On the matter of logic and the world
What do Zeno's arrow paradox, God, Einstein's theory of time space, and performative contradictions have in common? They all, and more like them, demonstrate how a perverse belief in a logically structured world can generate a false sense of paradox. Logic itself is the paradox.
Zeno's paradox: Why do we think the arrow never should reach the target? It is because logic is a quantitative delimitation of anything it applies to. The distances between the archer and the target are eternally divisible, but it is not the world that is divisible, it is the logic that imposes a principle on the world that says any given determinative distance is divisible, which is true, but in the world as an actuality, nothing is determined. Everything is indeterminate.
God: Can God create a stone so heavy that he himself cannot lift it? This sounds childish, of course, but where does such a thing come from? It comes from the standard concept of what God is, "his" omnipotence. What else can issue from Anselm's Greatest Possible Being? So when the mind takes up this concept as a serious way to think about God, we get these crude derivatives: God's omnibenevolence and omniscience? If true, why would God endure our suffering; an entirely fabricated way to deny the existence of God, which is to argue against a definition of God such that it is indefensible. Pure straw person nonsense, and all based on an overreach of logic. I mean, you take some quantification of God, here the "omni" which is simply a logical universal, and you start generating logical contradictions. so you walk away thinking you've made an important point, when all you've done worked with an abstraction, calling it "real". (The only "real" way to approach the God issue is to observe actuality, not the logic you fit it into.)
Einstein's space time: Space bending?? Nonsense. The concept of bending presupposes space. I am not a physicist, but it is an analytic certainty that if something bends, it must bend in a medium which allows things to bend IN it. Is there an implicit part of this that says there is some "absolute" space in which bending space bends? No. Because space itself is simply a geometrical abstraction that produces contradictions when applied to observing actuality. The actuality of the world is not geometrical. But what does this mean for the physics of space?It means that space time is not about the world at all. As is evidenced by the essential contradiction that arises with positing space in a quantifiable way.
Performative contradictions: Well, first, this sentence is false. And I cannot write in English. And so on. Especially the first, though: how can such a proposition every be "true"? The point I would make is simple: If logic qua logic can produce nonsense like this, then as a system of understanding the world, it is more than suspect. It is "wrong". Not only is logic incongruent with the actual world, it is self annihilating, for how can, as Wittgenstein said, all logic be tautological if it possesses just one inherent contradiction?
Just curiosities here, really. But I do not at present see any way around any of these. It does have rather staggering consequences for the way language and logic can, in empirical science, be in any way "about" the world as an actuality (and not as something already taken up in a system of assumptions).
Zeno's paradox: Why do we think the arrow never should reach the target? It is because logic is a quantitative delimitation of anything it applies to. The distances between the archer and the target are eternally divisible, but it is not the world that is divisible, it is the logic that imposes a principle on the world that says any given determinative distance is divisible, which is true, but in the world as an actuality, nothing is determined. Everything is indeterminate.
God: Can God create a stone so heavy that he himself cannot lift it? This sounds childish, of course, but where does such a thing come from? It comes from the standard concept of what God is, "his" omnipotence. What else can issue from Anselm's Greatest Possible Being? So when the mind takes up this concept as a serious way to think about God, we get these crude derivatives: God's omnibenevolence and omniscience? If true, why would God endure our suffering; an entirely fabricated way to deny the existence of God, which is to argue against a definition of God such that it is indefensible. Pure straw person nonsense, and all based on an overreach of logic. I mean, you take some quantification of God, here the "omni" which is simply a logical universal, and you start generating logical contradictions. so you walk away thinking you've made an important point, when all you've done worked with an abstraction, calling it "real". (The only "real" way to approach the God issue is to observe actuality, not the logic you fit it into.)
Einstein's space time: Space bending?? Nonsense. The concept of bending presupposes space. I am not a physicist, but it is an analytic certainty that if something bends, it must bend in a medium which allows things to bend IN it. Is there an implicit part of this that says there is some "absolute" space in which bending space bends? No. Because space itself is simply a geometrical abstraction that produces contradictions when applied to observing actuality. The actuality of the world is not geometrical. But what does this mean for the physics of space?It means that space time is not about the world at all. As is evidenced by the essential contradiction that arises with positing space in a quantifiable way.
Performative contradictions: Well, first, this sentence is false. And I cannot write in English. And so on. Especially the first, though: how can such a proposition every be "true"? The point I would make is simple: If logic qua logic can produce nonsense like this, then as a system of understanding the world, it is more than suspect. It is "wrong". Not only is logic incongruent with the actual world, it is self annihilating, for how can, as Wittgenstein said, all logic be tautological if it possesses just one inherent contradiction?
Just curiosities here, really. But I do not at present see any way around any of these. It does have rather staggering consequences for the way language and logic can, in empirical science, be in any way "about" the world as an actuality (and not as something already taken up in a system of assumptions).
Comments (221)
Quoting Constance
is a good example of this:
Quoting Constance
Or is that your point?
The point? It is a diffuse point, sort of bound up in the ideas presented, each one in its own right a challenge, but the general point would be that the perversity extends from the thinking that logic can serve as a structured way to speak about the actual world. It cannot, and all of our utterances about the world are really about something else altogether. This something else is. of course, the epistemic relation we have with the world. In the traditional analysis of knowledge, S never even approaches P. Einstein's space time is not about the "actual" world, e.g. Does not "touch" the world.
On the contrary, misrecognized misuses (e.g. reification) of logic, or grammar, generates "paradoxes".
I think that Zeno's arrow paradox and performative contradictions, a term I hadn't heard before, are examples of what we call paradoxes. I agree they arise from a misguided attempt to apply rigorous logic inappropriately. I think that's also true about seeming contradictions that come up when trying to talk God into a corner and yell "Gotcha!"
General relativity is something different. GR is a theory, a model, which very effectively predicts the behavior of certain aspects of the world. Talking about space bending is a metaphor that helps people picture and understand what is happening. GR redefined what "space" means. I don't see it as a paradox at all. If you were talking about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, I would be more likely to agree with you.
Space is real, and I don't think space bending is a metaphor. No mysterious force acts upon any two particles with mass that attracts them to each other; they are simply following the curvature of spacetime itself, caused due to their respective masses. Put it this way, metaphors are only as good as that which is source of the borrowed quality and that to which the quality is applied. So, I say, "He is an animal!" and the sense of it depends on the person in question and animals being both familiar. If space bending is just a metaphor, then what IS it that the metaphor is being applied to?
Yes. But then, the very structure of the performative contradiction, "this sentence is false" is very curious. It is not really a misuse, but a simple logical construction that is self contradictory, that generates contradiction where only tautologies should be allowed.
And with the others, I think there are important problems that are ignored, generally. What is God, if one ditches the Christian "misuse"? Is it wrong to think empirical science dis really not about the actualities lie before us. After all, the actual world is not a quantified presence; language and logic make it so; isn't science's claims about being about the world a hidden reification of logic?
Usually this expression is used in reference to spacetime and depends on a certain metric. Objects, however, become distorted by gravity and speed. Length contraction, etc.
Yep, blame [s]Canada[/s] language. There are no (true) paradoxes and if anyone claims that there are, prove it to them that they're misusing language (semantically and/or syntactically). Is this what you're driving at? Quite an ingenious solution; saves the phenomena insofar as 1[sup]st[/sup] order logic is at stake.
How?
Agreed that it can't make the case that it's rational to be rational on pain of circulus in probando. I'm telling you, I'm speaking the truth! How can you prove that, we ask? Well, I vouch for myself, I guarantee that I don't/never lie! WTFery!
The paradox is this: logic is the gold standard for proof but it can't prove itself without committing a fallacy, begging the question. I can't be trusted. Does this get an A for honesty and an F for intelligence? Logic, as it turns out, paradoxically, is a fool! The whole point to its creation and development was to build trust in a system that would always deliver the goods when it comes to truth. Yet, here we are, logic can't justify itself.
I don't think so, I don't see how, especially insofar as logic consists of syntact translations of tautologies and functions like scaffolding for building mathematical models of physical systems.
Yes, so account for distortions, what is the most elegant theory? The curvature of space. Is this an idea that makes sense, not as it is theorized about, but as a singular concept? What do you do with theory that explains things well, but is radically counterintuitive? Space bending is, as Wittgenstein put it, "an argument place" meaning it must first, to make sense at all, pass through the logic that is deployed to explain it and bring it into being, and space bending presupposes yet another space IN WHICH bending may occur, but this leads to an infinite regression of spaces. Maybe. Not clear on how positing this "second" space would make the same demands the first is subject to (that it bends, of course). At any rate, clearly, this second space would be eternity (keep in mind, we do not "see" eternity when looking up in the ight sky. This is because we are not seeing this second order of spatial existence. Interesting to note: When you do gaze into the night sky, there is this unsettling weirdness of at once facing infinity, yet not comprehending it at all. this is because what you are observing is the inside of your cranium).
Seems to me, most ideas refer back, or at least originally referred back, to something at human scale. That certainly makes sense with "space." Of course, there's always been space - the three-dimensional volume in a room, etc. I wonder if the development of the idea of space was changed by the development of Cartesian geometry. It certainly seems like it would have been as people learned that there were long distances between those bright things up in the sky. Science and science fiction probably changed the meaning of the word even more. General relatively just continued those changes and added another dimension. So, no. Space is not real, if by that you mean that it hasn't changed and can't change again.
And of course space bending is a metaphor. People can bend a tree branch or a piece of metal, but you can't bend air. Until, suddenly, you can.
Quoting Constance
It doesn't make any difference who the person in question is, if it's male, he is an animal. Sorry, a little cute.
As I said, I think you are caught up in the same paradox creation that you started out writing about.
If this is true, and I think it is, why can't spacetime bend?
Quoting Constance
Everything put into language is a reification of something. Every word is reification. Reification and metaphor, that's all there is. I guess reification is the same thing as metaphor.
Yes.
Quoting Constance
Science is all about finding out situations where our intuition is wrong. Intuition doesn't come from the great beyond, it can be changed by experience and understanding. Do you also doubt special relativity and quantum mechanics? Those theories are certainly counterintuitive.
Zeno's arrow proves spacetime is continuous. The problem with discrete spacetime is particles moving in it and time advancing. Spacetime can't be broken up though and the nature of space remains a mystery.
Einstein's theory of spacetime showed we can actually bend space by mass. How mass informs space remains a mystery in GR.
The gods created spacetime. The reasons for their grounds remain a mystery.
That's a triplet mysteries. Performative contradiction, like I'm dead, are no mystery though.
Unless, on the other hand, the question begged leads to a finality that IS a finality. Put it this way, if logic were to conceive of its own generative foundation, that too would be suspect. Indeed, to question logic in this way is simply nonsense, for the asking of the question is self contradictory since the question possesses the logic form of an interrogative (and implicit assertions, negations, and so on). We only get put out because we expect logic to be something it is not. It exists, like a chair or a piano, and talk about the generative source of anything at all is nonsense.
Just to point out, logic has no point. Unless you think it is part of a divine plan, or the like. Also, when we use logic to lie, it is not logic's fault, but its use. This is different from "I am lying" or "this sentence is false." These are fashioned out of logic itself.
Zeno has a couple, one being the a priori impossibility of motion and the a posteriori actuality of motion (the dichotomy paradox).
Up until Zeno, the Parmenidean luminary, discovered these paradoxes, (Greek) thinkers must've been completely convinced of the power of lumen naturale (the light of reason) to make sense of the world - in every case, reason merely served to confirm observation or if ever the two were in conflict, reason would come out on top, an doublechecking empirical data would reveal errors, subtle and egregious.
This, however, wasn't/isn't possible with the dichotomy paradox. Logic clearly demonstrates motion is impossible; observation, to our dismay, shows that motion is not only possible but actual (ambulando solvitur).
As you can see, a pre-Zeno reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism is impossible. We have to make a choice: believe our minds or believe our legs, but not both! We all know Zeno's preference: motion, in the Parmenidean umiverse, is an illusion. I guess this means Zeno, Parmenideans, were true blue rationalists.
That said, Zeno clearly wasn't as mathematically talented as Archimedes who had used the method of exhaustion (limits) to calculate the value of [math]\pi[/math], presaging the advent of calculus by roughly 1.8 k years. Calculus in its full glory took off with Newton and Leibniz and it could be said that calculus (differentiation and integration) could one day bridge the rationalism vs. empiricism gulf.
Aside: Actual may not imply possible.
Yeah, it works, and very well at that. But the actual "things of the world" are actualities that are not the logical forms assigned them when trying to make things work. So when the astronomer analyzes a light spectrum, the logicality of the analysis is what s/he contributes and not the visible phenomenon. This latter has nothing at all of the logicality in the description, yet science is generally confident that its work is essentially connected to the objects of its quantifications, that is, logicality (logic being essentially a quantifying utility).
The idea of wind bending certainly seems unproblematic. It is not like bending something solid, but it is as determinate quantity of something, the kind of thing such that it curving here, arching there makes sense. If one can conceive of a material substance that is so hard it breaks before is bends at all, then one can still conceive of it bending given some alteration in the conditions of it doing so. That is, it is still logically possible that it can bend. The point I would make is that if the posting space "bending" is a metaphor only and not meant to be taken literally, then what IS the "literal" side of this?
Cartesian geometry had an impact on the way things were conceived and measured, I know. Important is the the basic assumption that objects are in space res extensa at all! Extension in space requires the a conceptual framework to conceive of it. The concept "extension" is a quantitative measure: to extend something has to extend to a certain degree, length, depth; and if the extension is deemed indeterminate, it is implied that determined quantifications would be possible if one knew them. The question here is, Is the world a quantified presence that when encountered we "read off" from its presence what it already has. Or, is the world altogether without quantification, and the quantifying is done by us in our efforts to systematically make use of it?
As I see it, to bend absolutely requires a medium in which a thing can bend. Bending is a contingent idea.
Reification is the same thing as metaphor? An intriguing idea. How so?
I think quantum physicists "doubt" quantum mechanics, meaning they really don't understand it because it itself is not clear...yet. By counterintuitive is simply mean that space bending makes no sense as a logical concept. It is apriori nonsense: One cannot even imagine something bending without a medium in which it bends. I said space is real, and I mean space is not an abstract concept. I wave my hand through ???? It is not nothing. The physical concept of nothing requires space to be nothing IN. This is how it is with bending, or curving, arching, rounding out, and so on: these are spatial terms. They presuppose space. Space bending is like saying logic implying: to imply is to USE logic. It cannot be its own presupposition.
Well, just note that you had to bring god into it. If you do your explaining of something with this kind of talk, then you must realize you have gone metaphysical. Is space time a metaphysical concept? It is. Of course, measurements of speed, mass, relative values for these and so on, this is not metaphysical at all. Very clear ( I have read how it is clear, that is. Not the actual physics). But space time IS. For in order for it to make sense one must posit something entirely inconceivable: that IN which space bends.
the gods created spacetime? No, I think not. We created it in a system of pragmatic utility to "deal with" what the "gods made". Quantitative measurement is a logical function. If you think we are the gods, then fine. Maybe we are.
But at last, I agree, it is a mystery. But the mystery has consequences. How about acceleration as a concept? Acceleration occurs in spacetime, and this is the mystery. How about any quantification AT ALL vis a vis the empirical world?
Bring Parmenides and Heraclitus together and you have Plato, essentially. It seems Parmenides won the argument in Plato, the latter insisting the what what truly real was the idea, not the palpable phenomenon. By my thinking, Heraclitus wins out, though it gets pretty complicated, because while the desire to yield to an ontology of a palpable world over what is merely a conception of it, concepts are in their own way, just as palpable: No concepts, no singularities.
Slippery. The trick is, obviously, to reconcile the conceptuality with the irrational yet imposing and really impossible world (impossible because it is not contained categorically. It qualitatively "exceeds" categorical thinking. Sui generis).
It's a physical concept. Our perception of space is like it really is. We can move in it. Objects can move in it. It's the sauce between matter. It's the stuff objects can move in.
People used to think that there must be a luminiferous aether because they thought that electromagnetic waves had to have a medium to propagate through. Turns out they were wrong. I don't see how your inability to conceive of space bending without any outside space to bend in is any different.
Quoting Constance
I don't think that any reputable physicist doubts quantum mechanics at all. They may argue about the interpretation, but I think that is a metaphysical argument, not a scientific one. Fact is, it works. As they say, shut up and calculate. It doesn't make any difference if you can understand why. Science isn't about understanding why things happen, it's about understanding how things happen. Your "...yet" is a bit too cute for my taste. Most physicists don't think further study will make QM any less counterintuitive. The world is not obligated to arrange itself in a way that fits into your way of thinking about it. You can't change the world, but you can change your thinking.
Quoting Constance
I'll say this one more time, then I promise I won't say it again - You've fallen into the same trap of mistaking the words for the world that you identify in the OP.
I dont think we are the gods. I think they made us. They had good reason. There are as many gods as creatures in the universe. We just play the game they played already eternally. From virus gods to hominid gods. The god story will be revealed shortly... Exclusively here on Teeee...Peee...Eeeef!
Of course it is, that is, until you get to the part where it is bending. Then you have to explain this. When you reach an explanatory threshold like this, you have to concede that though the idea works to explain one thing, it creates a problem that also needs explaining, like a rug's wrinkle that is flattened out here, but rises up again over there. In this case the wrinkle is a metaphysical one.
The real problem? This lies not in the world, but in the conditions of its observation. To observe at all is to condition the object. Language and logic are not these "transparencies" that record the conditions of the world around us. They are "opacities" if you will, that are an independent existence.
Of course. But we also have to condition the subject, i.e, us. There is no such thing as "an observation". Thats already a theoretical claim. How and what we observe is not theory-laden but a theory, a story on its own. Space can have an objective existence, like the bending of it. A bend space(time) is a physical reality. The GW hunters at LIGO don't wanna chase metaphysical ghosts!
Think of it as an apriori problem, not an empirical one. What if someone theorized in a way that violated the principle of causality? Putting aside that someone has in fact done this, ask your self how well this sits with your understanding. It is a blatant absurdity, apodictically impossible. Rejecting the aether theory of light propagation was not like this at all since aether had no apriori status.
Quoting T Clark
Richard Feynman: "I think I can say that nobody understands QM." Not that I am fond of quoting authority to argue a point, but in my own limited exposure to this idea, I can say with confidence that it is not something people understand. When I say "doubt" I mean just this. They don't doubt the repeatability of the evidence; they doubt it can be understood. A bit like understanding rockets go up, escape the atmosphere and so on, but not having a clue as to how. How that cat can both dead and alive. Unless you have something I never heard of.
But as to, "The world is not obligated to arrange itself in a way that fits into your way of thinking about it." If you think the world is so "radically contingent" that anything could happen because nothing constrained by the "laws" of physics, I think you are right. There are no laws like this sitting out there among things. This is our doing, and it sounds like you agree with this. But are you willing to agree with the what follows from this? It is not the indeterminacy of a handful of problematic ideas. It is all that comes before us: To know at all is to take up the world AS this knowledge claim is expressed. Taken APART from the knowledge claim, pure metaphysics. The cup on the table, e.g. is qua cup, a cup, but qua a palpable presence not a cup at all.
I will be listening for the god story, looking for a clue to something profound. Hint: I don't think they made us. Nor did we make them. It is a conspiracy and we are both in on it.
Well, they made the universe, with all life evolving in it. I don't think we made them.
You mean it's a conspiracy that both the gods and life are involved in?
In 1912, Bertrand Russell wrote "On the Notion of Cause" in which he makes the argument that causation is not a useful way of thinking about the world. In 1943, R.G. Collingwood wrote "An Essay on Metaphysics" in which he wrote something similar. My point? It is not "absurdity" to deny the principle of causality.
I think that goes to show that you and I think too differently about the world for this to be a fruitful discussion.
Quoting Constance
I don't know what this means. More evidence you and I do not have the language to talk to each other about this.
But this is just what I say space cannot have. Try to conceive of something bending without a medium in which something can bend. All possible examples of bending require a stable foundation of space as an assumption such that bending can be understood relative to this stability. If I bend a stick or a piece of paper how is this bending determined? By identifying spatial changes in position. This is how all change, movement is measured and determined, vis a vis something that does not change or move. If it is posited that space itself changes or moves or bends, then this in turn requires the same stabilizing setting.
So to say space bends requires yet an additional medium in which space is, for all bending requires this in order for 'bending" to make sense.
This is certainly not to say another space is therefore to be posited. It is to say that our geometrical ways of stabilizing the space of the world are just projections onto an otherwise impossible presence. Reason, logic, language are utilities, only thrown, if you will, unto a world that otherwise has nothing of this "utility". This plays out across the board in every and all attempts understand in all the sciences, for these attempts are propositional, categorical, and the world is nothing like this. Science does not speak to us about the world; it speaks what we need to say about it in order to deal with it.
The world? Utterly metaphysical.
I mean the term 'gods' was certainly an invention, a fiction created by humans long ago; but it is not the case that this means there are no gods if it can be shown that such a term is necessitated by conditions of actuality. In other words, while we did an awful lot of invented, narrating, imagining through the ages, there are actual material conditions of your being human beings that are that from which our narratives find their meaning. Metaphysics is not a myth. We are it.
That's a questionable assumption...
You can't bend space like a stick. You bend it with mass.
Read that Russell essay and you will find Russel, in good analytic fashion, is complaining about how well causality can be explained using available means to do so. To utter a definition at all is to bring the wrath of analytic clarity upon you, and this applies to your cat and your sofa, as well. But this is not how we take causality, as a concept with an unproblematic analytic profile. It is an apodictic intuition: one cannot imagine a spontaneous effect. And that is all.It is not that this can be laid out in language that can be equally coercive to the understanding. Language is at best interpretative. But to just sit an imagine an object moving by itself, in good faith, it is clear as anything can be: impossible. A coercive to the understanding as modus ponens.
Quoting T Clark
Sorry about that. It simply means that language and the sensuous intuitions that it is about are qualitatively distinct. The former cannot be about the latter for they are separated by a chasm of difference.
I can.
Quoting Constance
No.
But you have to see the whole idea presented. I am not way the gods do not exist, or did not. I am saying a comprehensive understanding of what this could be cannot be done thinking about divine creation nor human imagination. It issues from both, but looking into this requires a good deal of compromise. Much, no, most that we casually understand has to be dismissed.
Quoting EugeneW
It is not about how something is bent. It is about bending as such.
Is bending curving? Space can have curvature. The metric can change.
Bending, curving, arching, swaying, leaning, accelerating, moving, and on and on. Things move IN space, e.g., space cannot move unless it moves In something else.
The metric? you mean the standard of measurement. But this doesn't enter into tit. It is bending as such.
Casually yes. Non-casually, after deep contemplation ("out yonder, is this huge world, which exists, independently of us human beings, and which stands before us, like a great eternal riddle; the contemplation of this world beckons, like a liberation"), no.
How can space be accelerated or lean? Can it sway? The metric yes. But can the metric accelerate?
Quoting Constance
Space dont move. Only the objects in it. It can expand or contract but has no speed. The metric is the just the metric of GR.
Well then, you seem willing to drop what is familiar and venture into alien territory when it comes to talking about God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages, and how sensible thinking can find where the two meet. How would you do this?
Quoting EugeneW
No, it can't expand or contract. Expansion is a spatial term; it presupposes space.
Yes. You are right and wrong. The global expansion of the universe is apparent but to bend around mass it can stretch, which is indeed different from expansion.
The medium of the dream could inform. Maybe that's how the gods contact us.
Why not?
Well then, you seem willing to drop what is familiar and venture into alien territory when it comes to talking about God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages, and how sensible thinking can find where the two meet. How would you do this?
Which two? Alien territory and the familiar?
God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages
and
how sensible thinking can find where the two meet
Ah yes! I think God is a grand narrative. There are a lot of grand narratives. Who is to tell which stands close to gods? I think my narrative is the true one. Why? Ill tell you after I walked our dog!
I had a dream. Im writing a short story about it. Ill letya know!
There is curved space - a type of geometry, and there is spacetime curvature, a way to interpret general relativity.
Empty space doesn't bend, IMO. :chin:
What if you put mass in it?
Be my guest. It distorts spacetime in the appropriate metric. Space by itself doesn't bend.
Isn't frame-dragging bending? Or is torsion the real bending? You can stretch space without bending but can you bend without stretching?
If space curves time curves.
It depends on what you mean by the object. Really, the fur of this cat shares something with a principle of organization (concept) that is used to talk and think about it? You think there is a "territory" that is qualitatively shared with the concepts used to refer to it? Nature " shows itself to itself" through logic?
These are pretty strong claims and i don't think any of them are right. I would have ask, how is it that a natural object reveals itself through logic? What do you mean by "natural"? Obviously, what you say does depend on this. Nature?
It doesn't bend unless there is a mass to bend it. I see this, but of course, space bending at all is an issue for the aforementioned reasons. And obviously, I think the science is fine, I mean, I am not arguing about that.
No. What "bends" is spacetime, which does not have the Euclidean metric in R^4. The Euclidean metric is how we normally measure spacial dimensions. We need Kenosha Kid (PhD physics) to return and explain this stuff. :chin:
1. Posit two levels of reality (universal and particular). Heraclitean change occurs in particulars while the Paremindean universals (forms/ideas) don't undergo change or remain constant.
2. Decide which, the universals or the particulars, is to be deemed real. Once we do that it's either Parmenides or Heraclitus but definitely not both.
Am I understanding you correctly?
No. What bends is space. This is accompanied with the bending of time. Time even is an maginary, giving flat spacetime a pseudo Euclidean metric. The bending of time simply means that clocks run with different paces over bend space.
Not sure what you are arguing. We can bend space like a stick. If you rotate a heavy object, space is bend in the direction of rotation. Frame dragging.
Thinking differently about the world is the most fertile ground for a fruitful discussion.
Language is more metaphor than logic
I have always been mystified that adding one-half plus one-quarter plus one-eighth plus one-sixteenth etc adds up to one, in that adding together an infinite number of things results in a finite thing.
I can explain this paradox by understanding that relations are foundational to the logic we use, in that 5 plus 8 equals 13, etc, yet relations, as illustrated by FH Bradley, have no ontological existence in the world.
It is therefore hardly surprising then that paradoxes will arrive when comparing two things that are fundamentally different, ie, our logic and the world.
Quoting Constance
We must be remember that when paradoxes do arrive, that this will be an inevitable consequence of the nature of logic, rather than indicative of anything strange happening in the world.
The fact that logic will inevitably lead to paradox explains why metaphor is such an important part of language, so much so, that a case may be made that "language is metaphor".
No, it's not the physics. It is the apriori impossibility of space bending. Space presupposes space, and you can't have something as its own presupposition unless it is an absolute of some kind. Space doesn't bend; things bend IN space.
Yes, and??
Then you have an issue with intuition and I cannot help you there. Someone argued that causality was debatable because Bertrand Russell wrote a paper saying so. Russell was actually waying we can't make sense of causality, but he was not contradicting the basic intuition that a spontaneous cause is impossible. I wonder how this went with him. Does he understand that a spontaneous cause is apodictically impossible. I wonder this regarding your thoughts: do you not see that space cannot bend, not because Einstein was wrong, but because the c0oncept is nonsense.
Space probably IS just a metaphor in this context. Physicists are not talking about actual bending anymore than they are talking about actual strings in string theory. Bending is simply a term borrowed to describe the effect witnessed observing gravitational pull. It LOOKS like bending when looking at a geometrical presentation of gravity's strength vis a vis mass and distance. We have all seen the images of the warping of space around amass like a planet.
But it does further illustrate the point that when we face the world, we impose a familiar image or idea to assimilate it. We invent problems like God and evil, arrows and the like defying logic, and the rest. Space bending
.At any rate, shouldn't you be walking a dog somewhere? I imagine it suits you.
Sorry about that. My back is not well, nor my disposition as a result.
The surprise I have in mind is usually just ignored. Paradoxes like Zeno's should be telling us that geometry and reality are very different, and geometry is just an expression of intuitive logical thinking. The surprise is that structural contradictions indicates not just that logic is quirky in the world that is not logical, but that this illogical world is altogether not logic. And so our thoughts about it do not "represent" it.
What do they do? They solve problems in time. Dicing up the world into particulars, what reason does, among other things, does not hand us the world; it does give us a means to manage and deal with the world, but the world altogether is not logical; it is alogical, apart from logic, qualitatively different, and language is mostly self referential, as are logical proofs. So when a scientist tells you the planet Jupiter has a mass and a trajectory round the sun, and is a distance D at time T, and so on, what is s/he talking about? It is about relations WE have with that planet, not the thing out there.
Does language have an ontological dimension at all? Yes and no. If you ask an ontological question, and don't simply ignore it, then answers can get interesting. The point is that, if you will, we don't really live in "the world" when it comes to knowledge claims. We live in epistemology. The world before us apart from this is utterly metaphysical.
Quoting RussellA
Strange happening in the world? Not the way to word it. The world is not strange, which is a borrowed term from familiar strange things, life's ironies. No, this is far more egregious. Intelligibility itself is completely Other than "the world" (as it is being considered here). You and I and everyone else are NOT the logical categories we are fit into when we talk and write.
Spontaneous cause is possible. Read about the Norton dome. I don't see why it is nonsense. You can bend space with a stick in it even! If the universe grows older, a stick in it will get torn apart by expanding space. I would agree if you said you can't cut space in pieces.
The world shows itself as it is. We dont invent things to assimilate this. Gods, good and evil, bent space, they are real things. Bent space is made visible by the the masses in it.
Our thought about reality resonate with reality. Reality projects itself into our brain constantly if we walk around in it. Via the senses. They constantly receive update about the actual state and our brain creates an image while we walk. Space is part of that image. It's the sauce between material objects in which they and we, our bodies, move. It can even be thought as made up of stuff, hidden variables and virtual particles.
Quoting Constance
Is this what you had in mind?If so, I agree completely.
“Now, an intra-ontology of embodiment has momentous implications for how we conceive knowledge. In the framework of a standard ontology, we strive to acquire
knowledge about what is given out there, and this non-committal knowledge can be encoded intellectually. But in the framework of an intra-ontology, non-committal knowledge appears as a non-sense. According to a Merleau-Pontian phenomenologist, knowledge affects the two sides that arise from the self-splitting of what there is (namely of embodied experience). In other terms, knowledge of something arises concomitantly with a mutation of ourselves qua knowers. And this mutation of ourselves qua knowers manifests as a mutation of (our) experience that cannot be encoded intellectually, since the very processes and conclusions of the intellect depend on it.
Such intra-ontological pattern of knowledge is universal. It may look superfluous or contrived in the field of a classical science of nature, where the objectification of a
limited set of appearances is so complete that everything happens as if the objects of knowledge were completely separate from the act of knowing. But it becomes unavoidable in many other situations where this separation is in principle unattainable, such as the human sciences or quantum mechanics.
This is why Varela considered that a purely intellectual operation (“a change in our understanding” about some object) is not enough to solve the mind-body problem, and even less the “hard problem” of the origin of phenomenal consciousness, namely of lived experience. For these problems are archetypal cases in which the inseparability between subject and object of knowledge is impossible to ignore. What is needed to overcome them, according to the lesson of the intra-ontological view of knowledge, is nothing less than “a change in experience (being)” (Varela 1976: 67). Addressing properly the problem of lived experience is tantamount to undergo a change in experience.”(Michel Bitbol)
An entirely abstract concept, along the lines of showing how the speed of light can be exceeded given that two beams of light whose paths converge when directed toward each other askew, and the point at which the they merge moves along the line of convergence at a rate faster than the velocities of each. This is not far afield from Russell, really, for when we conceive of a thing, we wind up in a explanatory system, leaving off the thing to be explained entirely. We make discursive castles in the air, which rather goes to the point that explanatory matrices of any kind never do explain "the world" conceived as an "actuality" (and double inverted commas are the inevitable consequence of this kind of talk). The world stands apart from this. Of course, what about eidetic ontology? Are ideas real? Yes and no.
That is an interesting statement. I wonder what it means. The world shows itself as it is? I actually agree with this, but surely you don't mean when we speak of the world, we have revealed the way the world "shows itself"?
Not sure why you bring this up. Isn't it clear that the point of light projected by a rotating laser on the inside of a huge sphere doesnt actually travel at all?
Quoting Constance
We havent revealed the way it shows itself. But what is revealed gives you information. The particle physicist sees different aspects of reality (and even here different things are seen as where some see massless quarks and leptons as fundamental point particles interacting with s Higgs field to give them mass I see massless geometrical, nonpointlike interacting triplets of preons) as the nuclear physicist, who sees different things than the molecular biologist, etc.
As well as reaching out and bending space to your will. Your grasp of nothing is exceptional :cool:
Quoting EugeneW
Does science passively give knowledge and information about a world outside of the knower , or is it an activity that makes changes in the world and then gauges it’s predictions in terms of the responses of the world to its interventions? Isnt there a fundamental circularity in science? For instance, a theory is usually tested by
means of instruments described and interpreted by means of this very theory. Another level of circularity is that an ‘anomaly' (threatening to falsify the theory) can only be expressed in terms of this theory.
In other words truth as consistency rather than truth as correspondence?
Hypotheses are always about coherency. They are never proven true. One selects, according to some predefined criteria, the [s]true[/s] best hypothesis.
Is the following consistent with your understanding of coherence?
“…the real criteria of validation of scientific descriptions cannot be their correspondence with the process ‘in itself’, but another criterion that a recent current of the philosophy of scientific experimentation has termed ‘enlarged consistency’ or ‘performative consistency’.27 Performative consistency consists of an agreement
among (a) the theories, (b) the construction of devices and the understanding of their functioning, (c) the theoretical guidance of measurements, and (d) the results (Pickering, 1995). More simply, performative consistency may be limited to an agreement between the perceptive interpretation of an image and the result of actions guided by perception. Let’s consider an example of this kind, discussed by Hacking (1983): the interpretation of images coming from a fluorescent microscope (or X rays). Does one need to ascertain ‘correspondence’ of these interpreted images with ‘the real object itself’ in order to consider them as valid? Not at all. On the one hand the comparison of the image with ‘the object itself’ is impossible (at the very most can we compare several images coming from different types of microscopes). And on the other hand, the researcher can do completely without such a comparison in practice.
Instead of comparing, he contents himself with acting under the supposition that the image is correct, and with insuring that the result of the action, controlled by a new image of the same microscope, is in conformity with what the initial image permitted him to foresee. In sum the criterion of validity of the image limits itself to an enlarged consistency between the image, the interventions that it makes possible to guide, and another image of the same type that highlights the consequences of these interventions.
Validation relies on a form of consistency and not on ‘correspondence’ (Shanon, 1984). True, when performative coherence has been reached and stabilized in some given scientific field, it is tempting to believe that this reveals a correspondence between a theory and its external object. Such a shortcut may help, as a provisional incentive to use the said theory as a guide for action. But it should not be endowed with any ontological significance.( Michel Bitbol)
intraontology. Is this another name for hermeneutics? Or intentionality? But the idea seems clear enough, bluntly put, you look at it and your gaze is part and parcel of the object observed. I go further than this, though fully aware that few will go with me. I like to take the very popular "high-flying thought" that says what we receive and give out in our sciences is what is there independently of our perceptual contribution, and proceed with this assumption to see how far epistemology can be taken. And, as predicted, it instantly turns against itself: Rorty stated, "no one has ever been able to explain how anything out there to can get in here (pointing to his head)." The analytic philosopher Rorty of course talks as if there is no problem with this (as I read through parts of his Mirror of Nature); but all of this, he insists, in the light of "truth is made, not discovered." He just thinks like Wittgenstein that there is no point is trying to speak about the unspeakable, for there is no unspeakable to speak of. I like the way Slovaj Zizek put it: it is like a software program that has no mountains in the distance of it visual setting. It is not that there is anything IN the program that does not show up, if one were in the program. It would be an absence the presence of which would neither fill a void nor redeem or anything else, for any "void" is just a mistake fashioned out of what we already have. I think Rorty thinks like this. So there is no merging, no intraontology, for this would imply the merging of two things, speaking roughly, when there are no two things. A fabricated metaphysics of two. Or: for there to be a synthesis, there has to be two identifiables on each side, but this cannot be shown, for neither side makes a appearance.
I
Let’s be clear about the “two things” intraontology is talking about. It is the noetic and the noematic , the subjective and objective poles of experience. They are not separable, don’t appear individually and thus don’t form a synthesis or merger. But without these poles there could be no differential ,and without a differential there could be no time.
Quoting Constance
Which philosophers are you getting this from? Marion? Henry?
Whenever you find yourself concluding something like a spontaneous effect or a contradiction built into the structure of logic, then you are going to find the assumption that this must be cleared up somehow. A true paradox is never allowed to stand. The law of causality is absolutely coercive to the understanding regardless of any and all to the contrary. (Just try it). This is NOT to say, that as a law, it is perfectly conceived, free of elucidative possibilities or, as I believe, not something else entirely. I think it is something else entirely because this is world is foundationally metaphysical (notwithstanding what I say elsewhere. In fact, I do not believe in foundational dualities of any kind. The perceived duality lies with a mistake, and the mistake is time. I do know how this sounds, but I believe it comes to this).
Both. And truth as really being there. The mental and physical world are dependent on each other. Structures in the physical world engrave themselves in our brain and the brainstructures inform the physical world. We can perceive all levels of strucure as we, our bodies, move in the physical world and we actively (experiments) or passively give shape to the world and have all right to call our perception objective. Like I wrote before, a particle physicist sees indivisible pointlike massless quarks and leptons, while I perceive triplets of geometric nonpointlike massless preons gaining mass by interaction. I could, as I read somewhere, imagine that these particles are green dragons avoiding detection but I dont. I prefer the view that they are love and hate particles, charged with a mystical load to repulse or attract (the three basic charges in physics, exactly the right ones). Experiment has to decide which one is true, but some things are obvious a priori.
I think so. Rorty's neo-pragmatism is postmodernism and less mystical that Witty. Rorty's anti-foundationalist project seems primarily (and I only have general understanding of his work) to be opposed to what he sees are remnants of Greek philosophy - notions of idealism and absolute truth 'out there'. In Rorty's view humans are able to justify claims but can say nothing about Truth.
The universe was created. Still, it was not physically caused.
The motion of the ball on the Norton dome is not caused.
Is that so difficult to explain? Why? The world is constantly projected into our brain. Except when we sleep or are absent in thought or pondering. The brain is the receiver and creator at once.
I find the newer thinking about the role and process of science to be more exciting. I dont find the idea of physical objects to be all that useful anymore for quantum physics, biology or psychology. It’s a relic of an older era.
Quantum particles are still just particles. The wavefunction in which they are embedded makes their behavior non-local but they are still particles.
Truth as something discovered and this discovery lays itself before one's eyes as a discovered object, event; he would say no to this. Knowledge, truth, the real, being, and so on, is to be pragmatically conceived, but he accepts this world of science as the only wheel that rolls, so he is willing talk as if this world had the objective standing scientists take it to have. Wittgenstein was the same, working in the Kantian tradition that the world is an empirical world and there is no sense beyond this. I think this kind of thinking gave rise to positivism and the decades of analytic philosophy.
Yes, to what you say about justification and truth and Witt. But this does leave knowledge claims hanging out there. Frankly, one is driven to wonder why there is such disagreement about this, these two sides of Kant: the metaphysical idealist (because as much as Kant wanted to deny metaphysics, the very notion of transcendental idealism says otherwise) vs the empirical realist. I think it comes down to the way we are put together. Some have metaphysics built into their faculties?
The foundation for Rorty is pragmatism, and like all good hermeneuticists, this too is indeterminate.
Exactly. Having not read widely in his oeuvre, I have sometimes wondered how Rorty justified his strong social justice beliefs. He one said the the meaning of life is 'to make the world better for our descendants'. Do you have a sense of how he arrived at this logically?
I don't know what the universe being created means. Causality is far more accessible and intuitive. And if you are going to support a motion uncaused, then you have what I would call a radical paradox on your hands. Radical in that it is bat shit crazy, and I don't mean this insultingly. Keep in mind that intuition is what drives the rational process that gives rise to problems like the Norton Dome. The denial of movement ex nihilo is the strongest intuitive insistence the mind can make. I am aware that there are equations and contrived thinking that have rigor and lead to counterintuitive conclusions. But when this happens, it is not a matter of resolution, but one of endless head scratching until it is resolved.
What's so difficult to understand about that? The gods had plans to recreate heaven. Their words or expressions made the univerde come into existence. They created it. It's plain English.
If you know about virtual particles you would know that they laid the basis for thermodynamic time. They go back in forth in time. They were all that resided on the central singularity and the surroundings of that singularity set inflation off. There are infinite serial big bangs. Each has its own beginning of thermodynamic time. So the creation of the universe, with its infinity of big bangs, is not a temporal process.
In "Constructing quarks", a fascinating account of the history of the literal construction of the quarks is given. Weel, not exactly literally, but reality is seen as a moldable material. To be molded by experiment and ideas.
To my will?
He is often attacked for this, because on one can see how one can be so bound to the contingency of knowledge and truth, and hold that there is some moral imperative that fits into this. Simon Critchley:
[i]The obvious (if banal) question to be raised here is how such a
committment to universality can be consistent with Rorty’s anti-foundational
‘relativism’(between quotation marks, for I take it that relativism would be the
name of a pseudo-problem for Rorty)[/i]
And then
[i]Rorty just adds the caveat that an ironist
’Cannot be a “progressive” and ”dynamic” liberal’ (Rorty 1989, p. 91) and
cannot display the same degree of social hope as the liberal metaphysician. But
isn’t this just to suggest that the liberal ironist is regressive, sedentary and
hopeless- and what good is that sort of liberal?[/i]
You see, Rorty wants to have his cake and eat it too,. But you really can't do this. You find no metaphysical grounding that can secure a moralist position out of irony and contingency, and out of this the best that can be gotten is a weakened stand on affirming that "cruelty is the worst a person can do."
To me, wherever you go, you run into Dostoevsky's Ivan: no God, no morality. Metaphysics is the only thing that can save morality, which is why I argue a support for moral realism. Not everything is a "language game".
But you don't seem to know about the presuppositional time, prior to anything a physicist might inquire about. Foundational time, call it: Prior to any quantum thought occurring the head of a physicist, or any thought at all, there is the foundational temporal construction that is there in the first place, "through which" thought passes and in which existence and its genesis can be examined. This is the level of assumptions we are dealing with. Causality, as with time, is a term that is foundational, not derivative (though it is always important to know that no knowledge claim is unassailable. The question here goes to, what level of inquiry is making determinations). The term is derivative, no doubt, and the way we understand it certainly is derivative, that is, contingent upon the language contexts it is brought to light in. But this "pure intuition" of causality is not derivative.
As someone who reads science, then assumes there is in this a foundation for all things, what you say is rather typical. You don't realize that what physicists do rests upon an intuitional givenness.
This is almost willfully naïve (apologies). Do you really think a brain is a mirror to nature? Have you ever seen a mirror that looked like an opaque brain? Patently absurd.
I totally understand where you are coming from here. I'm sympathetic too. Personally I don't see god as realistic and I'll come back to this in a tick. For me morality is unlikely to be metaphysical - as far as I can tell morality is created to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of order. And maybe Rorty holds to a similar view. Generally communities come to a shared agreement about the core values. But I agree with you about the odd gap between Rorty's philosophy and the certainty of his 'real world' ethical positions.
Like Zisek (who I am not in the thrall of) I generally reverse the Dostoevsky idea - 'with god anything is permittable' - hence inquisitions, forced conversions, homophobia, holy wars, misogyny, slavery. There's not an egregious behavior available to humans that hasn't been justified by a direct appeal to god. Now I do understand that this has no bearing on whether god approves or not, it's just a comment on the alleged moralizing effects of theism.
Sounds like my kind of book.
Are you just regurgitating Kant here?
Which sort of moral realism do you advocate for? Are you more a fan of Nussbaum and Pereboom’s blame skepticism (deterministically-based forward-looking blame) or P.F. Strawson (free will desert-based moral blame)?
He went further. He said the idea of cause in physics is meaningless.
So a differential is what is there, but simply the way we talk about what is there. Originally, it is all just "of a piece". Rorty I think would say yes to this. All talk is an abstraction from what is not talk at all. I think this is right.
But you wonder about my comment on time, and I see that this will not go well. It is a unique issue between me and Kierkegaard and the Prajnaparamita. Put baldly, I think time is the generative source of what divides the world. There is this constant precipice of anticipation, anxiety laden. Put aside Kierkegaard's religious thinking; put in place the actual practice of kriya yoga and ask, what kind of affair is this if not the annihilation of the burden of time.
Analytically, this kind of thinking is abysmal. It is born out in a manner that is revelatory. For me, when the reductive method is engaged, there is a "stilling" of the world in a way that theory does not touch. Here, ??riputra, all things have the characteristic of emptiness,
I never read Husserl talking like this. He seemed surprised when students were becoming religious converts. Rorty fled philosophy because he felt it had reached its end. Half right. It reached its end centuries ago.
An intuitive givenness. This comes for Husserl and his progeny. Reading Ideas one is invited to look closely at the reduction and what it is about. There is, in this intuitive apprehension of the world, something foundational. It doesn't matter if the predelineated time event of conscious awareness never "stops" for presence, so to speak. Not does it matter if 'time' is a contextual term, contingent and impossible be anything but what its embeddedness in thought allows.
What can I say, Kant opened doors.
I am a moral intuitionist, and the issue is metaethics.
What is the anatomy of an ethical act? There are aspects that are not really ethical, which are facts. It is a fact that I borrowed the ax, and a fact that its owner is now drunk and bent on revenge, and so on. In themselves, none of these presents the essence of what makes an affair ethical. Facts have no ethical dimension. To see this, one has to turn to value, the strangest thing in existence.
I could go on, but only if you are interested.
They just think they’ve annihilated time. By trying to ground change in the stasis of emptiness, what they’ve actually done is reified it by not noticing that emptiness is a form of valuation. Nietzsche and Heidegger recognized that Emptiness and the nothing are pregnant. Not pure terms of absence but transition itself. Emptiness is a refusalof the past in the face of the future as not-yet articulated possibilities which is already upon one. Emptiness doesn’t precede time , it defines its structure.Emptiness for Heidegger is the moment of vision , rapture, astonishment, wonder, the uncanny.
But the idea is not what is discussed here. It is not logical discursivity that discovers the essential that tells us something cannot move unless acted on. What makes causality so intractable to analysis is that it is intuitive, and not empirical, and such things are not reducible. I mean, we can try to call them something else, but language always forces matters into its own designs, hence Russell's trouble. It is like talking about metaethics (now that I think of it). We deny that ethics has an absolute foundation, such that in any given ethical case, there at its core something absolutely coercive. This is not because there is nothing like this there, but because the moment you try to talk about it, you place it in the dubious hands language and analysis. Causality as an intuition is taken AS causality in play, in context. But as an intuition, it is unassailable. Causality the same, I argue.
There are also aspects that are clearly deterministically explicable , like the child who didn’t understand or the schizophrenic who heard voices telling them to kill. In P.F. Strawson’s famous paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’, he distinguishes between such obvious examples where ethical judgement doesn’t apply, and examples where what he calls our reactive emotional-valuative moral attitudes do apply. He concludes that we should listen to our reactive emotions that drive us toward retributive justice. My question for you is how you parse valuative emotions like anger. Nussbaum and Pereboom reject anger because they see it as aimed at payback, retribution and revenge, which are backward looking valuations.
Pereboom on the irrationality of anger:
“On the skeptical view, an expression of resentment or indignation will invoke doxastic irrationality when it is accompanied by the belief—as in my view it always is—that its target deserves in the basic sense to be its recipient.”
“In the basic form of desert, someone who has done wrong for bad reasons deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because he has done wrong for those reasons, and someone who has performed a morally exemplary action for good reasons deserves credit, praise, and perhaps reward just because she has performed that action for those reasons (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Scanlon 2013). This backward-looking sense is closely linked with the reactive attitudes of indignation, moral resentment, and guilt, and on the positive side, with gratitude (Strawson 1962); arguably because these attitudes presuppose that their targets are morally responsible in the basic desert sense.”
“…when someone is mistreated in a relationship, there are other emotions available besides resentment and indignation—these emotions include “feeling disappointed, hurt or shocked about what the offender has done, moral concern for him, and moral sadness and sorrow generated by this concern when the harm done is serious”. Communicating such disappointment,
sadness, or concern can be quite effective in motivating avoidance of future misbehavour. In addition, communication of such alternatives to resentment and indignation “is not typically aggressive in the way that expression of anger can be, and will usually not have its intimidating effect” “ “moral sadness and sorrow—accompanied by a resolve for fairness and justice, or to
improve personal relationships—will serve societal and personal relationships as well as resentment and indignation does.”
Then there’s Jesse Prinz, who argues that moral
values are driven by emotions, and emotions are relative to individuals and communities. Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions.
No, Zizek is entertaining, and seems right on several things, like his Hegelian ideas (of which I know relatively little). And I like his Marxism, which I think holds a powerful truth about societal injustice.
As to morality, as I am explaining to Josh above, knowing it will end up badly because my views on ethics are very unpopular, ethics needs to be looked at phenomenologically, and I simply mean it has to be analyzed for its essential features apart from what is endlessly and tediously hashed over in the attempts to make sense of our attitudes and beliefs and the world. Is there something that makes ethics a problematic that fitting to its nature. Long story short: value.
An arguable idea.
I did mean to say I am not that find of him, but found him at least a clever dynamic presence.
But god: it is a term that requires better clarity before one can talk well about it. It is a mostly fictional account of why we were born to suffer and die and what we need to do to get free of it. this makes it a concept about the world, not about the way narratives tell us things. The issue is suffering, plain and simple (and happiness, but this for latter), and God the creator, the omniscient, omnipotent, the omnibenevolent, all out the window, as logocentric overreach and manipulative, dogmatic hyperbolic dismissibles.
Suffering, then. I ask, what is it? A very good question.
That's exactly what I realize to arrive at virtual particles as the foundation of both real matter in space as well as asymmetrical thermodynamic time. Before unidirectional, intuìtional, thermodynamical time took off, time was circular, and comparable to Aristotle's eternal circular motion, which neither went forth nor back. This eternal oscillation lied at the basis of all big bangs and beginnings of TD time.
Which is obvious nonsense, had he had some knowledge of physics. The problem in physics is why cause precedes effect..
It's the only plausible way to approach reality. We assume what our brain creates is a true image. Wou?d you assume we're given a fantasy? Would you prefer it?
[condescension] Let me explain this to you. Just saying "it's self-evident", "it's obvious", "it's a priori knowledge", "it's nonsense", or "it's undeniable" is not an argument.[/condescension]
Quoting EugeneW
He actually made his arguments based on and with reference to his understanding of modern physics at the time. Take a look at his argument - "On the Notion of Cause," 1912. I actually don't find that part of his argument especially convincing. I focus more on the fact that I think causation is a metaphysical entity. As with all metaphysics, it is neither true nor false, only more or less useful. Let's not go any further into it right now. The point I'm trying to make is that it is very much not obvious that things are caused. It's not obvious to me. It wasn't obvious to Russell. It wasn't obvious to R.G. Collingwood in 1943. We're not the only ones.
Suffering is suffering. What more do we need? :wink:
I dont wanna argue! Philosophy is not about argument (but it's probably you"re good at, hence your love to argue). Every effect has a cause. Only an object on a Norton Dome can be said to have no cause for its motion. Give me one example of a cause less event. Then I might give an argument why is has a cause. Everything is determined, has a prior cause. Without cause and effect no free will.
Then his knowledge was insufficient. It's all there is to logically conclude.
The obvious is the tip of your nose. Squeeze it too hard and you say "ouch'!
You brought up my previous post and were dismissive.:
Quoting Constance
I was that someone. So I responded and it is exactly the idea that is being discussed here. And, by the way, yes Russell was exactly contradicting the basic intuition that a spontaneous cause is impossible.
Quoting Constance
So, is it your position that your intuition trumps reason? Common sense must be right? I know the feeling you are talking about. When someone says that x caused y, I know what they mean. I've thought about that a lot and come to the conclusion that, except in a few very simple situations, it just doesn't work.
That's a bit muddled. Do you mean that every event has a cause? If so, then no, not necessarily. If you don't want to argue, then don't contradict things I write.
Quoting EugeneW
You haven't provided any logical argument. As I noted, "it's obvious" is no argument at all.
But this is a critical point. It is not the only approach, not even close. What happens is science's views become derivative, and primacy goes to it the Cartesian center. You can deny there is such a thing, which is fine; but you have arrived at a foundation for discussing things philosophically: phenomenology. Physics is now derivative, and this means its explanatory basis as a science with all of its paradigmatic historical progression, is held to be reducible to affairs at a more basic order.
Not fantasy. More real than real, if you like: the intuitive horizon that is presupposed by science. Hard to talk about, really, unless you read about it.
No, an event is a confusing term in relativity. It doesn't cover what it means. Events are metaphysical monsters. They don't exist. Every happening, on the other hand, is made up from a cause and effect, as they are spread in spacetime.
The logical argument:
Russel (or C, for that matter) based their refusal of a cause on physics. They didn't have enough of this knowledge. Logical conclusion: their refusal is unwarrented.
And I say "no." And you say "it's obvious." And I say, "no, it's not obvious." You are arguing that cause is real and obvious. My only argument is that it is not obvious. We're not getting anywhere with this.
I'm done. Unless someone pulls up one of my previous posts for criticism again without attribution.
Perhaps not, like the instantaneous decay of a uranium atom. :chin:
Some would say suffering requires redemption, not to invoke religious dogma, but as a stand alone phenomenon.
Im sure there are a lot of approaches. I prefer the approach the theory is the reality.
Quoting Constance
I disagree. Scientific views become reality.
Quoting Constance
Phenomena lie at the foundation. Indeed. But there exists stuff behind the phenomena. Scìence can lift the curtain and make that stuff visible. It's all a perception, I agree. But a truthful one.
Quoting Constance
Physics is now a derivative? I don't agree. All natural processes have a fundamental basic blocks. Truly existent matter. True, its nature remains unknown, though we can feel it by eating it.
Quoting Constance
More real than real? You mean what the nature of matter is? Then I agree. It's the content, the charge of matter that gives us consciousness. It's not that hard to talk about.
When the going gets tough...
Exactly! Its you who uses no argument! Except some reference to old dusty thinkers denying cause on insufficient knowledge base.
Yes! His leaving was not caused at all. He just instantaneously decayed spontaneously.
No, He was arguing that he could not make sense of it. The intuition is without an arguable basis. When we talk about it, and caste the intuition in terms, and these terms have associations, and these bind the argument to implications, and so on. This is how this goes. This intuition qua intuition is not assailable.
Quoting T Clark
Intuition is far from common sense. It simply stands alone. It would be like talking about qualia, but then, qualia, like being appeared to redly, really is not discussable. The moment you drop language, you stare dumbly, and when you try to discuss it, you find yourself deep in context, deep in the contingency of language, for red is not yellow or green, and color is a principle of subsumption, a classificatory term, and so on, and now one is on the road to arguing about being appeared to redly. Causality suffers the same fate. But there is in this something Other, this insistence it has, is an intuitive presence. It is "prior" to discussion. This is, again, NOT at all to say that there is some unassailable way to talk about this; not that we can definitively say what it is. This would be like explaining logic which says Wittgenstein, "shows itself" but not its generative nature.
When it is said that apodictic intuitions can be argued about, they are not arguing about the intuition; they are arguing about what is SAID about the intuition. You really should take a look at Russell's The Notion of Cause. Massively verbose.
It is not as if I expect you to see this and it does take work to familiarize yourself. But if all you read is science, you will never grasp phenomenology. This is the way of it with all things. Kant through Derrida has to be read. A must if you are going to talk about the foundations of knowledge claims.
And just look at how dismissive you are of something that altogether denies you want you want. Brains cannot do what you insist must be assumed. No way in good intellectual conscience you can think like this. When you find yourself at the very basis of your thinking about something, and the whole thing falls apart, it's time to move on to something that doesn't do this.
Sayin you don't agree is not an argument. By all means, make your case.
He wrote that causation is "...a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm."
Quoting Constance
I am a strong believer that intuition and introspection are valid, powerful, means of gaining knowledge and understanding. But, in the end, their results are still subject to the scrutiny of observation, experimentation, and reason. When you give intuition primacy over those factors, you've left philosophy and crossed the border into the bleak wasteland of voodooism, mysticism, and Republicanism.
I've had my say. You can have the last word if you'd like.
I agree with what you have written.
The question is why are geometry and reality very different
For me, the reason is that relations are foundational to our logic, yet relations have no ontological existence in the external world.
This explains why geometry and reality are very different, the world is alogical, language is self-referential, we live in epistemology and the world is utterly metaphysical.
If there was a more persuasive explanation why logic and reality are very different than because of the the nature of relations, then this would be of interest.
The next question is why we need to know why geometry and reality are very different
Perhaps it is sufficient to know what pragmatically works. I turn the ignition key on my car and the engine starts. I don't need to know why the engine starts, all I need to know is that turning the key starts the car. Why not treat the external world as an empirical experience and not search for any sense beyond this.
My justified belief that relations within logic are fundamentally different to relations within reality can never be knowledge
My belief is that logic and reality are very different because of the nature of their relations, and this I can justify. However, my justified belief that logic and reality are very different because of the nature of their relations can never be knowledge, as I can never have a true understanding of a reality that is relation-free using reasoning where relations are fundamental.
In this respect, my justified belief remains a working hypothesis, and will remain so
until presented with a more persuasive explanation as to the nature of logic and reality. My belief must always remain an invention rather than a discovery, as my belief transcends what I can ever discover.
Summary
The nature of relations is the fundamental barrier between our understanding of the external world and the external world itself.
Quoting Constance
Agreed, re: gravitational lensing. There are no mathematical expressions with space qua infinite containment, as a variable, which there must be if space moves, which it must if it bends.
(“Well, gosh, Mr. Bill. Where did the space go that was above the rock before I put the bucket there?”)
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Quoting Constance
Maybe....taken as causation in play.
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Quoting Constance
At first, maybe just language; to talk about indicates an analysis has already been done from which follows the dubious transcription into language. Subsequently, dubious analysis would then be of the initial language.
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Quoting Constance
This is catastrophically false, but none of your co-respondents noticed nor cared, even though every single one of them is fully immersed in it, so.....you got off scot-free. Almost.
Butting out.....
Speaking as a co-respondent, the phrase used was not "Kant denied metaphysics", which may well be "catastrophically false". The phrase was "as much as Kant wanted to deny metaphysics", which has a completely different meaning and is not "catastrophically false".
Of course, you are right, if you take intuition to be simply the immediate response your brain hands you to something you encounter. A mother's intuition, or the common sense that tells you a woman's place in the kitchen or something Donald Trump might think of. These "prereflective" beliefs are notoriously ill-conceived. But logic? Geometry? There is an element of necessity here that will not yield to any analysis. We may have the knowledge claim of what this is wrong, and I am sure this is true; I don't think for a moment that we understand what causality "really" is, same for logic: we are paradigmatically bound, you could say, in this. But the pure intuition is not going anywhere. Impossibilities are not possible, and, as a pure intuition, a causeless effect is impossible.
Ohfercrisakes.....that he wanted to deny it is every bit as false as he did deny it. He equally never did either.
True, but that is not what was written.
You are ignoring the qualifier "as much as" which is qualifying the clause that follows it - "Kant wanted to deny metaphysics".
And this is why I absolutely detest the ghastly stupidity of language games. DETEST, I tell ya!!
“As much as he wanted....” Exactly how much is that, anyway? WFT kinda qualifier would “as much as” be, without a quantitative measure to accompany it? Without a how much to go with the “as much”, who the hell cares about as much as he wanted? He wanted, however much it was. Which he didn’t in the first place. So of course “as much as” can be dismissed as a qualitative categorical condition and the falsity of the proposition stands unassailed.
There’s no mountain to be made from this molehill.
I read the Strawson and I think he makes an excellent case for explaining the constitution of our mutual moral regard for others and how he shows that "the preparedness to acquiesce in that infliction of
suffering on the offender which is an essential part of punishment is all of a piece with this
whole range of attitudes of which I have been speaking." Yes, we do live in these complex attitudinal relationships with others, and, if I take his meaning, determinism, while he admits, the truth or falsity of a general thesis of determinism would not bear on the rationality" of our choices or attitudes, he wants to establish a compromise. This is not an ontology. It is not engaged in asking, what can we say about the the being and its foundational features? It is rather saying, we must have certain " reactive attitudes" (generalized or specific) in place in order for moral agency itself to make sense, and these presuppose accountability, responsibility, guilt, innocence and other.
An interesting enlightening essay for me. I too "lean" away from determinism in light of this kind of thinking. And all of the assumptions possessed within a society's system laws and morals have implicit prima facie validity. Of course, when taken as a whole, the system is massively imperfect. this land is mine. Why? Because I bought it, own it. How does the purchasing power of your position give you this right of ownership? I worked for it? Oh, you mean you "mixed your labor" in the world and this labor produced the right? But what if you didn't do a damn thing, and it was given to you? And what if the purchasing opportunity were only provided for a certain arbitrarily geographically determined few? And what if you legally manipulated the system....and what if you lived in a miserable environment and grew up with no educational standards at all and your purchasing power is near the minus numbers; and on and on.
The point I would make is that IN this defacto system of "reactive attitudes" the need for self correction pushes against this fabric of consensus, and enlightened objections are grounded in determinative arguments: A person's successes are determined by the mere giveness of circumstances and abilities. Failures have reasons. Strawson is right to say there is a tender balance in the inhibiting and permitting good will and compassion and this must go on (which I think is the gist).
But inquiry is the spoiler, as usual. And it is not that inquiry about basic assumptions is going to be popular. this is always reserved for the study hall. If those who write about such things were on a boat, and the boat sank, it would take most of the readership with it. At any rate, I look at freedom very differently. The hammer head flies off, I am thrown into a discontinuity, if only for a moment till processes take over once again. This second can be protracted. I think freedom lies there.
Quoting Constance
This is a topic by itself!
Can you at least describe it shortly?
Quoting Constance
Can you explain this please?
Quoting Constance
I can see some truth in all this, esp. concerning "divisibility". However, I think that Zeno's "paradoxes" are much easier to explain --or rather, to reject: space and time are assumed to be discontinuous and thus divisible. Which is a fallacy. Space and time are continuous and thus indivisible. Neither of them has a start, middle or end. We can only divide them arbitrarily for description purposes. Thus, we get distances in space and periods in time. These serve to measure and compare things with each other.
Every so-called "paradox" that is based on a fallacy is a "pseudo-paradox". Zeno's are among them.
I can talk also about the remaining elements --God and Einstein's space time-- but that would overburden this post!
I'm so glad you came to save the day. You need to put a little meat on those bones. You have read the Transcendental Dialectic? But then, the notion of pure reason is no empirical concept. What metaphysics do you have in mind?
Ehhhh.....the man’s life’s work was at stake. I was duty-bound, doncha know.
Quoting RussellA
What? That sounds like something I would say. I probably take it further than you. If language is self referential, the there are two ways to think about this. One way says the world as the world is bound up with the ways we know it; ontology and epistemology cannot be separated and my coffee cup IS a coffee cup AS a bundled phenomenon. The idea of the cup is literally the cup-thing itself. So, I point to my cat, and the pointing, the concept, the predelineation of the past informing the present occasion as well as the anticipation of what the "future cat" will be, do, all of this is constitutive of the occurrent apperception of my cat. All of a piece. Any separation of parts would be an abstraction, which is fine because this is what analysis is, as long as we don't think analytically determined entities ae entities in their own right. Another way is to understand that the knowledge that brings the palpable thing into understanding and familiarity is qualitatively distinct from the palpable thing. To me, this is a very strong and even profound claim. It is not about some noumena that is postulated but beyond sight and sound; it's about the palpable presence of the thing, and its being alien to the understanding, so their you are, confronting metaphysics directly. This is called mysticism.
Sartre may not have been a mystic, but his Nausea has very strange encounters between Roquentin and the world (the chestnut tree, etc) which are close.
Quoting RussellA
Because the world is an open concept, and where there is openness, there is inquiry. I guess philosophical inquiry has a value difficult to see. As an objective enterprise this is most true. But as a personal desire for understanding the world that is sincerely driven by need to know, this is always important.
Quoting RussellA
On the other hand, logic is not nothing. An idea is not nothing.
One way to look at it is to note that all knowledge is justified belief, and justification is always presented in a logical form, as is necessitated since a proposition without logical form is literally nonsense. But where is the justification for logic's validity? It has none: logic cannot explain itself because the explaining would require logic. Logic is "its own presupposition."
Quoting Alkis Piskas
The world "out there" that we talk about all the time has nothing of the values we give it in doing so, it can be argued. I observe a lamp, but the singularity of the one lamp is only brought about by the application of a concept, a general term, When I look casually at the lamp, I acknowledge its singularity, just that lamp and not a table or a chair, either. All of this singling out is not part of the thing over there we call a lamp. We do this when we observe it.
Knowledge is a quantifying process. When we say some or all or one, logic calls this quantifying. Just talking about a thing at all is a quantifying act. (I remember Hegel's discussion: to say something is here, or there, or beyond, and so on, is to apply a general idea: many things are here or there, so the conditions of the application of the terms are , if you will, tokens of a type, particulars of a universal, and in this occasion, applicable. The point would be that you acknowledge this to be an independent singular perception, but actually, it really is not like this at all. As you observe, you condition the observed. Quoting Alkis Piskas
Right. Interesting. You might find Kierkegaard's take on concept of time enlightening:
If time is defined correctly as infinite succession, it may seem obvious that it should also be defined as present, past, and future. This distinction is, however, incorrect if considered as implicit in time itself, because the distinction arises only through the relation of time to eternity, and through eternity’s reflection in time. If a foothold could be found in the infinite succession of time, that is, a present, which was the dividing point, then the division would be quite correct. However, precisely because every instant, as well as the sum of the instants, is a process (a passing by), no instant is a present, and in time there is accordingly neither a present nor a past nor a future. Thinking that this division can be upheld is due to an instant’s being spatialized,
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin
Note this idea of a spatializing of time. A provocative notion. He is saying that in space things appear fixed, settled, but time is not this. Real time is a process that has no parts like past, present future. It is a seamless "passing by".
Thank you for taking the time to reply in that length!
I realize now that I have asked too much! :smile: Anyway, I will comment shortly on some things in this reply of yours. I don't ask you to agree or disagree. I just present my views.
Quoting Constance
Knowledge and belief can be indeed connected: what we believe as true --but it is not proven or established as fact-- can be proven to be true --always for us-- through reasoning (justification), experience or actual, physical proof. Then, it becomes knowledge, i.e. a fact. But only some of our knowledge is obtained in this way. We don't have to justify the fact that it is raining, that the price of tomatoes has risen, etc. So it would be better if one says "some" instead of "all "knowledge is justified belief".
Quoting Constance
There's a circularity and self-contradiction here ... It is as if we are asking what is the logic of the logic. The basic error in this question-statement is that logic cannot be justified or validated. Logic itself is a way of justifying and a proof of validity. Logic is reasoning based on principles of validity.
Quoting Constance
Indeed! Nice that you brought this up! :up:
I agree that there there are two distinct ways in which we understand the external world, and these may be described in various ways.
1) Metaphysics, our past history, Sartrian existence and Kantian a priori knowledge are all aspects of the same thing. This is, as you say, about "confronting metaphysics directly".
2) Physics, our present situation, Sartrian essence and Kantian a posteriori knowledge are also all aspects of the same thing. This is, as you say, "apperception".
Each is distinct, as hardware is distinct from software, yet both are mutually dependent, and both are required for the proper functioning of the whole human organism.
The colour red is experienced both physically and metaphysically
Consider our experience of the colour red. From physics, I know that the wavelength of red light is 700nm. But I also have a private subjective experience of the colour red, an experience that can never be described to another person. At the moment of having the subjective experience of the colour red, it is not the case that I am observing the colour red, rather, it is the case that I am the experience of the colour red. An experience transcending any physical knowledge into an immediate and visceral metaphysical knowledge.
IE, our knowledge of, for example, the colour red, is both physical and metaphysical
Evolution explains Kant's a priori
We are observers of the external world, yet we are also part of the world. We have an existence upon which we build an essence. This existence did not arise yesterday, or the day we were born, but has been underway for billions of years. We have evolved in synergy with the world. Humans are born with certain innate abilities, in that the brain is not a blank slate, as described by both post-Darwinian "evolutionary aesthetics" and "evolutionary ethics". In the 3.7 billion years of life on earth, complex life forms have evolved to have certain innate intuitions necessary for continued survival. It is not the case that we have certain intuitions and they happen to correspond with the world, rather, our intuitions were created by the world and therefore of necessity correspond with the world. Through the process of evolution the mind gradually models the world around it. If the model had not been correct, then the mind and body would not have survived. Therefore, the sensible intuitions innate within the mind have been created by the world in which the brain has survived.
IE, it is not the case that the mind has an intuition of the world that it exists within, rather, the intuitions of the mind necessarily correspond with the world it exists within, otherwise it would not have been able to successfully survive and evolve.
We understand the world both in a Kantian a priori and a posteriori way
The two distinct ways we relate to the world can be further understood within Kant's theory of the "synthetic a priori". Kant combined the ideas of the Empiricists and the Rationalists. For the Empiricists, such as Hume, only what can be observed has meaning, where a posteriori knowledge is "as mere representations and not as things in themselves"
For the Rationalists, such as Leibniz, understanding is in the mind, where a priori knowledge is "only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves".
Empiricism claims that our ideas are fashioned out of experience between an observer and an external world and the ideas thus formed if they have any bearing on external reality then elementary sensations are bound together by some principle of association. Kant argued that on this reading, science could not have developed, yet, as science is successful, the principles of association must have been provided by the observer such that "nothing in a priori knowledge can be ascribed to objects save what the thinking subject derives from itself".
The observer can only understand what they observe if they have a prior ability to experience what they observe, in that we are able to see the colour red but not the infra-red because of our innate abilities. Kant wrote in his Critique of the Power of Judgement : "We can only cognize objects that we can, in principle, intuit. Consequently, we can only cognize objects in space and time, appearances. We cannot cognize things in themselves". (A239). Foundational to all our understanding of what we observe is our innate understanding of space and time: "Space and time are merely the forms of our sensible intuition of objects. They are not beings that exist independently of our intuition (things in themselves), nor are they properties of, nor relations among, such beings". (A26, A33)
It is true that Kant (1724 to 1804) did not propose an evolutionary mechanism for a priori pure intuitions, as he was not able to benefit from Darwin's (1809 to 1882) theory of evolution, Kant's principle of "synthetic a priori judgements" remains valid.
IE, We are born with certain innate abilities that have taken billions of years to evolve, and based on these innate abilities we can observe the external world, but we can only observe in the world what our innate abilities allow us to observe. Our understanding of the world is from observed phenomenon which are given meaning by a pre-existing and innate understanding of them. The physics of the world is understood through an innate knowledge that transcends experience, ie, a metaphysics.
Our understanding of the world must always be limited
FH Bradley's regression argument illustrates the that relations have no ontological existence in the external world. The Binding Problem, that we experience a subjective whole rather than a set of disparate parts, illustrates that relations do have an ontological existence in the mind. As Kant argued that we make sense of the world by imposing our a priori knowledge onto our a posteriori observations in the external world, similarly we can also make sense of the world by imposing a reasoned relational logic onto a relation-free external world.
IE, both these show the inherent limits to our understanding of the world, in that we will only ever be able to understand those aspects of the world for which we have an a priori ability to understand. This means that there are things about the world that will forever be beyond our imagination, as a horse's understanding of the allegories in The Old Man and the Sea will forever be beyond the horse's imagination.
Language is more than self-referential
As language is, taking one example, the observed a posteriori linkage between a name "red" and a known a priori part (red), rather than being said to be self-referential in the sense of the Coherence Theory of Language, language is still able to refer to the world in the sense of the Correspondence Theory of Language.
Summary
We know the world in two distinct ways - i) metaphysically, rationally, as an evolutionary memory, as a Sartrian existence, a Kantian a priori ii) physically, empirically, as a present experience, as a Sartrian essence and a Kantian a posteriori.
And here Kant makes a false or pretentious assumption at least. Namely that we kant cognize the Ding an Sich. People have the power to become, to empathize, to become, to magine, to live oneself in das Ding.
Quoting Constance
I don't read science only. Theology is a firmer base of knowledge and offers a firmer ground for understanding phenomena or their nature.
Phenomenoa lay at the base of knowledge. Our brain, by means of its virtual infinite formal capacity, structures the phenomena and the structures behind it, while it gets informed by these structures at the same time.
Your accounting, or sourced from secondary literature?
Donald Hoffman also says this, but he draws a different conclusion from it. 'Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says: No, we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops: while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us.'
So, if indeed it is the case that our perceptions and conceptions are solely the product of evolution, then why should there be any basis for trust in the independent capacity of reason to arrive at truth? Put another way, if it's true that reason is the handmaiden of evolutionary biology, what faith could we put in it? Isn't confidence in reason justifiable because it is not solely dependent on biological evolution? 'The only form that genuine reasoning can take', says Thomas Nagel, 'consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded.'
In other words, to rationalise what we take to be true in terms of what is advantageous to survival, sells reason short - a very common tendency in modern philosophy.
Quoting RussellA
I would say, rather, that they show the inherent limits of naturalism, based on the mistaken assumption that the ability to grasp a priori truths is no more than a biological adaptation. An alternative account might be that such an ability is owed to the innate ability of the intellect to apprehend higher-order truths. But of course, that is not acceptable to naturalism.
Quoting EugeneW
So...phenomena lay at the base, but theology lays a firmer base.
How many degrees of firm are there? What’s the firmest possible base of knowledge? How is the firmness of a base determined?
Paint, meet corner.
Well, the gods lay at the foundation of all there is. Understanding them gives better knowledge of the cosmos than the phenomena in it. But if we consider the universe by itself, phenomena are all we've got to study and gain knowledge about.
Theology, seems to me. Know the gods and you know the universe.
All this does is presuppose the reality of gods, for which proven empirical justification is lacking.
Why don’t we just say a better knowledge of the universe is provided by better knowledge of the phenomena in it?
Quoting EugeneW
How would one know the gods, and even if one did, how would he know the gods would give knowledge of the universe? Why wouldn’t a god just say...hey, figure it out for yourself, you think you’re so smart, with your fancy inventions and all. I mean, c’mon, man. You’ve FUBAR’ed that beautiful planet I gave you, now you want me to give you free knowledge?
I got better intelligences to work with than you puny-assed humans.
The very existence of the universe is good enough proof for me. Know the universe and you know the gods.
That’s fine. If you think the existence of the universe is sufficient proof of gods.....who am I to argue.
But then...if to know the universe is to know the gods, and the average run-of-the-mill human being can never know the universe as such, how will he ever know the gods?
People can read about cosmology or theology. There is a pretty good scientific general picture of the universe. All people know a local piece of it. The animals, the trees in their neighborhood, other people, etc. The natural world is a carbon copy of heaven. Sadly enough the natural world is further away than ever. Destroyed or rearranged by human activity. The gods hadnt taken the homonid gods into consideration in the prequel to creation.
Sure they can. So if people know a local piece of the natural world, and the natural world is a copy of heaven, then they know a piece of heaven? If so, then heaven is as full of disturbing occurrences as the natural world, so why would I prefer one over the other? Why would there be copies anyway?
The only difference is that the gods have power of creation. They have the collective intelligence to create the universe. The heaven is eternal and all life in it is an eternal edition of all life in the universe. They had good reason for creating it. All creatures in the universe act out the life of the gods. Their eternal making love and hate is observe as us and all other life playing what they used to play. They watch the universe on the heavenly heavens. Big bang after big bang. Eternally. Existential boredom got a grip on heaven. Let's hope they don't get bored watching us. Untill then, they give meaning to and a reason and an explanation of life. Science merely describes. Though some think were a product of quantum fluctuations. Which are involved though.
plural :yikes:
Aint there more then?
I had been reading The Critique of the Power of Judgement because of my interest in aesthetics. The title stuck in my mind and I mistakenly wrote in my post Critique of the Power of Judgement rather than Critique of Reason.
Many people are far more knowledgeable about Kant than me, so I think it only wise to also refer to secondary sources, such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Don't you agree ?
Perhaps they do. On the other hand, human understanding is obviously capable of conceiving an unconditioned possibility, and pure reason has the authority to establish an idea of its object. But mere a priori conceptions and transcendental ideas are very far from manifest reality, and the manufactured illusory appearances of unchecked dogmatism for the sake of those ideas, treated forthwith as phenomena, do more harm to the certainty of experience than reason should allow itself to afford.
If for any reason that affirms an idea, there is an equally valid reason that negates it.....there’s something about the idea that remains inconclusive. And any thesis or proposition for which a definitive, non-contradictory judgement regarding the reality of its object is lacking, or ill-gotten, properly belongs to imagination, which has the power to logically present or deny to itself objects of mere ideas without phenomenal representation, yet cannot at all belong to that of which such representation is absolutely necessary, as in experience.
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That we can think gods and their supposed powers as logically possible, does nothing to grant knowledge of them as empirically given. The fact that humans cannot think the impossible, but can think gods, thereby denying their impossibility, is surely the weakest of positive arguments, and indeed.....
“....Now it may be taken as a safe and useful warning, that general logic, considered as an organon, must always be a logic of illusion, that is, be dialectical, for, as it teaches us nothing whatever respecting the content of our cognitions, but merely the formal conditions of their accordance with the understanding, which do not relate to and are quite indifferent in respect of objects, any attempt to employ it as an instrument in order to extend and enlarge the range of our knowledge must end in mere prating; any one being able to maintain or oppose, with some appearance of truth, any single assertion whatever. Such instruction is quite unbecoming the dignity of philosophy...”
At the very least we need to be able to reason in order to survive. As Hoffman argued, reason allows us to navigate the world around us and has evolved to what it is today through natural selection.
I believe that in order to survive, I should not walk off a cliff. I can justify this by noticing that others who have done this have not survived. It is true that if I walk off a cliff I will not survive. Therefore, I have knowledge that in order to survive I should not walk off a cliff, where knowledge is justified true belief. My reasoning has led me to a truth.
Reasoning to survive exists outside language, in that the Neanderthals were able to successfully survive for almost 400,000 years without language. The Neanderthal reasoned and knew without language the truth of the danger of walking off a cliff.
IE, visceral reasoning arrives at truths.
Quoting Wayfarer
We know that reason may lead to truths in knowing how to survive, but where is the truth beyond that which is necessary to survive. Where is the truth in a Derain. Where is the truth in an aesthetic experience.
I agree that once the ability to reason has evolved through the biological necessity of survival, then we can use our ability to reason about other things not to do with survival, such as trying to understand why a Derain is aesthetically more successful than a Hockney.
Although reason was born out of the necessity to survive, reason can now stand on its own two feet and go out into the world and reason about a whole range of different things.
It is true that when I look at a Derain I experience an aesthetic form. But what exactly is true. It cannot be the form that is true. It cannot be my response that is true. It cannot be the interaction between the form and my mind that is true. It is the proposition "when I look at a Derain I experience an aesthetic form" that is true. Truth also exists in language.
IE, linguistic reasoning also arrives at truths
Quoting Wayfarer
There are two types of truth - a visceral truth known outside of language and a linguistic truth known within language. There are also two types of reasoning - a visceral reasoning outside of language and a linguistic reasoning within language.
IE, as of necessity Philosophy uses language, Philosophy is also concerned with using reason as a means of discovering truth within language.
Yeah, I noticed, that and including his lifespan, made it look like some C & P but without credit for it. Not important, really....just wondering.
Quoting RussellA
Yes, for comparative understanding of a personal interest. No, when referencing him in support of an argument. There’s an unnecessary trust involved, in sayin SEP....or Guyer, or Palmquist, or Quinne.....says Kant says, as opposed to saying Kant himself says.
The dates were intended to reinforce the idea that Kant was not able to benefit from Darwin's later work on the theory of evolution, in that today we can explain Kant's "a priori" knowledge as innate knowledge, a product of billions of years of evolution.
Does the theory of evolution distinguish between innate knowledge and mere instinct?
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I watched a NOVA show on ”slime molds”, in which a planaria was cut in half, and one piece regenerated the missing front part, and the other piece regenerated the missing tail part. The guy called it “knowledge” possessed by the organism. But under dissociative experimental conditions, the organism generates either two heads or two tails. So, dunno if that’s really knowledge to begin with or merely compliance with natural law.
For certain they do. The universe wouldn't exist if the hadn't.
Quoting Mww
If so, then human understanding is capable of perceiving gods and to establish ideas of them. If we can know the gods by observing the universe and are informed about their motives for creation, it might even help in establishing a cosmology, or a cosmogenisis.
Pure reason is a fairytale.
Quoting Mww
That's equivalent to falsificationism. I prefer confirmationism. Endlessly trying to falsify has its limits. One should one time be satisfied with a last confirmation.
Quoting Mww
Of course. This judgement though is not lacking wrt to the existence of gods.
Until so far. I criticize the second part of your challenging comment later! Thanks for making it, but that's what a philosophy forum is for I guess. Arguments, reasoning, critique, etc.
Ok, but are we just as certain they did?
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Quoting EugeneW
No. Understanding conceives; the senses perceive.
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Quoting EugeneW
And yet pure reason is the only possible source of both affirmative and negative determinations with respect to gods, as far as humans are concerned. Whether they exist or not, reason is how we can talk about what they may or may not be. It is, after all, only reason that says reason is a fairytale.
Yes! How else it came to be?
Quoting Mww
Then the base for god is even firmer. We can conceive by perception.
Quoting Mww
Reason is no fairytale. Pure reason (das reinen Vernünft) is.
As regards instinct, babies have an innate instinct to move away from heat.
However, I am sure that babies also have certain innate knowledge.
Babies don't know how to talk and walk, but they have the innate knowledge of how to learn how to talk and walk. It would be wrong to say that babies have the innate instinct of how to learn how to talk and walk.
Similarly, babies have an innate knowledge of time and space. It would be wrong to say that babies have an innate instinct of time and space.
IE, babies are born with both innate instinct and knowledge.
Probably better not to confuse the abilities of one faculty with the abilities of another. Pretty soon we’ll have steering wheels that dig holes in the ground. Or.....apples doing calculus.
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Quoting EugeneW
It matters not. It is still only reason that says pure reason is a fairytale. And only reason can say how pure reason actually is a fairytale of sorts, when it operates beyond its limits. Like convincing ourselves of the reality of a thing, then making that thing impossible to experience in the same way other things are experienced.
Already in the womb the brain is put in shape to confront the world. For example, in the retina, processes run around like concentric circles whose radii grow or decrease. An effect one can sometimes observe in the dark or with closed eyes. The outside world impresses itself on the brain already in mothers safe haven. By construction or direct means, like the feeling of balance. All sensory equipment is used already then.
Apples doing calculus is unreasonable. Like a parrot understanding his words. Conception using perception is reasonable.
Quoting Mww
There is a big difference between reason and pure reason. Pure reason is abstract and devoid of subject matter. It's a fictional vacuous fairytale.
I’ll grant innate abilities, which is just a euphemism for instinct.
Quoting RussellA
Knowledge of how to learn? Again....merely an innate ability, a typical condition of sufficient intelligences.
Quoting RussellA
I’ve three sons. I gave a watch to one, once. He put it in his mouth. Best he could do, is think it something to eat, or at the very least, something to make his jaws feel better. I wouldn’t make any claims about what babies know about time and space, even after having been one. I don’t think it matters what they know about them, if they can’t understand th use of them with respect to empirical knowledge.
One can define any conception to make it fit his own theory.
I mostly have to disagree with the basic idea here, even though evolution I find no issue with any more than any other science. The problem I have is, in the bringing of Kant together with an empirical theory, your are in oil and water territory. Evolution is an empirical theory, which, had Kant been exposed to it, would likely have agreed, as long as you are not talking about philosophy. But his transcendental idealism is what is presupposed by empirical theories. He is thinking at a level "beneath" this: the underpinning of all science is the foundation of intuitions and their concepts.
Interesting thing to say, that " it is not the case that the mind has an intuition of the world that it exists within." This, to me, IS the problem. On the one hand there is no way out of Kant's world of phenomena. I mean, impossible (in modern physicalist terms: why oh why am I not observing, literally, neuronal networks, roughly speaking, and ONLY neuronal networks? Where IS the way out? Can't be shown, and after 200 years of philosophers and others examining this, I have to say, Period!). On the other hand, my apprehension of the world as a world very clearly shows that I am not merely confined to this "empirically reality" and this is very hard to pin, that is, how I literally "know" my cat is "out there" in the impossible, meta-empirical way.
The causal relation I have with the world does not translate into an epistemic relation. Causality is not an epistemic term, in any model I can conceive, it demonstrates no ability to transmit, carry, bring forth, intimate, convey etc. any object to establish a true knowledge claim. What is it to know something is the case? The very first order of business is to identify what the "something" is and this cannot be done, and all the philosophers since Kant know this, even the ones that want to put miles between what they do and what Kant did. Read Wittgenstein's Tractatus and you find Kant is everywhere implicitly informing this.
To me, this is the second most important philosophical problem there is. The first is with ethics.
Quoting RussellA
Yes, I see. But you have stepped over the line: To speak at all! is to be bound to the conditions of the structures of cognition and sensibility. There are no "billions of years" and had he known about Darwin he would not have received the "benefit" as a philosophically relevant theory. Evolution is an empirical idea. The matter he was looking at is what empirical thinking is in a more basic analysis. Even talk about "apriority" itself is first a concept, and all concepts are principles of synthesis, gathering particulars under a universal. The "purity" of the concepts that are in the structure of the logic that allows one to speak at all, this is transcendental, and one may not speak of this at all. There is NOTHING that can be said that explains apriority. "Preexisting " innateness? Are these temporal terms? There is no time into which one may "fit" a metaphysical concept.
Quoting RussellA
Strange business. I don't know if you follow this kind of thinking, but this is, it can be argued, what Derrida is saying. Structuralists like Saussure and those who follow, hold that meanings are found in the structures of the language that produces them. There is no "author" of a text, for the text is indeterminate, contingent on the receiving intellect. THEN it is determined, as I read it. Derrida says, this structure itself is indeterminate. Of course, it has the determinacy that allows us to speak of it, agree, share ideas, but none of these are free of the context that makes them possible, and this context itself is this kind of diffuse relational manifestation of differences among contextual elements. The basic idea is, I hazard to say, that there is no stand alone meaning, at all! Even structured meaning in my head has no center outside itself to affirm it.
Some see this as a true epiphany: the way to apophatic affirmation of the "presence" of the world.
Yes, but that’s not the only way of conceiving. Conceptions arise from understanding conditioned by sensibility, but they also can arise from understanding without sensibility for their condition. Which allows us to think gods, but prevents us from proving the existence of them, iff they do not admit to the criteria of sensibility, from which all our experiences are given.
Quoting EugeneW
The only differences in reason, is the domain of its use. Reason concerns itself with knowledge represented by phenomena in synthesis with conceptions, pure reason with thought represented by the synthesis of conceptions alone. Reason may or may not be a priori; pure reason is always and only a priori.
Quoting EugeneW
Pure reason has its own subject matter. Obviously, insofar as that which is derived from pure reason can be represented in language, which would be impossible without a subject. Necessity is a syllogistic subject matter of pure reason. As in, “Necessity is that for which the negation is impossible”. Causality. Existence. Reality. Any conception for which no object can be intuited as belonging to it. Like....you know.....gods and stuff.
Sorry for the all the writing. I have to watch that.
There is no brain talk in phenomenology. The brain is there among the rest of the world's phenomena, but it is a phenomenon, and does no explanatory work for discovering what is going on at the level of basic questions, for before a brain is a brain in a scientist's world, it is a construct of language and logic in time and space. I ask the scientist, brain? And in order to give an answer, one must be always, already in a world that makes sense of this. What kind of world is this? THIS is the foundational question. Science and religion are both constructs of language, and so language holds the key to understanding, not what these are, but what is possible for them to be, not unlike knowing what a telescope is does not tell you what something that is seen, but tells you this with an understanding what a telescope does first. It is the intervening process between the known and the knower, you could say (always wanted to read Alfred Whitehead. I will one day) that holds the answer to questions like, what is the world? What is real? Questions concerning religion reduce to what there is that actually stands before us that would make religion meaningful? One looks at time, its structure, the way anticipation is a powerful foundational feature of being in the world. There we are in this forward looking situation in each moment, each thought, prospect for the future, this "anxiety" that is a structural part of experience itself, an anxiety we never really experience until we withdraw from the mundane course of affairs and ask weird existential questions. Kierkegaard (to address the religious side) calls this positing spirit. Heidegger calls this metaphysics (this wonder of standing apart and encountering the world as this vast indeterminacy), and on and on.
Nice one! I had to read that a few timed and am not sure I even understand now! One can understand the gods without any appeal to the senses. For knowing the nature of the gods or their motives you can invoke the senses perceiving the cosmos and all the life that's in it. The senses can be used to even prove the existence of the gods. If you call the dream sensory proof then it can serve as proof.
Quoting Mww
Again, I had to read that slow and loud to grasp! The neighbors must think there is something wrong with me! There are different forms of reason. Not one form with different domains. That's only the case with the formal pure reason you talk about, floating in an abstract global fairyvacuum subjecting all local forms of concrete forms of reason. Pure reason (logic being its most pristine, sublime, yes almost divine form) is a killer.
Quoting Mww
Yes. Pure reason is an a priori. An a priori fairy tale.
Quoting Mww
And what might that be?
The gods, that is.
Quoting Mww
Every object can be intuited as belonging to it. Like scientific knowledge and the assumed objects the knowledge is about. Or the gods.
So far we have three words: instinct, ability and knowledge. Instinct is an innate fixed pattern of behaviour. Ability is the possession of the skill to do something. Knowledge is the intellectual understanding about something.
Your son showed great intelligence in successfully combining instinct, ability and knowledge. He instinctively knew it was necessary to eat. He was able to move the watch from one position to another. He knew that food comes in watch-sized objects.
IE, instinct, ability and knowledge are all distinct aspects of human intelligence.
No. I’m talking about objects of intuition belonging to conceptions of gods, but you’re talking about objects intuited as belonging to gods as existing, albeit supersensible, objects in themselves. We don’t intuit objects as belonging to objects, but rather, we intuit properties belonging to objects from the sensations by which they are presented to us. Gods are not presented to us as are real objects, they leave no impressions on our sensations, so we don’t intuit anything with respect to them as phenomenon.
Now it is permissible to think objects as belonging to gods, by which our sensations may be impressed by that object, but that is not the same as an impression made by a god itself. From which we say dumb stuff like....only a god could make an object so wonderful.
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Quoting EugeneW
The negation of the necessity of gods is easy. If the effects in the empirical world are sufficiently explained by natural law, then explanations for effects in the natural world have no antecedent necessary explanation by gods. Therefore the negation of the necessity of gods is not impossible.
If the certainty of natural law is really not sufficient to explain natural causes and effect, is a god then merely possible, but still not necessary. Only when no other explanation at all, of any kind whatsoever, whether comprehensible by us or not, for the natural occurrences of cause and effect, may gods be necessary. But then, if gods make causes and effects comprehensible to us, such that we know they are responsible for them, then we are no better off than having the comprehension of natural laws we already had.
How would we tell the difference? Technically, we cannot, as demonstrated by critiquing pure reason to order to exploit it only within its proper limits.
Quoting RussellA
If instinct is fixed, but ability and knowledge are contingent, thus not fixed, I wouldn’t lump them all under intelligence.
All distinct aspects of the human condition, perhaps?
That's questionable. What if you have seen them in dreams?
Quoting Mww
Negating them or their necessity won't make them less real.
Quoting Mww
Natural laws are not sufficient to explain the existence of the universe, even if eternal (which I think is the case as the universe is a copy of heaven, to a large extent). Nor can the presence of matter explain itself. So if both matter and the laws it conforms to are known to the fundament, they can't explain themselves.
There are no sensations in dreams. I’ve dreamt of frying bacon, but never when so engaged, have I experienced the smell it frying.
Just as I like to keep my conscious faculties separated, in order to tell which one to call on for the thing it alone can do, so too I like to keep the conscious activities separated from the sub-conscious activities.
Other creatures have no need of reason to survive. In my view it’s a highly questionable assumption to assert that the faculty of reason can be accounted for solely in terms of biological evolution. I recommend a careful reading of the essay pinned to my homepage, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, Thomas Nagel.
Quoting RussellA
I have no idea what Derain means.
Very true. Smell, pain, and taste are absent in dreams. I never smelt anything at least. I'm not sure if the gods need smell or taste to communicate to us. You could say (I realize now!) that that's even the reason we don't smell in dreams. The gods don't need it to communicate.
Quoting Mww
Not sure what you want to say with this. Maybe dreaming is meant for divine communication.
Not yet, but that’s beside the point of whether or not they are certain enough to explain the natural causes and effects in the universe.
Quoting EugeneW
Could be, but why only in dreams? And why would gods communicate with us in dreams, then not make it so we can remember what the dreams were about? Seems like a rather pointless enterprise. I guess I should say, if a god communicates with me via my dreamstates, he damn sure outta enable me to remember it.
Never in principle. All causal processes are explainable, from an infinite time in the past to an infinite time in the future. The infinite series of big bangs is good proof for the intentions of the gods to create the eternal universe.
Good question! I think the physical outside world is too "massive" for the message to send and come through. Making a voice appear in public costs more energy than letting a voice or image appear in the mind.
I owe my friend an apology. Space does warp in the presence of great mass. "Bending" or "curving" on the other hand requires definitions, like the three interior angles of a triangle not adding to 180 degrees exactly. Not sure if that has ever been verified near the surface of the Earth.
If you shoot thin Bonnor beams through the universe (and you would see them, though thats questionable,) the curvature of space becomes visible. Do you find curved space hard to imagine?
According to Feynman Einstein defined mean curvature of space in the following way:
In other words, you measure the surface area, A, and measure the radius,r, then compute
[math]r'=r-\sqrt{\frac{A}{2\pi }}[/math]
The "radius excess" is the mean curvature of space in that region. The actual formula is a tad more involved.
Yes. I find it difficult to imagine emptiness being curved. To "see" the curvature you need some sort of physical object like a line or a sphere or a triangle. Way beyond my pay grade. :cool:
Do they pay you that little?
It's not pure emptiness, as you know...
They haven't paid me anything the last twenty two years. :sad:
Quoting EugeneW
Yes, the aether of fields interacting, etc. I find that hard to visualize as well.
Then I understand it's difficult to grasp. Or should it be easy then? :chin:
Quoting jgill
The aether of the fields. Almost poetic.
Kant's Transcendental Idealism
Determinism
My belief is that every thought or feeling we have is expressed within the physical structure of the brain. I accept that others may believe that we may have thoughts and feelings beyond that which is determined by the physical structure of the brain, such as a god, but I personally don't.
Transcendental Idealism
The brain can get information about the external world through the senses - sight, sound, touch, hearing, smell. Kant is making the point in his theory of transcendental idealism that we know things about the external world such as causation, time and space that we could not have discovered by observing phenomena through our senses, as illustrated by Hume. He calls this knowledge a priori knowledge.
A priori knowledge
As our knowledge about causation, time and space is not discoverable through our senses alone, and yet as all knowledge is expressed within the physical structure of the brain, then this knowledge must be a pre-existing part of the brain. A priori knowledge is part of the built-in hardware of the brain, where empirical a posteriori observation is part of the software. We know a priori the nature of causation, time and space as much as we know the colour red when observing the wavelength 700nm.
Evolution
A priori knowledge cannot be explained from an empiricist viewpoint, where the human mind is a "blank slate" at birth and develops its thoughts only through experience. A priori knowledge can be explained as the product of an evolutionary process that began on Earth over 4.5 billion years ago, a continuous process of synergy within the world from unicellular organisms to human brains of up to 100 billion neurons. Darwin was the first person to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection. As Kant died before Darwin was born, Kant was not able to benefit from Darwin's insights.
Knowledge
We know causation, time and space in two distinct ways, as a priori knowledge built into the physical structure of our brain by evolution, and as a posteriori knowledge discovered through empirical observation.
IE, we experience the empirical world (the software) through a "meta-empirical" world (the hardware). Our a posteriori knowledge (the software) is transcended by our a priori knowledge (the hardware).
Yes, I see you have an empirical theory about apriority, but you don't seem to be acknowledging something entirely elementary: Apiority is a structural feature of empirical existence itself. It is not accessible for examination. Of course, you can talk as you do above, and this is fine, but you would be talking about how apriorityshows itself, not apriority.
Quoting RussellA
Just as long as you know this is not how Kant would or could talk at all. "The brain" is an empirical concept. Apriority is not brain hardware if you are speaking in Kantian terms. Apriority is transcendental. a presupposition to all empirical thinking, and its "purity" means it cannot be cast in terms of any other explanatory context.
I am saying a line has to be recognized between transcendental idealism and empirically based ideas, that is, science.
Quoting RussellA
I do see the temptation to think like this, and I don't think talk about the brain and apriority is wrong, really, if you want to talk like that. Many do. But that is not where Kant leads. Kant leads to talk like this: We must rise above
[b]the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing,
and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being[/b]
This is from Fink's Sixth Meditation and the "natural attitude" is the naïve world of empirical science. All empirical theory is suspended, following Kant (Note the Copernican Revolution is a direct reference to Kant). These philosophers want to examine the world given the assumption that empirical theory itself rests on something more fundamental. I think you can see this, based on your comments, but when you talk about brains and evolution, you have clearly departed from Kant and his legacy. What next, is it that apriority is reducible neuronal networks? Physical nerve systems of axonal connectivity? Not that this is wrong, but you will have a hard time maintaining concepts like apriority in the context of brain talk.
Software? Hardware? Pre-existing in the brain? Why are these, with their modern scientific predicates, contained in a treatise under the title of Kantian Transcendental Idealism? If the deterministic brain is fully involved at the expense of logical metaphysics, it isn’t idealism, and if some knowledge is pre-existing in the brain, it isn’t necessarily a priori in strictly Kantian terms, which makes explicit it isn’t transcendental.
Can’t critique the philosophy not given to us, using conditions not known to the author of the one that was.
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Quoting RussellA
Evolution being such a slow process, he would probably not even considered it with respect to human knowledge, insofar his speculative methodology for our being conscious of it, wouldn’t have changed, in general, noticeably for millennia. He would have readily admitted that knowledge about things changes all the time; the way knowledge occurs in humans, does not.
I'm not trying to critique Kant's Transcendental Idealism, rather, I'm trying to interpret it in today's terms.
To date
I am using the analogy that our a priori knowledge is the hardware of the brain, and our a posteriori knowledge is the software of the brain. The hardware of the brain has evolved over more than 4.5 billion years of evolution in synergy with the world enabling us to conceptualise time and space. The software of the brain enables us to observe apples falling off tables.
My belief is that the world can be described within the matter and forces of Physicalism rather than any supernatural intervention.
It follows that we should aim to discover knowledge empirically rather than metaphysically. However, there is a limit to human intelligence, and for knowledge beyond the limits of human intelligence we have no alternative but to use speculative conjecture. We have no alternative but to resort to metaphysical explanations (one could also say, metaphorical explanations)
Quoting Constance
Not true, it seems to me. For Kant, knowledge needs both empirical observation and rationalism. Kant is not saying that we don't observe the world, but he is saying that what we think we observe is determined by the innate nature of our brain. Innate are the pure intuitions of time and space, a prioiri knowledge that we know independent of experience. He wrote in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics 1783 - "And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something." Kant postulated that the mind intuits sensory experience, which it then processes in the faculty of the understanding to produce an ordered predictable world.
IE, Kant believed intuition of objects in the external world is the primary source for our understanding.
Quoting Constance
In understanding the external world, we try to make sense of empirical observations using innate, a priori knowledge. Our understanding of necessity transcends the reality the of the things as they are in themselves. As Kant wrote in the Fourth Paralogism: " I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves.
My reading of transcendental is not that of the supernatural, but rather that that there are many aspects of the world that we cannot explain using current scientific knowledge, such as the mind-body problem. This is not to say that such problems cannot be explained by future empirical science.
The transcendental paradox of self-awareness
1) As "I" subjectively know the colour red, "I" subjectively know time and space.
2) But the "I" is no more nor less than the physical structure of the brain, where the brain may be considered to be neurons in a particular arrangement.
3) Given an identity between 1) and 2), then the physical structure of the brain knows time and space.
4) But time and space are expressed within the physical structure of the brain
5) Given an identity between 3) and 4), the physical structure of the brain knows the physical structure of the brain, ie self-awareness.
IE, the paradoxical consequence of a priori knowledge is the brain's self-awareness.
Summary
IE, For Kant, knowledge requires both empirical observation and metaphysical interpretation. As a believer in the metaphysics of god and morality, it is not that he considered the metaphysical of more primary importance than the empirical, rather he strived to put the metaphysical on a more scientific basis, which must remain an ongoing process.
Oh. Well, alrighty then. Carry on, by all means.
Just no, to any association to the brain and "what we observe". The brain is an empirical concept, it is preanalytical, and empirically we certainly do observe it. But he is not saying "what we think we observe is determined by the innate nature of our brain." You may be saying this, and like I said, this is not unreasonable, but it is a break away from Kant.
I haven't read that Kant uses the term "mind" (geist) but his transcendental unity of apperception does not align with modern thinking about minds and their objects, thoughts, feelings. Maybe you have something where he talks like this, though. But sensory intuitions are not postulated, but are directly witnessed in his CPR. Noumena are postulated.
And where I said all empirical theory is suspended, following Kant, I was talking in the context of his critical analysis. He does, of course, and this is taken up very seriously later on, say that empirical theory is really the only wheel that rolls. But his CPR is an apriori thesis, not an empirical one. One arrives at the proposition that only what is said empirically and analytically can make sense via his apriori arguments.
Quoting RussellA
It depends, are you saying your reading is Kant's? Because Kant is essentially saying no to this "future empirical science," unless you can show how to epistemically bridge phenomena and noumena, I mean, show how noumena can be at all known. The only way one can conceive to this is to leave Kant entirely in the attempt to make what is noumenally postulated, manifestly apparent. THAT would be mysticism.
Heidegger opens that door a crack (see his brief reference to Buddhism in the Spielburg interview, der spiegel interview; see also his What IS Metaphysics. He is no mystic, but then, there is the post Heideggerians like Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion who follow through.
Kant's a priori pure intuitions
I agree with you that Kant in Critique of Pure Reason argued that we can only understand the truth of the noumena in the world by applying a priori pure intuition to the phenomena we receive from these noumena.
Kant wrote: "Space and time are its pure forms, sensation in general its matter. We can cognize only the former a priori, i.e., prior to all actual perception, and they are therefore called pure intuition; the latter, however, is that in our cognition that is responsible for it being called a posteriori cognition, i.e., empirical intuition." (B60)
He also wrote: I call all representations pure (in the transcendental sense) in which nothing is to be encountered that belongs to sensation. Accordingly the pure form of sensible intuitions in general is to be encountered in the mind a priori, wherein all of the manifold of appearances is intuited in certain relations. This pure form of sensibility itself is also called pure intuition. (B35)
However, Kant does not explain the source of these a priori pure intuitions. He does not explain how we are able have these a priori pure intuitions.
Indirect and Direct Realism
Today, there are those who believe in Indirect Realism and those who believe in Direct Realism.
Direct Realism is the common sense view within the philosophy of mind which states that objects are as they appear to be. All objects are made of matter and that our perceptions are entirely correct, in which case noumena correspond with phenomena.
Indirect Realism is the view that there is an external world that exists independently of the mind, but we can only perceive that world indirectly through sense data. Sense data can only represent the mind-independent world, meaning that we can only ever know a representation of the external world, in which case phenomena can never allow us to know noumena directly.
I personally believe in Indirect Realism. I understand Kant's position as also being similar to that of the Indirect Realist, even though he did not use this terminology
What is the source of a priori pure intuitions
Where do our a priori pure intuitions come from? Some would say from a metaphysical god, others would say that there is a physical explanation.
It follows from my belief in Physicalism, where everything in the world is physical, a world of matter and forces, and my belief that we are not born as "blank slates", in that all our behaviour is learned, that we are in fact born with innate a priori pure intuitions. These innate a priori pure intuitions are part of the structure of the brain, part of the hardware of the brain, part of the physical arrangement of neurons within the brain.
It seems clear that the brain has the physical structure it has as a consequence of an evolutionary process lasting over 4 billion years. A process where organisms change and evolve over time, along the lines of the natural selection as set out in Darwin's On The Origin of Species.
IE, our a priori pure intuitions are a direct consequence of a physical evolutionary process.
A future question
Kant assumed that our a priori pure intuitions are true to the reality of the world. However, would this be the case if as a result of a physical evolutionary process?
Those pure intuitions are transcendental and cannot be explained. It would be like explaining how the absence of space and time is possible.
And when you say, "truth of the noumena in the world by applying a priori pure intuition to the phenomena we receive from these noumena" Kant would not go along. Noumena are not received at all. It is entirely outside of "receiving". Noumena are posited because representations have to be of something.
Having said this, though, I think, not Kant, but me, that in order for noumena to make any sense at all, there must be something IN the comprehensive analysis of phenomena that reveals this. It is not like some heuristic that is posited because helps further another line of thinking. It is an existential claim about something other than sensory intuition that is intimated, an "intuition" of Being itself, if you will, that comes, not from outside as if empirical theory could generate it out of something empirically discovered, but within the world of ones "interiority" (Kant's TUA.....is YOU in the most intimate sense of the term). This is why I talk about mysticism. If you are going to take seriously some impossible interface with noumena, it is not going to happen through a discursive reasoning process of what is "out there" because what is out there will always be conditioned evidence and noumena are not conditioned. Talk about a brain? There are no brains that can be conceived that are not routed through the phenomenal construction: A brain is a phenomenon! As are my couch and plate tectonics and evolution and on and on. So a noumenal encounter would have to be revelatory, not discursive.
Quoting RussellA
But that is not Kant. We do not become aware of noumena indirectly. We do not become aware of this at all. This is the trouble with analytic philosophy and the attempt to tall about Kant and transcendental idealism.It does not have any thematic development for this. And I will say this with emphasis: If you are looking for some way to make sense out of Kant's idealism, and to build on this, elaborate on what Kant laid out there, then talk about direct and indirect realism is not a viable alternative as it insists that empirical observation, somewhere in the discoveries through microscopes and telescopes, is going to be relevant. This ignores Wittgenstein as well as Kant. Rather, one has to follow Kant as Kant was indeed "followed": through Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Neitzsche, then Husserl, Heidegger, and so on, then Saussure, Levi Strauss, Derrida; look, it's not that I am such a master of all this, but I have read a lot of it and this is the really the only way to develop with Kant. One simply has to start taking phenomenology seriously; Kant started it.
Quoting RussellA
Yes, I see you believe this. Physicalism? It is just a term used by those who want science to rule our thinking on philosophical matters. It is a scientist's term (as well as an everyday term) that attempts to reduce questions about the world to ones science addresses. The term itself is entirely without meaning. It is like Kant talking about noumena, utterly transcendental:
[i]The purely transcendental use of categories therefore is in reality of no use at all, and has no definite or
even, with regard to its form only, definable object. Hence
it follows that a pure category is not fit for any [-p. 248]
synthetical a priori principle, and that the principles of
the pure understanding admit of empirical only, never of
transcendental application, nay, that no synthetical principles a pm'ori are possible beyond the field of possible
experience.[/i]
Kant gave you the idea of the structure of thought, you think this structure can be talked about in the context of empirical thinking, and you are right about this. But if you think this boat is going to sail straight into some kind of consummation of Kantian idealism, you are entirely wrong.
Best read Husserl. Quoting RussellA
SInce evolution is an empirical concept, then you are apples and oranges in this. Kant's phenomenology is logically prior to a concept like evolution. It is about the grounding of experience that is presupposed to any and all empirical theory. A term like "physical": This is a concept, no? A subsumption of particulars under a general; and synthetic act of a structured psyche. This is why hermeneutics is so important, for it sees this and therefore puts interpretation first, and it is not physicality that takes priority, but meaning, and this goes to language and logic.
A question
Kant said that a priori knowledge is "knowledge that is absolutely independent of all experience". I propose that such priori knowledge is innate within the brain, a product of over 4 billion years of evolution and is part of the physical "hardware" of the brain.
I am curious as to your belief as to the source of this a priori knowledge, this pure intuition of time and space intrinsic in our minds?
What are "noumena"
Kant wrote in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics 1783: "And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something."
Kant included causation within the category of pure understanding, an a priori pure intuition, where an effect requires a cause. Given causation as an a priori pure intuition, it follows that the observer must know without doubt that there has been a cause to the phenomenon, and this cause may be called a "noumenon".
In my terms, a belief in causation is a Kantian a priori pure intuition because it has been wired into the brain through evolutionary processes,
The problem remains that although such an a priori belief may be pragmatically useful, there is no guarantee that it corresponds with the reality of the external world.
IE, I am not aware of any justification by Kant as to why a priori pure intuitions should of necessity correspond with the reality of the external world. This is the same problem found in Indirect Realism, in discovering the reality of the external world through internal representations.
Concepts
There must be a distinction between the whole and its parts. When we observe something, we are observing a whole made up from a relationship between parts. As relations don't ontologically exist in the external world, as illustrated by FH Bradley, and relations do ontologically exist in the mind, as illustrated by the Binding problem, we can say that the parts of the object do exist in the external world, but the whole object, as a relation between its parts, can only exist in the mind as a concept.
The parts we observe are assembled in the mind into concepts - a table is a table top plus table legs, a house is a roof plus walls plus windows, etc. But many mereological permutations are possible of the parts we observe within the external world - a table top plus table legs, my pen and the Eiffel Tower, etc. We sensibly choose and name those particular combinations that are beneficial to our evolutionary well-being and survival.
It follows that if we think of noumena as objects in the external world consisting of a relationship between a set of parts, then it is true that noumena don't ontologically exist in the world, as relations don't ontologically exist in the external world, but only in the mind of the observer as a concept.
You wrote "If you are going to take seriously some impossible interface with noumena, it is not going to happen through a discursive reasoning process of what is "out there" because what is out there will always be conditioned evidence and noumena are not conditioned"
IE, in my terms, it follows that our understanding of noumena as defined as objects in the external world must be transcendental in that objects in the external world don't ontologically exist.
Meaning
Meaning in language is in the relationship between parts. "Apple" has no meaning in itself. "The apple is green" has meaning because of the relationship between its parts, "apple" and "green". As relations have no ontological existence in the external world, but only in the mind, and as meaning is a relationship between parts, meaning cannot exist in the external world, but only in the mind
You wrote: "This is why hermeneutics is so important, for it sees this and therefore puts interpretation first, and it is not physicality that takes priority, but meaning, and this goes to language and logic."
IE, in my terms, any meaning discovered in the external world must be transcendental, as meaning has no ontological existence in the external world but only in the mind.
Apriori knowledge at its source, is transcendental. Hence, transcendental idealism. We can observe it in its USE. But "purely transcendental use of categories therefore is in reality of no use at all, and has no definite or even, with regard to its form only, definable object."
Quoting RussellA
Not this. As an intuition, causality only applies to phenomenona. What causality IS in some noumenal sense, is unknown. One cannot speak as though noumena "causes" phenomena. It could be, he speculates, a preestablished harmony, or some other (as I recall. Haven't read CPR in a while). If you find he talks like this, it is because 'cause' is the only term he can think of that might describe the relationship?? But clearly, he does not mean we have in causality an understanding of anything noumenal. Such knowledge is impossible.
Quoting RussellA
But one does not "discover" this reality if by reality you are talking about noumena. It is undiscoverable. Noumena is just an empty but necessary concept. You can read why he talks about it in the Transcendental Analytic.
Quoting RussellA
Yes, but the whole is the problem. A whole is only conceivable in relation to a part, just as up is only conceivable relative to down. Meanings are generated in opposition. Noumena are not "the whole". They are not a "they", which is just a manner of speaking. Impossible to imagine, since to think at all is to divide, relate, play against, etc.
I look at noumena very differently for Kant or you. I hold that the noumenal necessarily subsumes the phenomenon such that what I behold AS a phenomenon, like my cat on the couch, is, tail to ears, noumenal. There is no finitude, and the divisions are what they are, and they too are noumenal. Nothing at all can escape the what we see as eternal, noumenal, infinite. Take a single index of identity: time: how "old" is this hand? Given that ex nihilo nihil fit. Space and time, when pressed for basic meanings, are apodictically eternal. Take a given phenomenon, and it can be demonstrated that what you observe is reducible to eternity, that is, all the terms used in the totality of lexical possibilities, yield a foundational indeterminacy.
Quoting RussellA
I don't doubt that language is good for survival and reproduction.
Quoting RussellA
I don't think of noumena as objects at all. I think of noumena as the indeterminacy inherent in all that is. And I think, to understand what this means takes a withdrawal from the thought itself.
Quoting RussellA
"Don't ontologically exist" is an odd phrase.
I wonder how amenable you would be to the following. A bit wordy I'm afraid:
I am far less interested in objects than I am in the self. After all, I am, in the recesses of my "interiority" a noumenal being. This transcendental ego is my self, and this has its analysis found in the examination of the generational ground of experience, right there, where the thought rises up and becomes manifest. You see, where a scientific approach would try to reconcile the brain and its observable features like the analysis of its biochemistry, the structure is neuronal systems, and the whole rest of this empirical field of study, phenomenological approach takes Kant more seriously: All that can be known is phenomena, and the brain is a phenomenon, a densely processed phenomenon . It is not as if there is no connection between the brain and experience; this is not denied or refuted. It is rather that THIS too, this connection, is a phenomenon, making the true generative source of experience still noumenal. We want very much to say brains produce consciousness, but this connection remains entirely alien to our grasp: We simply cannot infer from our phenomenological grasp of brain chemistry and so on, that this grasp IS the way things ARE "in themselves". That remains with metaphysics.
On the other hand, there we are observing the world and it is intuitively powerful, this presence of things and our engagement. It is not possible that I am not experiencing "reality" for what is real can only be a measure of the way reality is presented. I mean, this IS where we get the term 'reality' in the first place. We do not get reality out of an abstract analysis, or from a concept like material substance. It issues from the eating and the breathing and the full sense of existing in the world.
I ask myself this: how is it possible that I can experience the world as a world and not just the locality within a cranium? By any measure one can imagine, I should not be able to experience the (noumenal) world. One has to be very careful with this, because it is most tempting to see the apparatus in place, the lens of the eye, the light reflected and absorbed by the object, the tactile feel corresponding and it all fitting so neatly together, etc., and conclude: I am surely receiving the (noumenal) world indirectly. But one can never get around, in an empirical way, that the thick membrane of brain tissue simply has no epistemic access to the "outside". The lens of the eye quickly turns into clunky brain matter. Even the lens is, on analysis, this.
Only one impossible answer: we do in fact experience the (noumenal) world; and our experience is not localized to this grey physical mass. Consciousness is, after all, noumena. Nothing escapes this. Certainly not phenomena.
Interpreting what you wrote in my own terms.
You wrote: I am far less interested in objects than I am in the self.
We begin with the self, the "I" that is conscious, the "I" that has thoughts. The "I" has thoughts about things external to the thoughts themselves, things that change with time, and these things are called phenomena. All the "I" knows for certain are phenomena - the colour red, a sharp pain, an acrid smell, a sour taste, a crackling noise. The "I" has thoughts about these individual phenomena, but more than that, the "I" combines these individual phenomena in various ways. The "I's" thoughts are about phenomena and various combinations of phenomena.
A whole is only conceivable in relation to a part, just as up is only conceivable relative to down. Meanings are generated in opposition.
The nature of relations is critical. My belief is that relations do ontologically exist in the mind (the Binding Problem). We call these combinations of phenomena "noumena". We think about particular combinations of phenomena and sometimes we give them a name. The combination of phenomena, the colour red, an acrid smell, a crackling noise we can name "fire", and this "fire" is a noumena. We can say that combinations of phenomena exist in a logical reality, in that noumena exist in a logical reality. A logical reality that exists in the mind.
I don't think of noumena as objects at all. I think of noumena as the indeterminacy inherent in all that is.
Noumena are combinations of phenomena. But a combination is a relation. As relations only ontological exist in the mind, noumena only ontologically exist in the mind. We can think about the noumena occupying a space, but such a space is only a logical space, nothing more than that. When thinking about space, as we are thinking about the relation between phenomena, we are thinking about a logical space.
On the other hand, there we are observing the world and it is intuitively powerful, this presence of things and our engagement. It is not possible that I am not experiencing "reality" for what is real can only be a measure of the way reality is presented.
Our thoughts about these combinations of phenomena, these noumena, are intuitively powerful because they ontologically exist within our mind, within a logical space and a logical reality.
Nothing at all can escape the what we see as eternal, noumenal, infinite.
There is almost no limit to the number of possible combinations of phenomena, in a mereological sense, meaning that there is almost no limit to the potential number of noumena existing in a logical reality
Space and time, when pressed for basic meanings, are apodictically eternal.
In experiencing phenomena, I have freedom to combine them in an almost unlimited number of spatial and temporal ways, a logical space and time unbounded and eternal.
I am surely receiving the (noumenal) world indirectly. But one can never get around, in an empirical way, that the thick membrane of brain tissue simply has no epistemic access to the "outside"
The mind needs no epistemic access to the external world in order to perceive noumena. The mind perceives the noumena directly as combinations of phenomena in a logical space existing within the mind.
Only one impossible answer: we do in fact experience the (noumenal) world; and our experience is not localized to this grey physical mass. Consciousness is, after all, noumena. Nothing escapes this. Certainly not phenomena.
Our consciousness is of phenomena and combinations of phenomena , both having an ontological existence within the mind. These combinations of phenomena, which we know as noumena, exist in a logical world that exists within the mind.
Kant's a priori pure intuition
Kant's a priori pure intuitions of time and space may be explained as being a logical time and space created by ontological relationships between phenomena, ie, noumena, within the mind.
Logic and the world
a perverse belief in a logically structured world can generate a false sense of paradox
Relations are an ontological part of the logical world we perceive in our minds. The world we imagine outside of the phenomena we perceive is a world that we cannot imagine to have relations (FH Bradley's Regress argument). It is inevitable that the application of relational logic onto a world without relational logic will inevitable lead to paradox.
Okay
Quoting RussellA
But this is confused; I mean, you cannot say, "We call these combinations of phenomena "noumena." What you say here about noumena really has to be more closely looked at. What do you mean "this fire is a noumenon"? When we say "fire" it is EXACTLY what noumena is not, for Kant is very explicit about this. If you disagree with Kant then say so. I know I do.
Quoting RussellA
Logical space? Wittgenstein? You know, there is in Heidegger's B and T a kind of space that is utterly distinct: What is "close" is what is brought to mind. My glasses may be physically close, but as I ignore them to think about Chinese bar tenders in Beijing, the latter are much closer. Proximity by extended space is only ONE way to think about this, and only when it comes to mind, is this relevant. But in terms of your actual affairs, Kant's space is certainly NOT primordial.
But when you say things like noumena being combinations of phenomena, you have to explain yourself. Clearly you've stepped out of Kant, which is fine with me, but then you use his language and it sounds all wrong. What, in this idea, is a phenomenon? You will talk about combinations, but Kant's idea of a combination is the synthetic function of a concept. Without this there is no thought at all, and what lies before you is unspeakable, or, if you follow someone like Dennett (and Husserl and Heidegger and Derrida; all of them), what is there before you IS in its being there at all, conceptual. You cannot separate these. They are the essence of being an object.
One has to first admit this. Then one can go on to what Kierkegaard says about the collision between concepts and actualities: IN and through this conceptual apparatus, is disclosed the world's eternity. Both IN and OUT of time, for to think at all is to be in time, yet time is quantifying the world: the world is immediately grasped, in our daily living, in a kind of spatialized way. Not a continuity, but divided. Remove the divisions (a debatable concept) and eternity stands before you, subsuming all, of you will: the eternal present. Wittgenstein talked like this, a big fan of Kierkegaard, as was Heidegger.
Our finitude is created by time, the events that divide things. Dewey called this "consummatory". His Art as Experience is a very good read. He was a pragmatist, and he and Rorty made me a qualified pragmatist. Heidegger's Being and Time has pragmatism as a principle feature. It is through thinkers like this that one continues on with Kant, even as much as they depart from him. They are all, in one way or another, phenomenologists.
You sound like someone who who could think in this vein.
Quoting RussellA
Phenomenology does not separate the relation from the "related". To do so leads one to affirming a thing apart from the relation, and that isolates the object beyond apprehension. THIS is Kant's noumena. Entirely metaphysical, in the bad sense of this word. This kind of thing is what gave rise to analytic philosophy's positivistic
The REAL question is, what is there in the world and its analysis as a world. The "beyondness" is there. This about separation is, however, very important: In the bond of relations we have the power to critique, second guess, put distance between us and the institutions that would claim us, so we don't simply go along, allowing our lives to be lived, if you will, in the third person. But this interposition of consciousness into the cycle of events that move forward so automatically, is MOST interesting. It is not simply a matter of declaring oneself independent, as with a political opposition, say; it is a partial termination of the institutions that flow through you, that define the meaning of our lives in culture and language. Here, we are thrust into something else entirely, not just an adjustment of thinking.
It comes to point, for many, that the foundational philosophical problem we face requires something revelatory for its resolution.