Remarks on Karl Popper’s idea of three worlds in the context of the development of virtual reality technologies

Abstract

The article examines the idea of Karl Popper’s three worlds and makes some critical remarks on the expediency of such a division in view of the prospects of modern science. It was found out that Popper actually explored the idea of three worlds throughout the entire period of his work, each time paying special attention to the world 3. This approach was necessary for him to demonstrate the correctness of the objective epistemology, which, to his mind, best explains how scientific knowledge grows. It is noted that Popper defines the world 3 as the objective world of products of the human mind, which is essential for the development of scientific knowledge, autonomous, expressed in language, self-transcendental and emergent. It is explained how the idea of the world 3 distinguishes Popper’s views from other thinkers who were convinced of the objective existence of knowledge and with whose reasoning Popper compared his ideas, first of all with the views of Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Bernard Bolzano and Gottlob Frege. At the same time, the author criticises Popper’s somewhat arbitrary and insufficiently reasoned interpretation of natural numbers as products of the human mind. It is suggested that due to the rapid development of the latest technologies, the space of the virtual world, which has something in common with the three worlds in the sense of Popper, but at the same time is significantly different from each of them, can be interpreted as another world under certain interpretations. Such a world is interactive and autonomous and no less objective than others. In the future, it will be created only by artificial intelligence, which, under the conditions of acquiring autonomy in its actions, significantly surpassing all human cognitive abilities, achieving technological singularity and ultimately transferring human consciousness into the virtual environment, can become a single space of true reality, a qualitatively new world.