Information science for biology

Do I believe in collective knowledge?

Popper’s 3 Worlds alludes, by a metaphysical lunge which leaves most philosophers shaking their heads in disdain, to a third world to complement the oft-accepted worlds of physical knowledge and mental knowledge.

A book is read, and thus the physical is transmuted, briefly, into the mental. The flickering neurones in our brains ignite thoughts in the thing or are the thing we call consciousness.

Knowledge splurges from mind to page and back again, yet Popper argued that we are ignoring a third sense to knowledge, beyond the material we can read, hear and touch, and beyond the cognitive where in word and thought we create and criticise in abstractions.

Popper’s World 3 is akin to collective knowledge, the sum of all our learning and creativity which persists beyond our thoughts and our deaths. World 3 is the pooled expertise of millions of minds, engaging with a reality, estabishing problems and proposing solutions to why the rains fall or how Labour could ever serve a fourth term.

Do I believe in a collective knowledge? I think there exists a very strong sense in which knowledge is considered to be a shared experience. The library is a place to store all our knowledge. We work together to create and share new ideas. The Internet is a place where we can access and exchange all sorts of thoughts and theories about the world.

We are feel reassured because there is coherency in the world, a confidence that knowledge, that a collective making-sense-of-things, extends beyond what we might understand on a personal level. I trust aeroplanes will not fall out of the sky, even though I don’t know anything about why they stay in the air.

I like Popper’s World 3 because it has this collective, shared element to knowledge. It is a place for the bringing together of ideas. It establishes communalism for ideas, a means for the bringing together of human thought.