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Three Worlds


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Karl Raimund Popper was born in Vienna in 1902. He studied at the University of Vienna, where he received his Ph.D. in 1928. He lectured in Canterbury, New Zealand, from 1937 to 1945 and in the London School of Economics (University of London) from 1946 to 1969. Sir Karl is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the British Academy and a member of several national and international academies.

Reading level: Intermediate

I would guess that most people, when they take the time to consider how many worlds they live in, would answer “two”. These would be the physical and mental worlds. There is some sort of relationship between what is “out there” and how we sense it and then represent it on our minds. That relationship is complex and subjective. There is also some question about whether we exist in a duality, with mind and body being entirely separate, or in some sort of unified whole where mind and body are one. I suspect that research into brain science may give rise to some new forms of philosophy shortly, or at least some new questions and arguments.

One of the enduring philosophical questions is whether and how the mind can have causal effect on the “real world”. in his 1978 lecture on human values,  Karl Popper  delves into these questions and adds a new wrinkle. He suggests that we live in three worlds, rather than two.

Popper’s three worlds are as follows:

  1. The physical world, perhaps subdivided into non-living and living, e.g. rocks and trees.
  2. The mental or psychological world, comprised of individual human experiences.
  3. The world of products of the human mind, such as language, stories, art and institutions.

These three worlds correspond to the notion of objective (1), subjective (2) and inter-subjective (3).

Okay, so this is not too big a stretch, until you ask the question about which of these three worlds is real? Popper argues that since both of the mental worlds (human minds and their products) can have causal effects on physical things, both are real. He differentiates between subjective and objective knowledge.

Knowledge in the subjective sense consists of concrete mental dispositions especially of expectations; it consists of concrete world 2 thought processes, with their correlated world 1 brain processes. It may be described as our subjective world of expectations. Knowledge in the objective sense consists not of thought processes but of thought contents. It is the objective thought content of a conjecture or theory on which the scientist’s subjective thought processes work. Thought contents are, we may conjecture, products of human language; and human languages, in their turn, are the most important and basic of world 3 objects. If I am right that the physical world has been changed by the world 3 products of the human mind, acting through the intervention of the human mind then this means that the worlds 1, 2, and 3, can interact and, therefore, that none of them is causally closed.

So, the next time you drive to the airport and get on a plane, consider this. Roads, cars, airports and airplanes all have physical form and are real. But the meaning and use of roads, cars, airports and airplanes (world 1) arises from (and is caused by) thought contents in world 3, which were themselves generated, understood and agreed to by thought processes in world 2.

Popper’s Three Worlds lecture is available here.

The Architecture of Complexity

A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of “general systems theory” which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.

Reading level: Intermediate

Herbert Simon was a Nobel laureate and social scientist most noted for his study of decision making. He is not usually thought of as a “complexity type” and was in fact quite critical of such areas as emergence. He tended to think of systems as near-decomposable hierarchies.

But one idea in this paper really caught my attention, namely the relationships between states and processes. These relationships provide a useful duality.

How complex or simple a structure is depends critically upon the way in which we describe it. Most of the complex structures found in the world are enormously redundant, and we can use this redundancy to simplify their description. But to use it, to achieve the simplification, we must find the right representation. Pictures, blueprints, most diagrams, chemical structural formulas are state descriptions. Recipes, differential equations, equations for chemical reactions are process descriptions. The former characterize the world as sensed; they provide the criteria for identifying objects, often by modeling the objects themselves. The latter characterize the world as acted upon; they provide the means for producing or generating objects having the desired characteristics. The distinction between the world as sensed and the world as acted upon defines the basic condition for the survival of adaptive organisms. The organism must develop correlations between goals in the sensed world and actions in the world of process.

If you are involved in facilitating complex change, it is important to think in terms of both present and future state, and the process needed to move between them. My experience has been that when considering complex organizational opportunities, most people think in terms of states. I can’t even count the number of times I have been asked to find a solution in terms of “drawing a new organizational chart”. Rather, I sense a lot more truth in the old adage that “form follows function” and that you should rather consider actions and processes required to achieve goals, and leave the organizational chart as a future implementation consideration.

Simon’s well noted paper The Architecture of Complexity is worth reading, but perhaps more for the serendipitous gems it contains than for his main reason for writing it.