Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In Defence of Interaction 1st Edition

You (mean Amazom) should set up reader's group about important book like this one. And give the kindle print edition as possible you can.
The paper edition buyer has right to as you do that. Every one will get no harm, but benefit.

Karl is one of the best philosophers. He is in print everywhere. Though he is dead now, his work is much loved. Wanted to
review some of his 60s work. very affordable. Bob 2014

Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics, best-known as a philosopher of science and of political philosophy. He wrote a number of books, such as The Logic of Scientific Discovery,The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato,The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath,Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography,In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years,The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality,The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, etc.

[NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 158-page paperback edition.]

His “Author’s Note” to this 1993 book states, “The following chapters are based on lectures that I delivered at Emory University in 1969 on the body-mind problem. In them, I suggest a theory of mind-body interaction that I relate to evolutionary emergence, human language, and what I have … called ‘world 3.’ … The original lectures were followed by discussion. I have tried to incorporate parts of this in my lectures where appropriate, and have taken the rest of it, where relevant, as appendixes to the lectures.”

He states in the first chapter, “I can describe myself as a Cartesian DUALIST. In fact I am doing a little better than Descartes: I am a PLURALIST, for I also accept the reality of a THIRD WORLD, which I will call ‘world 3.’ I will very briefly explain this at once since it is my policy to put before you, from the very beginning, not only my problems but also my tentative solutions to these problems---and the theory of the reality of world 3 is the most important ingredient within my tentative solutions. By ‘world 3’ I mean, roughly, the world of the PRODUCTS of our human minds. These products are sometimes physical things such as the sculptures, paintings, drawings, and buildings of Michelangelo. They ARE physical things, but they are a very peculiar kind of physical things: in my terminology they belong to both the worlds 1 and 3.” (Pg. 5)

He outlines, “I want to discuss the role of world 3---the role, that is, of objective problems, arguments, and theories. I want to discuss the importance of the fact that these problems, arguments, and theories can be DISCOVERED---they can be FOUND. And I want especially to discuss the fact that these… can be UNDERSTOOD by us and that this understanding or grasping is not like the understanding of another person and his intentions, but is, on the contrary, just this peculiar thing: the understanding of an objective problem, argument, or theory.” (Pg. 29)

He further explains: “the main idea that I intended to use in the discussion of the body-mind problem… is the idea of what I call ‘world 3,’ the world or products of the human mind, such as a motor car, a skyscraper, a book or, most important, a problem and the theory: World 3: products of the human mind (theories); World 2: mental (conscious) experiences; World 1: physical objects, including organisms. I cannot sufficiently stress that I regard the products of the human mind as real: not only those which are themselves also physical---such as a skyscraper and a motor car… but even a book or a theory. The theory itself, the abstract things itself, I regard as real because we can interact with it---we can PRODUCE a theory---and because the theory can interact with us. This is REALLY sufficient for regarding it as real.” (Pg. 47)

He states, “I greatly admire Darwin, and I regard the so-called ‘modern synthesis of Darwinism’ as a great step towards the truth. Yet at the same time I am well aware of the inherent difficulties and vagueness of Darwinism. It is far from being a satisfactory explanation of what happened, or of what will happen. But it gives some intuitive understanding, in spite of the many questions which it leaves open.” (Pg. 34) Later, he adds, “the predictions made by Einstein’s theory are very precise. You cannot make ANY predictions with the help of evolutionary theories so far.” (Pg. 69)

He says of Rudolf Carnap: “Carnap says that metaphysical problems are pseudo-problems, and that the statements of metaphysic are pseudo-statements… Now I agree with you that all of this is too simple, and perhaps also too absolute. But I deny all of it, because, first of all, I do not agree that the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification, and I do NOT agree that we can, or that we even should try to, eliminate metaphysics. But more important, I deny it because there are many problems that cannot be solved, even in science---and that certainly cannot be solved in the way in which the positivists thought, so that their solutions can be verified…” (Pg. 76)

He states, “my lecture today … [will] be on human nature… My first main thesis is that man is distinguished from animals through the peculiarity of human language, and that human language is distinguished from all animal languages in that it serves at least two functions that animal languages do not serve. I will call these functions the ‘descriptive’ or ‘informative’ function, and the ‘argumentative’ or ‘critical’ function… My thesis says, further, that these functions constitute human language as the first and basic region of the human world 3.” (Pg. 81) He adds: “I now come to my third main thesis… Although animals have produced their own world 3… no animal has produced anything like objective knowledge. All animal knowledge is dispositional… there is a gulf between this and human objective knowledge.” (Pg. 83)

He suggests “A similarly inconclusive argument against solipsism… When reading Shakespeare, or hearing any of the great composers, or seeing a work of Michelangelo, I am very conscious of the fact that those works go very, very far beyond anything I could ever produce. But according to the theory of solipsism, only I exist---so that in dreaming these works I am, in fact, their creator. This is utterly unacceptable to me. And so, I conclude, other minds must exist, and solipsism must be false.” (Pg. 107)

He summarizes: “I now come to the formulation of my theory of full consciousness and of the ego or the self. I have five main theses: 1. Full consciousness is anchored in world 3… It consists mainly of thought processes… 2. The self, or ego, is impossible without the intuitive understanding of certain world 3 theories… The theories in question are theories about space and time, about physical bodies in general, about people and their bodies, about our own particular bodies as extending in space and time… the self, or the ego, is the result… of placing ourselves into an objective structure. Such a view is possible only with the help of a descriptive language. 3. … My conjecture is that the interaction of the self with the brain is located in the speech centre… 4. The self, or full consciousness, is exercising a plastic control over some of our movements… Many expressive movements are not consciously controlled… 5. In the hierarchy of controls, the self is not the highest control centre… this control is, like all plastic controls, of the give-and-take, or feedback, type… I will now briefly look back upon the old body-mind problem… The answer is given by emergent evolution. The novel structures which emerge always interact with the basic structure of physical states, from which they emerge…” (Pg. 114-115)

Later, he concludes, “Thus we arrive at the result mentioned in my last lecture: the ego or self is closely linked with our higher functions of language. And this suggests that full consciousness interacts with the speech centre of the brain.” (Pg. 131)

He also states, “I am a rationalist. That is, I am trying to stress the importance of rationality for man. But like all thinking rationalists, I do not assert that man IS rational. On the contrary, it is obvious that even the most rational of men are in many respects highly irrational. Rationality is not a property of men, nor a fact about men. It is a TASK FOR MEN TO ACHIEVE…” (Pg. 134)

Popper’s book will be of great interest to anyone studying the philosophy of mind, or Poppeer’s philosophy in general.

Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics, best-known as a philosopher of science and of political philosophy. He wrote a number of books, such as The Logic of Scientific Discovery,The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato,The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath,Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography,In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years,The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality,The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, etc.

[NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 158-page paperback edition.]

His “Author’s Note” to this 1993 book states, “The following chapters are based on lectures that I delivered at Emory University in 1969 on the body-mind problem. In them, I suggest a theory of mind-body interaction that I relate to evolutionary emergence, human language, and what I have … called ‘world 3.’ … The original lectures were followed by discussion. I have tried to incorporate parts of this in my lectures where appropriate, and have taken the rest of it, where relevant, as appendixes to the lectures.”

He states in the first chapter, “I can describe myself as a Cartesian DUALIST. In fact I am doing a little better than Descartes: I am a PLURALIST, for I also accept the reality of a THIRD WORLD, which I will call ‘world 3.’ I will very briefly explain this at once since it is my policy to put before you, from the very beginning, not only my problems but also my tentative solutions to these problems---and the theory of the reality of world 3 is the most important ingredient within my tentative solutions. By ‘world 3’ I mean, roughly, the world of the PRODUCTS of our human minds. These products are sometimes physical things such as the sculptures, paintings, drawings, and buildings of Michelangelo. They ARE physical things, but they are a very peculiar kind of physical things: in my terminology they belong to both the worlds 1 and 3.” (Pg. 5)

He outlines, “I want to discuss the role of world 3---the role, that is, of objective problems, arguments, and theories. I want to discuss the importance of the fact that these problems, arguments, and theories can be DISCOVERED---they can be FOUND. And I want especially to discuss the fact that these… can be UNDERSTOOD by us and that this understanding or grasping is not like the understanding of another person and his intentions, but is, on the contrary, just this peculiar thing: the understanding of an objective problem, argument, or theory.” (Pg. 29)

He further explains: “the main idea that I intended to use in the discussion of the body-mind problem… is the idea of what I call ‘world 3,’ the world or products of the human mind, such as a motor car, a skyscraper, a book or, most important, a problem and the theory: World 3: products of the human mind (theories); World 2: mental (conscious) experiences; World 1: physical objects, including organisms. I cannot sufficiently stress that I regard the products of the human mind as real: not only those which are themselves also physical---such as a skyscraper and a motor car… but even a book or a theory. The theory itself, the abstract things itself, I regard as real because we can interact with it---we can PRODUCE a theory---and because the theory can interact with us. This is REALLY sufficient for regarding it as real.” (Pg. 47)

He states, “I greatly admire Darwin, and I regard the so-called ‘modern synthesis of Darwinism’ as a great step towards the truth. Yet at the same time I am well aware of the inherent difficulties and vagueness of Darwinism. It is far from being a satisfactory explanation of what happened, or of what will happen. But it gives some intuitive understanding, in spite of the many questions which it leaves open.” (Pg. 34) Later, he adds, “the predictions made by Einstein’s theory are very precise. You cannot make ANY predictions with the help of evolutionary theories so far.” (Pg. 69)

He says of Rudolf Carnap: “Carnap says that metaphysical problems are pseudo-problems, and that the statements of metaphysic are pseudo-statements… Now I agree with you that all of this is too simple, and perhaps also too absolute. But I deny all of it, because, first of all, I do not agree that the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification, and I do NOT agree that we can, or that we even should try to, eliminate metaphysics. But more important, I deny it because there are many problems that cannot be solved, even in science---and that certainly cannot be solved in the way in which the positivists thought, so that their solutions can be verified…” (Pg. 76)

He states, “my lecture today … [will] be on human nature… My first main thesis is that man is distinguished from animals through the peculiarity of human language, and that human language is distinguished from all animal languages in that it serves at least two functions that animal languages do not serve. I will call these functions the ‘descriptive’ or ‘informative’ function, and the ‘argumentative’ or ‘critical’ function… My thesis says, further, that these functions constitute human language as the first and basic region of the human world 3.” (Pg. 81) He adds: “I now come to my third main thesis… Although animals have produced their own world 3… no animal has produced anything like objective knowledge. All animal knowledge is dispositional… there is a gulf between this and human objective knowledge.” (Pg. 83)

He suggests “A similarly inconclusive argument against solipsism… When reading Shakespeare, or hearing any of the great composers, or seeing a work of Michelangelo, I am very conscious of the fact that those works go very, very far beyond anything I could ever produce. But according to the theory of solipsism, only I exist---so that in dreaming these works I am, in fact, their creator. This is utterly unacceptable to me. And so, I conclude, other minds must exist, and solipsism must be false.” (Pg. 107)

He summarizes: “I now come to the formulation of my theory of full consciousness and of the ego or the self. I have five main theses: 1. Full consciousness is anchored in world 3… It consists mainly of thought processes… 2. The self, or ego, is impossible without the intuitive understanding of certain world 3 theories… The theories in question are theories about space and time, about physical bodies in general, about people and their bodies, about our own particular bodies as extending in space and time… the self, or the ego, is the result… of placing ourselves into an objective structure. Such a view is possible only with the help of a descriptive language. 3. … My conjecture is that the interaction of the self with the brain is located in the speech centre… 4. The self, or full consciousness, is exercising a plastic control over some of our movements… Many expressive movements are not consciously controlled… 5. In the hierarchy of controls, the self is not the highest control centre… this control is, like all plastic controls, of the give-and-take, or feedback, type… I will now briefly look back upon the old body-mind problem… The answer is given by emergent evolution. The novel structures which emerge always interact with the basic structure of physical states, from which they emerge…” (Pg. 114-115)

Later, he concludes, “Thus we arrive at the result mentioned in my last lecture: the ego or self is closely linked with our higher functions of language. And this suggests that full consciousness interacts with the speech centre of the brain.” (Pg. 131)

He also states, “I am a rationalist. That is, I am trying to stress the importance of rationality for man. But like all thinking rationalists, I do not assert that man IS rational. On the contrary, it is obvious that even the most rational of men are in many respects highly irrational. Rationality is not a property of men, nor a fact about men. It is a TASK FOR MEN TO ACHIEVE…” (Pg. 134)

Popper’s book will be of great interest to anyone studying the philosophy of mind, or Poppeer’s philosophy in general.