Context without content

I approach this blog post with a bit of apprehension. It is key to understanding much of what I intend to write going forward. Yet it is a bit dry, and maybe too technical. I will do my best to keep it interesting.

First, let's consider content without context. That could, of course, be a post by itself, but I'm trying to contrast it with the topic at hand.

I had a colleague at one of my places of work, whom I will call "Brent." Brent used to enjoy writing the number "1040" on the whiteboard, and would then look at his audience expectantly. After letting some painfully silent moments pass, he would ask, "What is this?" People would propose various things. He would finally point out that we can't know what it means until we understand the context. It could be the number of an IRS tax form (this was especially fun in April), the number of a house, Brent's favorite number*, the number of visits to a particular web page, and on and on. I used to think this was a rather self-evident point, but it was important to him that people think about it, and we often dedicated a moment of silence to its honor.

This post is about context without regard to any particular content. In other words, I wish to discuss a framework for thinking about things. I invite you to pause for a moment and consider this question, "In what sense is Cinderella alive?" I recognize that I am encouraging the same** kind of exercise that Brent enjoyed, but please humor me for a moment. I invite you, then, having considered this, to read the last half of a short blog post. The half about Cinderella (starting two paragraphs above the screenshot). The post is entitled, "Lying to children," and I hope you will find it amusing. Please come back here and finish reading this post after you have enjoyed that one.

Thank you for returning! It is always a bit of a gamble, on the Internet, to refer your readers away to another author. Especially a younger one.

The context that I wish to expose you to is from Karl Popper, a twentieth century philosopher. This way of thinking about things is commonly called "Popper's three worlds". Things might exist in World One as tangible, physical objects, such as the pages in a book which comprise the Cinderella fairy tale. Other things might exist in World Two as thoughts and mental pictures, such as those imagined by the reader of those pages, or if read aloud, by the child listening. There exist also things which, while not concrete, physical objects, nevertheless exert an impact on us, such as the character "Cinderella," and he assigns these things to World Three.

I don't want to get into this in any great detail in this post, because here I am merely setting up the stage for a number of subsequent posts, which, to be understood, will require that the reader be familiar with this way of looking at things. Every time we hear that something exists, or read a question about the existence of something, we can make distinctions about that something in terms of these three worlds.

For example, recently facebook has been displaying an ad that asks, "Do you believe in Africa?" Probably because we are now living on the African continent. Well, not really on the continent per se, but the island of Mauritius is considered to be a part of Africa.

What does this question mean? I never clicked on the ad to find out what the advertiser meant, and the ad no longer appears. In World One, yes, I believe that Africa exists in the physical world. I have seen it on maps and globes hundreds of times, have flown over it several times, and I have changed planes in an airport there. Not having looked at the advertiser's material, I do not know what was in his or her head about Africa, what thoughts or mental pictures he or she wished to implant in my World Two. I can only assume that it is something about Africa as a World Three entity, perhaps its future or its potential for greatness or economic growth (or pride to be African?).

I invite you to consider using Popper's three worlds as a way to organize your thoughts about things. Is it a real, tangible object? World one. Is it an idea flitting through your head? World two. Is it something that, while not tangible, has a life of its own, that people talk about or to which people pledge allegiance? World three.

In fairness to modern thinking, I must point out that this way of viewing reality is not popular now. And, that will become my point in future posts, because it is my own cognitive dissonance, bouncing back and forth between different ways of viewing reality, which drives me to write this blog.

For the moment, this is just context without content.

* This was not one of the examples he used at the time, but, hey, it was his favorite number! Something that I had not thought of at that time, but realized at this writing.
** "Everyone is a mirror image of yourself—your own thinking coming back at you.", a Byron Katie quote.