Cyril Höschl Lecture, Knighthood of the Truth, Prague 1994 ****************************************************************************************** * ****************************************************************************************** Your Excellencies, Eminences, Spectabiles, Honorabiles, Cives Academici, Ladies and Gentle Every one of us at times thinks back to the books of his childhood. It is possible that th together a certain spiritual, intellectual and emotional affiliation of those who share th them are archetypal elements which act as cultural clasps creating bridges across eras, ra cultures. I can recall one such book which I read when I was about eight years old. It was Journey of Nils Holgersson through Sweden by Selma Lagerlof. Nils, turned into a small spr goes on an unusual pilgrimage beyond the frontiers of the human world, with a flock of wil journey there and back again transforms him from a pampered child into a young man who und breadth of this world. It is still the same theme that concerns us here: the motif of crea drama of pestilence and salvation. Theme cum variationibus; a theme which recurs all over It can be heard in the polyphony of Bach, in the titanic character of Beethoven and the su Mahler; it surfaces in the dramas of Shakespeare just as in Tolkien's wonderful trilogy: i Michaelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and its echo penetrates into the heart of e of us. Years went by and philosophy in Prague experienced a boom with the freedom of window-washe watchmen, boiler-room stokers and handicapped pensioners. Those of us who were indoctrinat sciences topped up by positivism corrected this by reading forbidden history and by variou at initiation into the "cabala" of spiritual communities which were grouped around transdi seminars with Prof. Katetov at the Mathematics and Physics Faculty at Charles University, on the Rasinovo (then Engels) Embankment and finally at Novotneho Lavka. One such transdis frequently saw Zdenek Neubauer, Ivan M. Havel, Jiri Fiala, Petr Vopenka, Jan and Martin Pa Bendova, Zdenek Pinc and a number of others. The dominant theme was the relationship betwe the body. It was there on the Rasinovo Embankment that once, together with a colleague named Jan Lib about interactionism. The main subject of our discussion was a book by the famous epistemo Popper and the Nobel Prize winning neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles "The Self and Its Bra Interactionism is a theory of psycho-physical interaction. Popper opens his argument with of materialism, which he links to an explanation of his conception of three worlds. He rec materialism inspired science and that many great materialists from Democritus and Lucretiu Feigl and Anthony Quinton were also humanists, and freedom fighters. Popper divides materi into the theory of continuity (Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrodinger) which led to field atomistic theory (Democritus, Epicurus, quantum mechanics). Both these programs arose from matter as something that takes up space is primordial, basic; it does not need further exp such is the foundation of all concepts by which anything else is explained. Physics contai explanatory properties of matter, such as the filling of space ("impenetrability"), elasti and state. For Popper, it is physics itself that offers the most important arguments again materialism in the way that it transcended itself. So for example the Greek materialists j fills space and one thing can push into another, which they regarded as the causal interac the entire world. The world is a clockwork, everything was pushed somewhere somehow, like system of cogwheels. The first move beyond this view came with Newton's gravitation, which not a push, and was the interaction of bodies of matter on one another without mutually to gravitational force, the property of attraction, was declared by Newton's successors to be of matter which neither can (nor needs) further explanation. Another event in the history of the self- transcendence of materialism was Thomson's disco electron. What is it? What about the divisibility of matter? Moreover, as soon as it was s repulsivity and thus impenetrability of pieces of matter is given by electronic repulsivit charged particles, the idea of touching, meeting, being put there collapsed as the basic p what is more, even stable particles like electrons can be pairwise annihilated, with the p photons (light quanta); and they can be created, out of a photon (a gamma ray). But light because matter cannot have its speed. Despite this, light can turn a mill in a vacuum. So that light and matter are both forms of energy. We had to give up the law of the conservat Matter can both be destroyed and created (e.g., annihilation when meeting antimatter in th of light). Matter is thus only highly concentrated energy convertible into other forms. It like a process interchangeable with other processes, perhaps heat, light, motion. Matter t not a proto- material, substance, essence. As Whitehead said, the universe is not a museum but a collection of events and processes. The structure of matter is atomic, but the struc or of their particles cannot be classified in this way. It is almost "material". Physicist materialism. They still work with particles, but they no longer say that they are little p pieces of "matter". Man is no longer a mechanical machine, but an electrochemical one. Tha important. Popper attempts to show that the evolution of materialism is in fact moving towards ideali an idealism of a new kind. The relationship of ideas to the "materialistic" world still re explained. Thus Popper also devotes himself to the problem of what is real. He explains th are real partial things of common size, things that a child can take and put into its mout conception widens to larger objects which we cannot seize (mountains) and smaller ones (du How does this expansion occur? It takes place in such a way that entities which we recogni be able to exert influence (causal influence) on "a prima facie" real things (of normal si consider changes in the normal world as effects of supposedly real entities. For example, is seen as an effect and therefore as proof of the existence of molecules. We accept thing can causally work or at least interact with the normal material things of our world. Field thus real. According to Popper, materialists solve problems by simply calling everything t with their world a form of matter, end of story. What isn't in the form of matter cannot i real world. This statement is very important for understanding Popper's critique of parall of materialism. Psychophysical parallelism is an unusual form of dualism of the modern era. T. Fechner (18 considered to be its founder and other representatives include W. Wundt, Th. Ziehen, H. Eb our own philosopher and psychologist Frantisek Krejci. The well- known Austrian physicist identified himself with parallelism. His basic idea can be summarized as follows: mental a functions represent two groups of phenomena - immaterial and physical, material - at once themselves and running in parallel, whose individual temporally corresponding elements mut to one another. That is to say, firstly that they are unanimously connected to each other phenomenon of the mind has a single "physiological correlation" which pertains only to it, that they are not connected causally, meaning that they do not evoke one another, they do another, nor do they influence one another in any way whats oever. It is this final statement which is in contradiction with the proof of "realness" as Poppe above), for if the working of the immaterial world did not manifest itself in the real one able to consider the immaterial world as real. We must therefore be interactionists in ord account for the influence of ideas. In the case of Popper, Neubauer calls this "tame Plato however, to maintain a dualistic idea and not to come into conflict with the law of the co energy, the parallelists denied any real relationship between mental and physiological fun a narrowed understanding of causality, the parallelists came to the paradoxical statement is not possible without the body, but at the same time is not at all dependent on the body exists. Popper, on the other hand, shows that there is an immaterial real world that influences th For this reason he reverts to the development theory that he has to deal with in some way. Natural selection is usually seen as the result of the interaction between blind chance (m powers from outside, that a living being cannot influence. The aims and desires of the org usually count. The theories of Lamarck, Butler or Bergson, which count on preferences and darwinism, as it had been put forward until then, since they suggest the possibility of th of acquired qualities. Baldwin and Morgan corrected this in their theory of organic evolut Hardy, "The Living Stream"): Every animal, particularly at a higher level, has a different of behaviour. By adopting a new form of behaviour an animal can change its environment. Th choice (of a new food, for example) it can change the environment and expose itself and it to new pressures of selection. Thus the animal's desires, aims and choices influence the r selection. A typical illustration is the giraffe, whose neck became long due to continuous food that was too high. According to modern darwinists, the preference of the giraffe for original and created a selection pressure that advantaged animals with long necks. It is o to determine whether the primary factor is the anatomical change or the change in behaviou change of food and change in the digestion tract) . Unlike Darwin, Popper regards this que important. He aims to show how the immaterial (mental) can affect the formation of the mat In opposition to the ideas presented so far, Popper (and Eccles and others along with him) the concept of three worlds. World 1 is the ordinary material world around us, of building airplanes, planets, atoms; it is the subject of research in physics and physical laws are World 2 is the world of mental experiences and mental states, including consciousness, and of self and of others; of mental disposition (intention) etc. World 3 is a real immaterial includes the content of thought, figments of human thinking, in particular scientific ques argumentation. This world is real because it affects what we generally regard as reality - material world 1. It is the product of human thought, and yet, it is independent of our co but can only be embodied through it. Such encounter, embodiment, occurs in research, in wo sculpture is world 1 but its idea is world 3) etc. As an example Popper states that the pr thinning out of the occurrence of prime numbers (immaterial, pertaining to world 3) is rea man, just as Mount Everest would be real even if nobody ever saw or climbed it. The soluti (logical reasoning, seeking, counting) pertains to world 2 or world 1 and depends on its o 2 and 3 may come into contact solely through world 1 (physical, chemical, physiological pr acts as a kind of computer (brain, machine). At a lecture at the third faculty of medicine of Charles University last year, Sir John Ec his idea of the encounter of the immaterial mind with biological processes in neurons on t In his opinion this is a probabilistic process that could be envisaged as a kind of resolu not a certain amount of a neurotransmitter from the synaptic granula will be released. When we came out onto the embankment after that seminar at the Havels', we were, as always as to our own future. Popper, Einstein, Schrodinger, Eccles and Huxley knew and correspond another but for us they did not exist. They belonged to a different world that it was impo on the future of our part of Europe at the end of the 20th century. To us they were as muc Madame Curie or Claude Debussy. Not long after the seminar I came across Popper's intellectual autobiography, typically en quest". The word "quest", however, has another specific meaning in English. It means the q knights for the Holy Grail, the mystical vessel which held Christ's blood, the quintessenc Truth. I opened it and I was cast back into my childhood: the young Popper had also read a wanderings of Nils Holgersson through Sweden. He, the renowned figure, the cosmopolitan bo and knighted by the Queen of England (1965), had been carried into life by the same blue g Kebnekaysa, that always became watchful when it smelt man. I could not stop reading this a How familiar I found his statement that a man should never be more precise than the partic situation requires. He criticised philosophers for their never ending efforts to give exac of terms. It is hypotheses and not terms that matters, he would say. The relation between hypothesis is similar to that between a letter and a word: if you make a typing error, you what it means and one letter is not important. It is always undesirable to try to add to e for exactness' sake, in particular as far as language exactness is concerned, as it leads clarity. As an example he cited a pun that Bertrand Russells' grandmother teased him with: "No matter!" "What is matter?" "Never mind!" It is better to ask "What does mind?" as this apologised mentally for all the teachers that make their little pupils suffer with questio and punish them for answers like "Definition is when...". I found that Popper too worried, when he was seventeen, about the question of what in fact tried to find a demarcation line between science and pseudoscience, between dogmatic think thinking. He followed Einstein who stated at a lecture in Vienna in May 1919 that it would to forsake his theory if observation did not find the red shift caused by gravitation. Tha stellar hour: science in fact puts forward hypotheses that it is possible to test. In his possible to test means possible to falsify, to disprove. If somebody says, for instance, t are white and I bring a black one to show to him, he then has two possibilities: either to original statement, which means that he uses scientific methods, or to state that the blac swan. Popper calls the latter the immunization of a hypothesis. He who immunizes his hypot any kind of falsification is still "right". As an example of genuine scientificness Popper who opened the way to disprove his hypotheses from the start. In Popper's opinion a scient who is able to give a definition of circumstances in which his hypothesis becomes invalid. psychoanalysis, on the contrary, is an example of pseudoscience. He says: If you go to see he treats you and if you feel better afterwards, he says: "You can see now that it works, better now." If you feel even worse and you do not want to continue with the treatment, he you find yourself in the expected stage of resistance and this proves that everything work Marxism also used this way of immunizing itself, remaining unshaken after history disprove one by one. One little postscript to this: Popper distinguishes between honest and dishone Honest immunization defends a theory by expectations that can themselves be falsified. Whe Newtonian physicists claimed that there must be another planet beyond Uranus because they the deviation of the course compared to the calculation in any other way, they immunized t of the movement of cosmic matter. This immunization was in fact basically falsifiable. Whe observation improved, they were found to be right. Their immunization contributed to the s eventual discovery of Neptune. Dishonest immunization, on the other hand, makes it impossi any hypothesis. From the point of view of science, the unscientific is everything that is Popper reformulated Hume's problem of induction: according to Popper induction does not ex theories cannot be derived from individual events but they can be refuted by individual ev can be contradicted by the description of facts. The idea always comes before the fact: th disproves the idea or not. It never happens the other way round. Science always uses deduc Popper draws attention enchantingly to the fruitful dialectic of dogmatic and critical thi the former could not develop without the latter. This happens as in ontogenesis, as a chil his physiological period of dogmatic and obsessive thinking only to change later on to str criticism, just as in history. Popper had a charming if not perhaps quite true hypothesis origins of old European music: "The church brought people into the churches, the people we Gregorian chants in unison during the mass and they found themselves in a situation when n was able to sing in unison with all the others. Thus from time to time he had to move his to the nearest alternative consonant and a note appeared against a note, point counter poi counterpoint." Popper sees in this the nucleus of Bach's polyphony and finally also of rom It is an illustration of how I imagine that free creation bound only by form breaks throug and paradoxically it is only this bonding by form that produces the impulse to great works Bach's music could not have come into existence in Africa, in Latin America, in Australia. church dogma has cultivated European music into the likenesses of Bachs, Beethovens and Me there is something that apparently steps forwards against creativity, but this duel is a p oversimplification. In reality it is a harmony. Without form there is no valuable content, to happen, some obstruction has to come, we have to assume a handicap to be able to create The history of art is not thronged with those who had an easy life. Antagonism which is pu creative efforts to break a path. In a supplement to The Economist from February 16, 1991 an editorial states: "Generally sp scientists treat philosophers as they would mosquitoes: as irritating parasites. They comp straitjacket into which Sir Karl Popper has put them. Every time they write a proposal for have to put it in Popperian terms, setting out clearly a hypothesis and how they will test them, the whole point of a grant proposal is to get money to find something out, not to te hypothesis. They are explorers, not patent clerks." Here we reach the core. A scholar who of popperism must be aware that he does not live according his principles and ideals. Here against T.S. Kuhn, who explicitly rejects the concept of the "truth"; according to him, th cognition is to force its path and to survive at any price. At first sight, Kuhn's concept to the actual state of things. In all eras M. Bonacieux and Sancho Panza were right "in co history has always honored Don Quixotes, Cyrano de Bergeracs and d'Artagnans. Science too its existence, sense and prestige not to its prosaic everydayness, but to its fully illuso ideal: the knightly order of truth. A scholar may not spend all the days falsifying hypoth do according to Popper. He is different however from, say, a politician or a priest: he is theoretically, to change his opinion if facts change. He revels in his ignorance, because material. Karl Popper has put his finger brilliantly on this ideal in the manner of the tr and become its prophet. His intellectual autobiography is proof of that. Who actually is i Sir Karl Raimund Popper, C.H., K.T., M.A., Ph.D., D.LITT, F.R.S., F.B.A. is the most emine philosopher of science (epistemologist). He was born on July 28, 1902 in Vienna, son of Dr Carl Popper and Jenny Popper, nee Schiff. Karl Popper worked briefly as a manual labourer woodcarving for a while, but this work ran aground on his rich internal intellectual life, his attention. He married Josephine Anna Henninger in 1930. He studied mathematics, physic at the University of Vienna and then worked first as a teacher in secondary schools, and l lecturer in the department of philosophy at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, (1937-1945). From 1945 to 1966 he was the head of the department of philosophy, logic and method at the London School of Economics, where one of his more famous pupils was George S benefactor of Central European University (CEU). Karl Popper lectured at Harvard Universit worked at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the field of behavioral sciences. He g lecture on philosophy at British Academy; he lectured at the University of London, Oxford etc. As a visiting lecturer he gave lectures at University of California and Minnesota Uni University of Indiana (1963), in Denver (1966), Emory (1969), Princeton (1963), Washington Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1966-1967) etc. He was a member of the Council of t Symbolic Logic, (1951-1955), the International Academy for Philosophy and Science (from 19 Academy (from 1958), an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966 member of the Harvard Capitula Phi Betta Kappa (from 1964), President of Aristotelian Soci the British Society for Philosophy and Science (1959-1961), Foreign Associate of the Natio Sciences, Washington D.C. (since 1986), etc. He is also interested in music. In his first fundamental work, Logik der Forschung, which he published being in touch with Circle (Wiener Kreis) of logic positivists, Popper rejected their inductive empiricism and historicism. He went on to publish The Open Society and Its Enemies, The Poverty of Histor Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance, Quantum Mechanics without the Observer, The Self an authored with Eccles, his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest, and many other works. acquainted with Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger and with other prominent scholars. Charles University owes a debt to Karl Popper, who although a socialist when young later b marxism and was one of the forbidden philosophers. Sir Karl Popper celebrates his 92nd bir In view of his remarkable work in the methodology and philosophy of science, which has als influenced medicine, particularly the problems of the body and the mind as articulated in Its Brain, the 3rd Medical Faculty of the Charles University has nominated Sir Karl Popper Doctor of Charles University, emphasizing his remarkable cultural, philosophical, scientif and political contribution to the world community. Sir Karl Popper embodies the very best of Central Europe contributed to the intellectual history of the 20th century. It is great Charles University that Sir Karl Popper has accepted our invitation and undergone an arduo allow us to experience, with great gratitude and in genuine admiration, the pleasure of th will be unforgettably written in the history of Czech higher education. It is a moment as return of Nils Holgersson into this world, as the victory of Don Quixote, as the fall of c presidency of prisoner and auxiliary workman Vaclav Havel. It is a good moment. Cyril Hoschl, Carolinum, May 25, 1994