The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism

by Karl Popper, W.W. Bartley

Book by

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science

185 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1982

About the author

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, FRS, rose from a modest background as an assistant cabinet maker and school teacher to become one of the most influential theorists and leading philosophers. Popper commanded international audiences and conversation with him was an intellectual adventure—even if a little rough—animated by a myriad of philosophical problems. He contributed to a field of thought encompassing (among others) political theory, quantum mechanics, logic, scientific method and evolutionary theory.

Popper challenged some of the ruling orthodoxies of philosophy: logical positivism, Marxism, determinism and linguistic philosophy. He argued that there are no subject matters but only problems and our desire to solve them. He said that scientific theories cannot be verified but only tentatively refuted, and that the best philosophy is about profound problems, not word meanings. Isaiah Berlin rightly said that Popper produced one of the most devastating refutations of Marxism. Through his ideas Popper promoted a critical ethos, a world in which the give and take of debate is highly esteemed in the precept that we are all infinitely ignorant, that we differ only in the little bits of knowledge that we do have, and that with some co-operative effort we may get nearer to the truth.

Nearly every first-year philosophy student knows that Popper regarded his solutions to the problems of induction and the demarcation of science from pseudo-science as his greatest contributions. He is less known for the problems of verisimilitude, of probability (a life-long love of his), and of the relationship between the mind and body.

Popper was a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the British Academy, and Membre de I'Institute de France. He was an Honorary member of the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics, King's College London, and of Darwin College Cambridge. He was awarded prizes and honours throughout the world, including the Austrian Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold, the Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association, and the Sonning Prize for merit in work which had furthered European civilization.

Karl Popper was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965 and invested by her with the Insignia of a Companion of Honour in 1982.

(edited from http://www.tkpw.net/intro_popper/intr...)

Reviews

[Brok3n · Rating 2 out of 5]

Knocking down a straw man

I read The Open Universe between 1987 and 1990 -- I know that, because I remember why I read it. I was a postdoc in Cambridge during those years and complained to one of my colleagues that philosophers, despite their vaunted claims to be the princes of logic, are often not very good at it -- their arguments are often logically flawed. My colleague told me that if I read Karl Popper's The Open Universe I would find the logic flawless. I did, and I didn't. I pointed out some of the logical flaws to my colleague, and he agreed I had a point.

The Open Universe is Popper's argument against determinism. Now, if you're hoping to read an open-minded discussion of the determinism/nondeterminism question, this is not the place to look. It is clear right from the start that Popper despises the very thought of determinism, and sets out in this book to demolish it.

Personally, I am not very interested, because I think the determinism/nondeterminism question is vacuous. No one can tell you in any concrete way how a deterministic universe would be different from a nondeterministic one. I mean, it is completely clear as a practical matter that we can't predict the future perfectly -- I don't know what weather we will have a year from today -- but that we can sometimes make predictions that have a good chance of becoming true. I have lived in Canada eight years, and I have learned that if Environment Canada says we're going to have a huge snowstorm in the next day or two, a snowstorm will in fact materialize.

Recognizing this problem, Popper begins by setting out in detail how he will define determinism. And it is here that his plan becomes clear. He defines determinism in so strong and strict a way that it is impossible for his criteria to be satisfied. Then he writes a book in which he shows that failure in detail.

I'll give one example. Popper argues correctly that the motions of a system of three bodies moving according to Newtonian gravitation cannot be predicted into the indefinite future. He is correct about this -- Henri Poincaré showed it in 1887 -- it was the beginning of the field now known as Chaos Theory. The three-body problem shows what we now call the "Butterfly Effect", extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, such that even the smallest change eventually leads to completely unpredictable results.

Popper apparently fails to realize that this is not a statement about physics -- it is a statement about mathematics. We now know that much simpler systems than the three-body problem show the Butterfly Effect. Perhaps the simplest is the logistic map: x ? cx(1-x), where x is a number between 0 and 1 and c a constant between 0 and 4. If c is a rational number (i.e., an integer fraction) and x is also rational, then all the subsequent x's are rational and known with perfect precision, and any number of them can be calculated on a computer in a finite and completely predictable way. Yet, by Popper's definition, this mathematical system is not deterministic.

It is an absurd definition.

Now, understand, my complaint is not that Popper doesn't know about chaos or the logistic map. Popper wrote The Open Universe in 1951-1956 (although it wasn't published until 1982), and the logistic map became an active object of study in the 1970's. My complaint is that he defined determinism is such a way as to make his criteria impossible to satisfy.

In The Open Universe, Popper convincingly refutes a position that absolutely no serious person believes.

Blog review.

[Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Popper outlines his thoughts on the existence of indeterminism, though human free will isn't touched on until the afterward. Primarily covers the arguments for indeterminism against both philosophical determinism and 'scientific' determinism.

Notes

Intuition: just because it may persuade and convince us of the truth of what we have intuited, may badly mislead us: it is an invaluable helper, but also a dangerous helper, for it tends to make us uncritical. We must always meet it with respect, with gratitude, and with an effort to be severely critical of it.

'Scientific' determinism: an attempt to replace the vague idea of foreknowledge by the more precise idea of predictability. It asserts that events shown in the film of our lives are, forwards or backwards, never haphazard but always subject to rules. Any 'scientific' theory must imply this much or not be scientific. It appeals to the success of science, eg Newton's theories.

But if scientific determinism is accurate then our logic is really more like brainwashing of the initial states of the universe and our indoctrination to its laws. It implies that we cannot rationally approach the truth because we are not free to be persuaded by arguments from reason, because it was determined for us ahead of time. Reducing rationality to an illusion negates the meaning of science and the scientific method's success at revealing our errors.

Like Einstein, many will have to move from 'scientific' determinists when they realize there are no valid arguments in favor, and move to metaphysical or religious determinist.

Probabilities: for the determinist, the law-like behavior of probabilities, like the 50/50 chance of a coin toss, are ultimately irreducible and unexplainable. They must say both that every coin toss is predetermined from initial conditions of the universe for either heads or tails, and that the universe corrects the tosses and those initial conditions to converge the tosses at 50/50. The convergence must be explained by more unknown initial conditions that are further unexplainable. This prima facie characteristic of determinism adds no explanation.

All singular events in this universe are unique, and if considered under the aspect of their uniqueness might then be described as ultimately undetermined or 'free'. Some actions can of course be caused or even determined already of time, but not everything to 100% accurately *from within the system* (the theory or'scientific' determinism).

Human knowledge progresses from correcting mistakes, and will create more in the future, those which cannot be foreseen until the future problems arise. Emergent properties represent unforeseeable evolutionary steps in biology, physics, and cosmology.

As a philosophy reductionism is a failure, but these failures led to outstanding success as a method for science to get closer to truth. Popper said we need to act like determinists to explore the problems of what piece of philosophy we can reduce to science next, even if 100% reductionism is impossible and even a bad philosophy. Because science's greatest accomplishments are failed reductions. Reductionism will always fail to be 100%. Darwin and Newton weren't right, Einstein wasn't 100% right. But where their theories failed we open up entire new fields. Reductionism will always fail, and that's why we have an open universe to explore. So despite Popper being an indeterministic we must act methodically deterministic if we hope to reduce our theories and discover causal laws.

But a belief in determinism (aka philosophical reductionism or scientism) and the ability to reduce everything everywhere, leads to ignoring and sweeping real problems under the rug.

Popper says the role of dogma is to set the border of what's allowed and where you have to stop asking, 'why?'. Being a reductionist does the same. People had to shut their eyes to the problem of design in nature until Darwin's great success. Natural selection wasn't allowed to be discussed as part of the physical universe. After Darwin's theory the reductionists then adopted it since evolution was reduced to a branch of biology. Godel's incompleteness says all physical science is incomplete. We can never hope for complete reductionism since we live in an open and indetermined universe, but the critical method of science produces partially successful reductions often and that is enough. Open problems are beneficial and to be called in their own. They are as interesting and important as their solutions. We need more of them and can't sweep them under the rug.

[sude · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gece doğacak günü tahmin eder. Değişimsizlik değişimsizliği tahmin eder. Ben beni tahmin edemem.

[Bob S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because of my interest in skepticism, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. I was familiar with the author (previously having written about him in my undergraduate thesis, "the Afterlife of Memory"). That being said, I was impressed not only by the meticulous thinking for which Popper is famous, but also by the applicability of some of the issues raised to my chosen field of Business Analysis.

As a Business Analyst, I occasionally encounter two types of resistance to the profession. First, there are those who reject the discipline from fear of a loss of freedom; this is quite fashionable amongst those who misunderstand "Agile" to be a rejection of all documentation and process. The second form comes as doubt, essentially stating that we can't know that the work products I produce are True, or even stating that they must be necessarily incomplete, and, therefore, useless.

In the Open Universe, Popper argues that no theory (even the physical sciences) can reduce the world to a causally determined system, thus freedom (especially where it counts: creative behavior) can never be eliminated from human experience.

He also discusses the role of abstractions (in Popper's term: World 3), such as process descriptions and other documentation, which are bound to be incomplete and possibly even wrong. Here he reminds us that in ~3,000 years of human inquiry, including many valiant attempts to reduce the world to a simple system of rules (e.g. Unified Theory), we have almost universally failed. Nevertheless, the act of trying has had a powerful effect on our ability to manipulate the material world. Our knowledge may be incomplete -- in fact the very act of attempting to perfect our knowledge seems always to lead us to discover new problems that unravel what once was thought of as an almost completed understanding.

As a BA, I don't consider myself a scientist searching for the Truth, but rather a facilitator, assisting communities in articulating a shared understanding, so they can examine their assumptions, and attempt to improve the impact they collectively have on the world (Popper's World 1).

I enjoyed reading this book. Sometimes the detailed examples from the history of physics were tough to follow, but the main argument was fascinating, and surprisingly pertinent to me as a Business Analyst.

[Durval Menezes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Popper is peerless, in my opinion the best philosopher of the 20th century, head-and-shoulders above the rest.

This book is no exception: Popper takes a very difficult theme and writes about it simply and concisely (alas, this is part of the author's personal ethics: see his letter titled "Against Big Words"[1]), and manages to cover everything very well.

In fact, I wrote my graduation thesis[2] for my Philosophy Baccalaureate based exactly on this book.

[1] http://www.the-rathouse.com/shortrevi...

[2] Abstract in English: http://durval.com/filosofia/2016_1129... ;
Full work (in Portuguese): http://durval.com/filosofia/2016_1129...

[Gareth Farrow · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you think you have free will to read this book then don't read it. If that doesn't make sense then read this book and you will then understand that you never had free will to read or not to read this book. To be a little less obscure, it's a wonderful read if you want to think about something that may or may not be so :)

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic account of openness that leads right up to the cusp of Systems Philosophy. I'd highly recommend this book for anyone wrestling with the mind-body problem.

[Serdar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 3 star rating is not a reflection of this book's quality but merely its specialization. It is, as the title implies, an elongated postscript to another work. But it's a fascinating postscript (even I still find Popper's "Three Worlds" notion wonky and not very useful for advancing his arguments).