"Popper never said that the aim of science is to falsify theories –
although some of his critics like to think he said it. The aim is to
explain the world, and the method is to produce theories, to test them,
and if they fail, to produce new theories."
http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2012/08/13/what-does-poppers-falsifiability-criterion-achieve/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mj5ogEeWQ
"I do not wish to suggest that the following formulation was in my mind when I was fifteen, yet I cannot now state better that in this way the attitude I reached in that discussion with my father which I mentioned in the previous section:
Popper, Karl R.: Unended Quest. An Intellectual Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2002, 15-16.
"How do we obtain self-knowledge? Not by self-observation, I suggest, but by becoming selves and by developing theories about ourselves. Long before we attain consciousness and knowledge of ourselves, we have, normally, become aware of other persons, usually our parents. [...] I suggest that a consciousness of self begins to develop through the medium of other persons: just as we learn to see ourselves in a mirror, so the child becomes conscious of himself by sensing his reflection in the mirror of other people's consciousness of himself [...].
This is a process whose later stages depend much upon language. [...] In order to be a self, much has to be learned; especially a sense of time, with oneself extending into the past (at leat into 'yesterday') and into the future (at least into 'tomorrow'). But this involves theory; at least in its rudimentary form as an expectation: there is no self without theoretical orientation, both in some primitive space and some primitive time. [...]
The importance of this localization (of the question 'Where am I?' on recovering from a fit) is that we cannot act coherently without it. It is part of our self-identity that we try to know where we are, in space and time: that we relates ourself to our past and the immediate future, with its aims and purposes; and that we try to orientate ourselves in space.
All this is well understandable from a biological point of view. The central nervous system had from its beginning the main function of steering or piloting the moving organism. [...] [to these devolved tasks] belong not only executive tasks (such as keeping the body's balance) but even the acquisition of information: information is selectively filtered before it is admitted to consciousness. An example of this is the selectivity of perception; another is the selectivity of memory.
I do not think that what I have said here or in the preceding sections clears up any mystery; but I do think that we need not regard as mysterious either the individuality, or the unity, or the uniqueness of the self, or our personal identity; at any rate not as more mysterious than the existence of consciousness, and ultimately that of life, and of individualized organisms. The emergence of full consciousness, capable of self-reflection, which seems to be linked to the human brain and to the descriptive function of language, is indeed one of the greatest of miracles. But if we look at the long evolution of the individuation and of individuality, at the evolution of a central nervous system, and at the uniqueness of individuals (due partly to genetic uniqueness and partly to the uniqueness of their experience), then the fact that consciousness and intelligence and unity are linked to the biological individual organism (rather than, say, to the germ plasm) does not seem so surprising. For it is in the individual organism that the germ plasm -the genome, the programme for life- has to stand up to tests".
Popper, Karl R. and Eccles, John C.: The Self and Its Brain. Berlin: Springer International, 1977, 109-110, 128-129.
http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2012/08/13/what-does-poppers-falsifiability-criterion-achieve/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mj5ogEeWQ
"I do not wish to suggest that the following formulation was in my mind when I was fifteen, yet I cannot now state better that in this way the attitude I reached in that discussion with my father which I mentioned in the previous section:
Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise.In the sequel I shall refer to this piece of self-advice as my antiessentialist exhortation ["essentialism" as a name for any position opposite to "nominalism"] [...] This, I still think, is the surest path to intellectual perdition: the abandonment of real problems for the sake of verbal problems".
Popper, Karl R.: Unended Quest. An Intellectual Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2002, 15-16.
"How do we obtain self-knowledge? Not by self-observation, I suggest, but by becoming selves and by developing theories about ourselves. Long before we attain consciousness and knowledge of ourselves, we have, normally, become aware of other persons, usually our parents. [...] I suggest that a consciousness of self begins to develop through the medium of other persons: just as we learn to see ourselves in a mirror, so the child becomes conscious of himself by sensing his reflection in the mirror of other people's consciousness of himself [...].
This is a process whose later stages depend much upon language. [...] In order to be a self, much has to be learned; especially a sense of time, with oneself extending into the past (at leat into 'yesterday') and into the future (at least into 'tomorrow'). But this involves theory; at least in its rudimentary form as an expectation: there is no self without theoretical orientation, both in some primitive space and some primitive time. [...]
The importance of this localization (of the question 'Where am I?' on recovering from a fit) is that we cannot act coherently without it. It is part of our self-identity that we try to know where we are, in space and time: that we relates ourself to our past and the immediate future, with its aims and purposes; and that we try to orientate ourselves in space.
All this is well understandable from a biological point of view. The central nervous system had from its beginning the main function of steering or piloting the moving organism. [...] [to these devolved tasks] belong not only executive tasks (such as keeping the body's balance) but even the acquisition of information: information is selectively filtered before it is admitted to consciousness. An example of this is the selectivity of perception; another is the selectivity of memory.
I do not think that what I have said here or in the preceding sections clears up any mystery; but I do think that we need not regard as mysterious either the individuality, or the unity, or the uniqueness of the self, or our personal identity; at any rate not as more mysterious than the existence of consciousness, and ultimately that of life, and of individualized organisms. The emergence of full consciousness, capable of self-reflection, which seems to be linked to the human brain and to the descriptive function of language, is indeed one of the greatest of miracles. But if we look at the long evolution of the individuation and of individuality, at the evolution of a central nervous system, and at the uniqueness of individuals (due partly to genetic uniqueness and partly to the uniqueness of their experience), then the fact that consciousness and intelligence and unity are linked to the biological individual organism (rather than, say, to the germ plasm) does not seem so surprising. For it is in the individual organism that the germ plasm -the genome, the programme for life- has to stand up to tests".
Popper, Karl R. and Eccles, John C.: The Self and Its Brain. Berlin: Springer International, 1977, 109-110, 128-129.
