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Concept
Behind the Mirror
Summary
Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge (Die Rückseite des Spiegels, Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens) is a 1973 book by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz.
Lorenz shows the essentials of a lifetime's work and summarizes it into his very own philosophy: evolution is the process of growing perception of the outer world by living nature itself. Stepping from simple to higher organized organisms he shows how they benefit from information processing. The methods mirrored by organs have been created in the course of evolution as the natural history of this organism. Lorenz uses the mirror as a simplified model of our brain reflecting the part of information from the outside world it is able to "see". The backside of the mirror was created by evolution to gather as much information as needed to better survive. The book gives a hypothesis how consciousness was "invented" by evolution.
One of the key positions of the book included the criticism of Immanuel Kant, arguing that the philosopher failed to realize that knowledge, as mirrored by the human mind is the product of evolutionary adaptations.
Kant has maintained that our consciousness or our description and judgments about the world could never mirror the world as it really is so we can not simply take in the raw data that the world provides nor impose our forms on the world. Lorenz disputed this, saying it is inconceivable that - through chance mutations and selective retention - the world fashioned an instrument of cognition that grossly misleads man about such world. He said that we can determine the reliability of the mirror by looking behind it.
Lorenz summarizes his life's work into his own philosophy: Evolution is the process of growing perception of the outer world by living nature itself. Stepping from simple to higher organized organisms, Lorenz shows how they gain and benefit from information. The methods mirrored by organs have been created in the course of evolution as the natural history of this organism.
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