This is how it is among animals — spiders, for example. Human technology solves human problems such as sewage disposal, or the storage and supply of food and water, as, for example, bees already have to do. Hostility to technology, such as we often find among the Greens, is therefore a foolish kind of hostility to life itself– which the Greens have unfortunately not realized. But the critique of technology is not foolish, of course; it is urgently necessary. Everyone is capable of it in their different ways, and most welcome to contribute. And since criticism is an occupational skill of technologists, the critique of technology is a constant preoccupation of theirs. Nevertheless, it is often outsiders who see a problem first. This may be because an inventor is rightly keen to have his invention applied, and may therefore overlook its possibly undesirable consequences.

[Excerpt from Popper, K. (1999). All life is problem solving.]