All Life is Problem Solving Quotes

“The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse — to challenge others to form free opinions.”
― Karl R. Popper, All Life is Problem Solving

“We do not know, we guess. Although scientific knowledge is not knowledge, it is the best we have in this field. I call it conjectural knowledge - more or less to console people who want certain knowledge and think they cannot do without it.
Such people have a dangerous need for suggestion, they lack the courage to live without assurances, without certainty, without authority, without a leader. Perhaps one could say that they are people still trapped in childhood...
Science begins with problems. It attempts to solve them through bold, inventive theories. The great majority of theories are false and/or untestable. Valuable, testable theories will search for errors. We try to find errors and to eliminate them. This is science: it consists of wild, often irresponsible ideas that it places under the strict control of error correction”
― Karl Popper, All Life is Problem Solving

“Rasyonalizmden bahsettiğimde, ne bir felsefi teoriyi (Descartes'ınki gibi) ne de insanın tamamen rasyonel bir yaratık olduğuna dair son derece mantıksız bir inancı kastediyorum. Akıl ya da rasyonalizmden bahsettiğimde, kastettiğim tek şey, hatalarımızın ve hatalarımızın eleştirilmesi yoluyla, özellikle başkalarının eleştirisi yoluyla ve en sonunda da özeleştiri yoluyla öğrenebileceğimiz inancıdır.”
― Karl Popper, All Life is Problem Solving

“The only right way to proceed is to consider the past as completely different from the future. We should judge past facts historically and
morally, in order to learn what is possible and what is morally right.
We should not try at all to derive trends and directions from the past in order to make predictions about the future. For the future is open. Anything can happen.
Unfortunately, this way of looking at the future does not seem easy to grasp. Some intellectuals are simply incapable of making this distinction between the future and the past and present - intellectuals who have learnt from Marxism to require some wise man to point the
way into the future. More than once I have been told that my optimism must be at least a disguised pointer, because there are no
optimists about the present who are not also optimists about the future.
But all that my optimism about the present can offer for the future is hope.
It can give us hope and incentive; for we have succeeded in making a lot of things better, and similar success is not impossible in the future.
As far as the future is concerned, we should not seek to prophesy but simply try to act in a way that is morally right and responsible.
This means we have a duty to learn to see the present correctly, not through the tinted spectacles of an ideology. We can learn from reality what it is possible to achieve. But if we see reality through the lens of one of those three ideological conceptions of history, we violate our duty to learn.
The future is open, and we have a responsibility to do our best to make the future still better than the present. But this responsibility
presupposes freedom. In a despotic system we are slaves, and slaves are not fully responsible for what they do.”
― Karl Popper, All Life is Problem Solving

“Freedom is not a supplier who delivers life's goods to our door. Democracy does not ensure that anything is accomplished - certainly not an economic miracle. It is wrong and extremely dangerous to extol freedom by telling people that they will certainly be all right once they are free. How someone fares in life is largely a matter of luck or grace, and to a comparatively small degree perhaps also of competence, diligence, and other virtues. The most one can say of democracy or freedom is that they give our personal abilities a little more influence on our well-being. This brings me to my third thesis. We should choose political freedom not because we hope for an easier life but because freedom is itself an ultimate value that cannot
be reduced to material values.”
― Karl Popper, All Life is Problem Solving

“Not only Newton's classical physics but also wave mechanics ultimately originated in
the tension between those eight minutes of arc - less than one-seventh of one degree - and Kepler's Pythagorean metaphysics. Like the
theory of atoms, which began in its Greek form as metaphysics in the fifth century B.C. (Leucippus and Democritus) and acquired scientific status only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries A.D., Kepler's
Harmony of the World acquired scientific status only with Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrodinger. In fact, Schrodinger's wave mechanics takes the transition from geometric radial optics to wave optics and attempts to transpose it to the theory of matter, to the theory of elementary particles. Wave optics in turn takes its orientation from musical theory, from the theory of acoustic vibrations and waves, resonance and dissonance. But in this theory Kepler and his doctrine of harmony - hence Pythagoras in the end - plays a decisive role. Kepler, then, plays a role in the prehistory of Schrodinger's wave mechanics. But that is not all. Of all Schrodinger's precursors, Kepler
is the only one who foresaw that harmony - resonance - holds the
world together.”
― Karl Popper, All Life is Problem Solving

“I should be happy if scientists, and intellectuals in general, realized how little we know - for example, about the origins of life. We know
next to nothing about it. These are the unsolved problems I have mentioned. Even if life emerges, why should it do so in just such a
way that it happens to be adapted to the environment in which it has
arisen? This is an extremely difficult problem.
We know nothing - that is the first point.
Therefore we should be very modest - that is the second.
That we should not claim to know when we do not know - that is the third.
This is more or less the approach I should like to popularize. It does not have good prospects.”
― Karl Popper, All Life is Problem Solving

“I maintain that both are typical of attempts to solve a problem through a kind of head-in-the-sand philosophy. The problem of the body-mind relation vanishes into triviality as soon as one denies the existence of either the body or the mind.”
― Karl Popper, All Life is Problem Solving