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To put it more fully, any analysis into standard elements of the World 1 process which we may produce will fail to correspond to an analysis of the unique World 2 process because World 2 cannot be fully analysed into standard elements (such as ideas, representations, feelings, or anything else). Incidentally, it may be suggested that in the hope of producing such an analysis lies perhaps the deepest motive of those who speak of a “stream of consciousness” or a “stream of ideas”. The impossibility of such a complete analysis becomes particularly obvious in the light of the role played in World 2 by unconscious processes which interrupt and intercept the sequence of conscious World 2 processes.
A materialist might try to explain all this as the result of natural selection. However, I think that natural selection is not enough, and that we also have Michelangelo exercising critical selection (with respect to certain World 3 principles). Moreover, even the theory of natural selection presents a problem for the materialist. One of my main points about the body-mind problem is this. Even though World 2 may have emerged from World 1, it must have become to a considerable extent independent of World 1, for in a critical discussion it must orientate itself on World 3 standards — say, on logic — rather than on World 1. If it were only an epiphenomenon of World 1, then our beliefs would all be illusions and on equal terms with other illusions; and this would hold for all “isms”, including epiphenomenalism and the theory of natural selection. It thus turns out that materialism reinforced by the theory of natural selection is a metaphysical theory which cannot be refuted; but it also cannot be rationally upheld because, from its own point of view, all such metaphysical views are epiphenomenal illusions and thus equivalent. Unless we assume that (say by natural selection) there has emerged an autonomous World 3 of autonomous standards of critical discussion, all theories are equally epiphenomenal illusions (including, of course, the theory of natural selection). See my section 21.
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© 1977 Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles
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Popper, K.R., Eccles, J.C. (1977). Dialogue X. In: The Self and Its Brain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61891-8_24
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