Worldview
Chapter 1 - Worldview
Worldview - Next page: Building blocks
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Welcome to our worldview
Maybe you already said, "If you'd been in my position, you'd have done the same …"
In this situation, where swapping roles, responsibilities, relationships, etc., would result in a swapped opinion, we speak about perspective.
Worldview is about deeper values that may have origins in upbringing or cultural experience: fundamental beliefs about the nature of things and a sense of what is 'fair and right'. If swapping circumstances would not change your view, then the difference is more likely to be one of your worldview.
Our worldview includes our knowledge and beliefs about how our world works, its interests, values, emotions, and ethics.
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Key take-aways from the deep dive
- The core dimensions of life are action, evaluation and relevance
- At different levels, from person to society, we exhibit 'similar' behavior
- Self-organisation (life) is fighting the entropy of the context we live in
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Deep dive
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Elements of a worldview
In a changing and complex society, scientific, social and cultural knowledge is rapidly fragmented. This fragmentation leads to a growing gap between the exact sciences and the humanities (the two cultures), and between the layman and the specialist. Even more, it leads to the alienation of man from his surrounding nature/culture.
According to Leo Apostel*, a worldview is a descriptive model of the world. It should comprise these elements:
- An account of its own "building blocks", its origins and construction.
- An answer to the question "Where are we heading?"
- A theory of knowledge: "What is true and false?"
- A theory of action: "What should we do?"
- An answers to ethical questions: "How should we attain our goals?
* Leo Apostel (1925 – 1995) was a Belgian philosopher and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University. Apostel was an advocate of interdisciplinary research and the bridging of the gap between exact science and humanities.
| Content source |
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| CENTER LEO APOSTEL - VUB |
| https://clea.research.vub.be/home |
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Descriptive model
As said, we start with a descriptive model of what the world means to us and you. Be aware of the fact that what follows IS NOT the world, but a MODEL of the world. A model helps us understand what is happening around us all. The overview model is driven by dimensionality, similarities and self-organisation.
Global view
Above is a visual descriptive model of our view of the world. As you can see, boundaries are not straight, open and overlapping. You may also have noticed that a small gap arises between the self and its context when beliefs come to the fore.
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Dimensionality creating direction
All the above is not linear, but is situated in a multi-dimensional space. The open frame of the worldview model represents the dimensional space of action, evaluation and relevancy we live in.
- Action is everything you do to safeguard your interests. First of all, this is about your survival, but being human, this turns into reputation, status, power, ...
- Evaluation is based on the criteria (e.g. good versus bad) that we receive with our genes, but they also develop further throughout our lives.
- Relevance makes the previous two contextual. Why and how we act only creates results within a time and space frame.
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Similarity
The following important characteristic is 'similarity'. When discussing this in terms of the small, we usually call it a fractal. A floret from a cauliflower looks very much like the cauliflower of which it was a part. But this is also true in the opposite direction. Robert Aumann explained in his Nobel Prize (Economy—2005) lecture how people, teams, organisations, businesses, etc., all exhibit the same properties regarding action, evaluation, and relevance in the world.
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| Robert Aumann received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005 for his work on conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis. He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling. |
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Self-(organisation) fighting entropy
This is the greatest mystery of our existence. It contains a paradox. The opening up of the entropy principle creates the dynamics of material reality. Living organisms, on the other hand, compress in the opposite direction.
Within the world, living entities are fighting entropy by creating a self (self-organising). The attractors, who form the self, constantly try to minimise free energy (entropic, non-usable energy) by erecting barriers and keeping the energy within limits. Each attractor is part of a dimension, connecting other attractors. In this way, self is always part of a paradoxical situation as dimesions (which contain your 'self') create non parallel directions.
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