Popper’s World 3
The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism, a long exchange between philosopher Karl Popper and neuroscientist John Eccles, is among the most significant 20th century defenses of mind-body dualism. I do not agree with every aspect of their approach, but the book is filled with interesting things and deserves more attention than it has received in contemporary philosophy of mind.
Popper famously distinguished between three “worlds” or levels of reality. (Though whether “levels” of reality is the right gloss on Popper’s theory is not clear. “Kinds”? “Aspects”?) World 1 is the world of physical entities and states – tables, chairs, rocks, trees, fundamental particles and forces, human bodies and behavior, and so forth. World 2 is the world of thoughts, sensations, and mental phenomena in general. World 3 is the world of scientific and philosophical theories, arguments, stories, social institutions, works of art and the like. World 3 differs from World 1 in that the entities comprising it are abstract; for example, though a theory or argument might be embodied in a particular book (a World 1 object) it does not depend for its reality on the existence of that book, or on any book or World 1 object at all. We could still consider the Pythagorean theorem, know it to be true, prove it, etc. even if every geometry textbook that had ever existed were destroyed. World 3 differs from World 2 in being objective or public, whereas World 2 is subjective or private. Your thoughts and experiences are directly knowable only to you, but World 3 objects are equally accessible to everyone.
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