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World of Propensities

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In these two late lectures Karl Popper explains briefly his vision on some problems which haunted him all life long, like truth, knowledge, freedom and evolution.

He defends rightly Tarski's proposition that objective truth is correspondence of a statement with the facts and that absolute truth can be described as follows: if an unambiguously formulated statement is true in one language, then any correct translation of it into any other language is also true.

For Popper, it is a colossal mistake to believe that all our knowledge stems from our senses, because before our senses can tell us anything, we must have prior knowledge. In order to be able to see a thing, we must know what things are. This prior knowledge is the result of evolution by Darwinian trial and error. In this sense, all our knowledge is hypothetical, the result of error elimination.

Determinism is totally mistaken. Indeterminism and free will have become part of the physical and biological sciences, because our very understanding of the world changes the conditions of the changing world, and so do our wishes, preferences, motivations, hopes, dreams, fantasies, hypotheses, theories. The world is no longer a causal machine, but a world of propensities, an unfolding process of realizing possibilities.

Being long time a staunch anti-Darwinist (evolution could in his eyes not be tested), he finally accepted Darwin's vision. He sees evolution working along lines of inherent tendencies to produce certain statistical averages (weighted probabilities), which are the real physical realities, as real as forces or fields of forces.

All his life he remained an optimist and saw music, art and science as the greatest and most enlightening achievements of the human spirit.

These lectures by the greatest philosopher of the 20th century are a must read, not only for Popper fans.

The book "All Life Is Problem Solving" also contains the essay, "Towards an evolutionary theory of knowledge" written in 1989.

Karl Popper (1902-1994) elegantly proposes that knowledge is linked to expectations. These expectations express theories of reality. Reality in itself is unknowable.We as with all living things have propensities to guess reality based on largely unconscious hypotheses which both logically and psychologically precede observation. Open any dictionary on the word "knowledge", you will find all sorts of circularity and assumptions that knowledge is primarily empirically derived. Popper's association of knowledge with expectation, or guessing, is a breakthrough in clarity. Animals and plants carry what can be defined as unconscious guesses or theories, namely their genes and other molecular and physiological codes.
Let us give Popper the last phrase: "I shall now try to give you a list of interesting conclusions that we can draw, and partly have drawn (although so far unconsciously) from our trivial proposition that animals can know something............"