Life in Popper’s cosmology
Dr. Josep Corcó
Universitat Internacional de Catalunya
Barcelona (Spain)
Popper proposed an emergentist cosmology. In the evolution of universe, new things appear. We know Popper's distinction between World 1 (the physical world), World 2 (the world of subjective knowledge) and World 3 (the world of human thought objects). According to Popper, World 2 emerges from - out of - World 1, and World 3 emerges from World 2. Popper says that living beings belong to World 1. But within World 1, he distinguishes between inert things and living beings. So life has emerged from a lifeless world, a physico-chemical, inert world. I think that Popper uses the term emergency in a concrete way: it means novelty, unpredictability, and irreducibility. Thus life is a novelty in a physico-chemical world. We cannot predict life from the standpoint of a physico-chemical world. And life is irreducible to it.
Popper accepted that life is, basically, a net of metabolical processes. There are no constituents other than chemical ones. Nevertheless, life has properties that are different from those of the chemical world. He stated that problems, knowledge and values appear in the universe along with the origin of life. Therefore, Popper proposed a distinction between inert things and life: only organisms have problems and try to solve them. In his intellectual autobiography, he said that the organism's problems are typically not physical problems and that organisms themselves are not physical things. Rather, living beings are physico-chemical structures that solve problems, and because of that, they are not merely physical. Life is a novelty in a physico-chemical world, and problems are essentially involved.
Popper pointed out that this view is opposite to a reductionist one that tries to find the explanation for a new level by looking at the structure and interaction of elements on the lower level. Popper said that the reductionist programme is very important for science and he conceded its achievements. Nevertheless, Popper gave up hope of its final success, especially in the investigation of life. The new level cannot be completely explained by the rules and laws of the level from which it emerges. Popper's view, then was emergentist. Nevertheless it was not anti-reductionist, for he conceded that life is a physico-chemical process. But he thought that before trying or insisting upon reduction, we need to know very well what we are trying to reduce. This means that we need to work first on the level to be reduced. He considered that we cannot solve the problems linguistically, by eliminating some entities through refusing to talk about them. We must be, initially, pluralistic, trying to work through the arguments for emergence, as Popper did.