Karl Popper’s Ideas on Knowledge and Adaptation

Note

notes from Anaximander (25.06.2024)

Nature of Knowledge

  1. Knowledge often has the character of expectations.

  2. Expectations are usually hypothetical or conjectural.

  3. Most knowledge, for both humans and animals, is hypothetical.

  4. Knowledge can be objectively true despite being uncertain.

  5. Truth and certainty are distinct concepts.

Characteristics of Knowledge

  1. Much of our knowledge is true, but little is certain.

  2. Truth is objective and corresponds to facts.

  3. Certainty is subjective and can lead to dogmatism.

  4. All organisms possess knowledge, including animals and plants.

Evolution of Knowledge

  1. Knowledge is adaptive and evolved over generations.

  2. Sense organs evolved alongside knowledge of environmental conditions.

  3. Prior knowledge is necessary for sensory perception.

  4. Short-term adaptations are built on long-term adaptations.

  5. Knowledge precedes and is built into sensory organs.

Relationship between Knowledge and Life

  1. Prior knowledge is required for observation and perception.

  2. Long-term knowledge cannot be derived solely from short-term knowledge.

  3. All adaptations to environmental and internal regularities are forms of knowledge.

  4. Life requires adaptation to the environment.

  5. The evolution of knowledge coincides with the evolution of life and our planet.

Origin of life

It was the factual invention of using sunlight as food which, incidentally, led to self-invention of the kongdom of plants that produced the greatest of all life-inducing revolutions in the history of our environment. It introduced oxygen into the atomosphere. We are not things but flames. Or a little more prosaically, we are, like, all cells, process of metabolism, nets of chemical processes, of highly active energy-coupled chemical pathways. The invention of feeding on sunlight and the invention of light sensitivity of the achaic eye, the explanation is that both inventions are chemically very closely related. One of the pathways producing the machinery for feeding on sunlight and the pathways for producing visual apparatus are strucrally connected.

Key Takeaways

  • Knowledge is hypothetical and adaptive.

  • Truth and certainty are separate concepts. You can have truth, but no certain truth.

  • Prior knowledge is crucial for perception and learning.

  • Knowledge evolves alongside life and adapts to the environment.

  • the pathways producing the machinery for feeding on sunlight and the pathways for producing visual apparatus are strucrally connected