Abstract
Two things, says Kant near the end of his Critique of Practical Reason, 1 fill his mind with always new and increasing admiration and respect: the starry heavens above him, and the moral law within him. The first of these two things symbolizes for him the problem of our knowledge about the physical universe,2 and the problem of our place in this universe. The second pertains to the invisible self, to the human personality (and to human freedom, as he explains). The first annihilates the importance of a man, considered as a part of the physical universe. The second raises immeasurably his value as an intelligent and responsible being.
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Notes
Immanuel Kant [1788], Beschluβ (pp. 281-285).
For Kant, this knowledge was summed up by astronomical theory: by Newtonian mechanics, including the theory of gravitation.
La Mettrie did not deny the existence of conscious experience. He also reacted strongly to Descartes’s doctrine that animals (though not men) are mere automata. (See section 56, below.)
See my [1963(a)] p. 106 (text to note 20 to chapter 3), and section 48, below.
See my [1963(a)] p. 107 (note 21 to chapter 3).
More about the role of Newton’s theory in the decline of essentialism may be found in section 51, below.
There is, of course, the fact that contemporary physics operates with the conjecture that the amount of energy in a closed system is conserved. But this does not mean that we need, in physics, something like a substance: the theory of Bohr, Kramers and Slater [1924] assumed that only in the statistical average was energy conserved. Bohr made a similar suggestion years later, before Pauli’s conjecture of the existence of the neutrino; and Schrödinger [1952] also suggested a similar theory. This shows that physicists were quite ready to discard the one and only property of energy in which it resembles a substance, and that there is no a priori necessity behind this idea.
See Blackmore [1972], pp. 319-24.
John Archibald Wheeler [1973], p. 235. As Wheeler points out (p. 229), this important idea can be traced back to William Kingdon Clifford [1873], [1879], [1882].
Even though I am doing here something like raising a “what is” question, I am not doing “meaning analysis”. Behind my discussion of the word “real” there is a theory: the theory that matter exists, and that this fact is crucially important, but that some other things which interact with matter, such as minds, exist also; see below. (See also Plato, Sophist, 247 d-e, 248c.)
An important contribution to the history of the idea of organic evolution may be found in Sir Alister Hardy’s great book, The Living Stream [1965].
While I personally believe that animals and men make genuine choices, a materialist might, of course, choose to interpret such choices and preferences as being ultimately no more than the outcome of randomness and of selective filters. It is, however, not my concern here to argue this issue.
Charles Darwin [1859], chapter VI, “On the Origin and Transitions of Organic Beings with Peculiar Habits and Structure”. The passage quoted in the text is the version to be found in the fifth and subsequent editions. See Morse Peckham (ed.) [1959], chapter VI, sentences 92 and 93 (p. 332 of this variorum edition).
See Kenneth G. Denbigh [1975]. G. H. Lewes’ [1874-79] term is “emerging”.
“Explanation in principle” is critically discussed by F. A. von Hayek [1955]; see his [1967], pp. 11ff. “Reduction in principle” is a special case of it. The comparatively most successful reduction of which I know is that of the Young-Fresnel optics to Maxwellian theory. Yet (1) this theory was developed later than the Young-Fresnel theory of optics, and (2) neither the “reduced” theory nor the reducing theory were complete: the theories of emission and absorption — quantum mechanics and quantum-electrodynamics — were (and partly are) still missing. Another important example of an incomplete reduction is statistical mechanics. For a fuller discussion of reduction, see my paper [1974(z2 )].
It is a “heap” like a “heap of sand” or a “heap of stones”; see note 2 to section 8.
See Erwin Schrödinger ([1957], chapter VI, p. 133). These remarks of Schrödinger’s come from a lecture delivered in 1922. Schrödinger says there (pp. 142f.) that Exner discussed these ideas — perhaps in a lecture?-in 1919. In chapter III of the same book (p. 71), Schrödinger gives 1918 as the date of Exner’s lecture, and in Schrödinger’s address [1929] he says that Exner discussed the matter in his lectures published in 1919. (On Peirce, see my [1972 (a)], chapter 6, pp. 212-13.)
Even a heap of stones has a Gestalt in Köhler’s sense (although I do not think that Köhler was aware of this fact); see my [1944(b)], p. 129, [1957(g)], p. 83.I there distinguished a whole in the sense of a Gestalt from a whole in the sense of a totality, and I denied that we can know any object in the sense of knowing the totality of its properties. See also dialogue X.
It is interesting that Köhler ([1961], p. 32) is led close to panpsychism; but he rightly comes to the conclusion that panpsychism is not fully compatible with his materialist position: “… if [panpsychism] were true it would … show that the [physical] scientists have not given us an adequate description of nature” (that is, of the nature of atoms).
This is perhaps the strongest argument in favour of what I have called “the propensity interpretation of probability in physics”. See my [1957(e)], [1959(a)], and [1967(k)]; also my reply to Suppes in [1974(c)]. The propensity is the weighted disposition (Verwirklichungsten-denz) of a thing in a certain situation to assume a certain property or state. As the example of radioactive nuclei shows, propensities may be irreversible: they may determine a direction of time (the “arrow of time”). Some propensities, however, may also be reversible: the Schrödinger equation (and thus quantum mechanics) is reversible with respect to time, and the propensity of an atom in a certain state s1 to make a transition to state s2 by absorbing a photon will in general be equal to the propensity to make the reverse transition by emitting a photon.
See for example my [1967(k)]; see also note 1 above and text.
See my [1957(e)] where this example is briefly mentioned on p. 89.
Another emergent property seems to be the propensity of certain molecules to form crystals capable of reflecting light of a certain wavelength: the emergence of coloured surfaces. The optical properties of a complex crystal — of a spatially extended complex periodic or aperiodic arrangement of molecules — and thus the properties of spectral analysers, may also be not fully predictable from the properties of single atoms and photons, although those of simple and highly symmetrical arrangements are predictable, and although much about the structure of highly complex molecules can be deduced from their X-ray spectrograms.
See Jacques Monod, [1970], p. 160; [1971], p. 144; [1972], p. 136.
There is also a queer egocentric version of behaviourism which allows consiousness only to the ego: only to oneself, but not to anybody else: a psychistic form of solipsism. See chapter 9 of Sidney Hook [1960], [1961].
Monod [1970], p. 162; [1971], p. 146; [1972], p. 137.
A suggestion similar to this may be found in R. A. Fisher [1954], pp. 91-2.
Wolfgang Köhler [I960]; see [1961], pp. 23 f. It is interesting that the whole discussion seems to go back to the early ninteenth century discussion of catastrophism in geology which, no doubt, Thomas Huxley had in mind when he said things very similar to these remarks of Kohler’s. See his [1893], p. 103, where he writes: “The doctrine of evolution … postulates the fixity of the rules of operation of the causes of motion in the material universe … the orderly evolution of physical nature out of one substratum and one energy implies that the rules of action of that energy should be fixed and definite.” More recently the constancy of natural laws has been challenged by some dialectical materialists such as David Bohm [1957].
An interesting objection to this argument has been raised by Jeremy Shearmur: even if we admit propensities, we do not escape the idea of preformation … we just have several prefor-mationist possibilities instead of one. My reply is that we may have an infinity of open possibilities, and this means giving up preformationism; and this infinity of possible propensities may still rule out infinitely many logical possibilities. Propensities may rule out possibilities: in this consists their lawlike character. I suggested something like this many years ago, in an attempt to explain the world view of the propensity interpretation of probability in my still unpublished Postscript. The infinity of the inherent possibilities or propensities is important, since a probabilistic doctrine of preformation does not otherwise differ sufficiently from a deterministic doctrine of preformation.
For Plato’s indeterminism see the passage from the Phaedo, quoted below in section 46.
DK = Diels & Kranz [1951-2].
Compare Cyril Bailey [1928], pp. 140f. Also DK, A69. Bailey (pp. 142f.) argues, perhaps correctly, that “chance” meant for Democritus those objective mechanical causes which, subjectively, are “unaccessible to man”. (Objective randomness was introduced into atomism much later, by Epicurus’s theory of “swerve”.)
See H. Diels (ed.) Doxographi Graeci [1929].
The issue is whether the (probabilistic) second law of thermodynamics is completely reducible to the interaction of individual atoms or molecules. My answer is: probabilistic conclusions require probabilistic and thus non-individualistic premises for their derivation.
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© 1977 Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles
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Popper, K.R., Eccles, J.C. (1977). Materialism Transcends Itself. In: The Self and Its Brain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61891-8_1
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