Dec 21, 2016 11:05 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 21, 2016 11:10 PM by C C.)
Preliminary blurbs...
Erwin Schrödinger: "The great thing [about Kant's philosophy] was to form the idea that this one thing -- mind or world -- may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice." --Mind and Matter
Another of Schrödinger's quotes about Kant probably baffles many, in respect to Einstein's work seeming to do just what Erwin denies: "Einstein has not ... given the lie to Kant's deep thoughts on the idealization of space and time; he has, on the contrary, made a large step towards its accomplishment." --Mind and Matter
But Kant contended that our perceptions or experiences of the world would be regulated by either Newtonian or traditional / commonsense concepts and intuitions. Not that our theoretical enterprises would be incapable of adding new furniture to our descriptive accounts of it. Kant's very system allowed for new developments like Einstein's work and non-Euclidean geometry before that to eventually emerge (Kant's prediction in the quote below). But those innovations didn't alter the human brain/mind's "old" operating system (figurative) or our usual manner of representation in perception. Such only expanded our axioms for geometry and other abstract thought inventions.
Immanuel Kant: "As long as the cognition of reason is homogeneous, definite bounds to it are inconceivable. In mathematics and in natural philosophy human reason admits of limits but not of bounds, viz., that something indeed lies without it, at which it can never arrive, but not that it will at any point find completion in its internal progress. The enlarging of our views in mathematics, and the possibility of new discoveries, are infinite; and the same is the case with the discovery of new properties of nature, of new powers and laws, by continued experience and its rational combination." --Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics
Extracts of the meat... From Chapter 7 of Ronald C. Pine's book "Science and the Human Prospect"... Not all presented in order...
Ronald C. Pine: [...] Kant's philosophy also prepared the way to think about the possibility that there are many real events, other worlds, happening all the time right in front of us, so to speak, even though we are incapable of directly experiencing them. It would soon be common place for scientists to believe that there are many realities beyond the perceptual window allowed by Newtonian conceptual filters. Kant was right about our normal perceptual window. It is Newtonian. Every observation scientists make, whether it be in an Earth laboratory or of deep space, will be framed within a normal three-dimensional window. [...] it would soon be common place to believe that [...] indirect methods [...] made in our normal mode could indicate or point to a world totally different from what we normally observe. Scientists would soon be routinely setting up laboratory conditions to reveal the heretofore unimaginable and invisible realities of electromagnetic radiation, of electricity, of X-rays, of AM and FM transmissions, and eventually announce theories such as the Big Bang, the description of which cannot be imagined through our Newtonian common sense.
Ironically, in his attempt to establish Newtonianism as a priori, Kant prepared the way for us to think the unthinkable: that we could conceptualize, understand, and even have knowledge of new unimaginable realities, that our common notion of three-dimensional space, our normal experience of the unidirectional flow of time, our thoughts about causality, could be but a human point of view.
- - - - - - -
[...] In the eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) discovered another paradox, a paradox which clashed with the astounding success of the new science of his time and its rudimentary technological applications. [... amounting to problems with induction and causality...] With Hume, philosophy was embarrassing the whole show. Philosophical analysis showed that there was no proof that the fundamental concepts of this understanding represented reality. From a logical point of view, all the useful discoveries could be nothing more than a large number of coincidences. [...] But for a philosophically minded German physicist, Hume's work was the challenge of a lifetime.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) [...] was shaken by Hume's critique of Newtonian concepts. Hume awoke Kant from a "dogmatic slumber," to use Kant's words. Kant taught physics and philosophy at the University of Konigsberg and had contributed to the theoretical applications of Newton's work by proposing a hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, known as the "nebular hypothesis." He also noted that the tides would, over a long period of time, slow the Earth's rotation, and proposed that earthquakes were caused by shifting and faulting of large sections of rock. But he quickly saw that Hume's work questioned the very foundation of not only Newtonian physics but all of science as well and any attempt to know the causes of things.
Kant wrote his book primarily for scientists and scientifically minded philosophers to allay their fears that any attempt at a unified body of knowledge was a hopeless dream. There was a solution to the problem, according to Kant, but the solution would have to be a radical one. Just as the Sun-centered system of Copernicus was a radical revision of our normal thinking about our place in the universe, a switch from being central to being simply on another planet, so the epistemological solution to Hume's problem would also be an "inversion" of our thinking about reason and knowledge.
[...] According to Kant, [David] Hume was right to an extent: There would be no way to logically deduce an objective reality of causal connections independent of our thinking about reality. We can, however, deduce from human experience a kind of "meta-knowledge." We can deduce that causality and other fundamental scientific concepts, such as three-dimensional space, a universal time, and the basic principles of mathematics, will always be the framework for which all human observations of the world will take place. These concepts will always be with us and will never be overthrown by any future experience of reality because these notions are an inherent part of the human mind. They are the "filters" through which we will always view the world.
No matter where we travel in this great universe, space, time, causality, and mathematics will be the same, not necessarily because the universe itself is always this way but because wherever we go, every interpretation, every observation made by human beings will always conform to our filters, the "categories of understanding" as Kant put it. The objective universe might conform exactly to the way we filter it, but there would be no way to know this. When we observe reality, we must do so through our filters, and there is no way of stepping outside of our minds and filters and seeing how reality is when we are not looking at it.
[...] We cannot know if reality itself matches these fundamental concepts, it might, it might not. Rather, we can only be sure that reality will always appear this way for us. It is our view of things, a universal, but human perspective. It is as if all humans regardless of culture were born with rose-colored contact lenses as a natural part of our visual physiology. Suppose that without the lenses we would not be able to perceive anything meaningful; we would be effectively blind. With the lenses we see an organized, but always rose-colored, world. For all we know the real world is rose-colored also, but there will never be any way to tell.
In this way Kant turned subjectivity into objectivity and overcame he thought the problem of induction. We do not need to worry about proving on the basis of our experience that causality is a valid concept or that it will not be overthrown someday; we know that it will always be a valid concept and never be overthrown, because it is one of the fundamental concepts that makes any experience of the world possible. The validity of causality does not depend upon experience; it is not "a posteriori," to use Kant's terminology. It is "a priori," it is independent of experience. In other words, we do not derive the concept from our experience of the world, we bring it to the world, just as we would not derive our experience of rose-coloredness from the world, but impose it upon the world. --Science and the Human Prospect
Erwin Schrödinger: "The great thing [about Kant's philosophy] was to form the idea that this one thing -- mind or world -- may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice." --Mind and Matter
Another of Schrödinger's quotes about Kant probably baffles many, in respect to Einstein's work seeming to do just what Erwin denies: "Einstein has not ... given the lie to Kant's deep thoughts on the idealization of space and time; he has, on the contrary, made a large step towards its accomplishment." --Mind and Matter
But Kant contended that our perceptions or experiences of the world would be regulated by either Newtonian or traditional / commonsense concepts and intuitions. Not that our theoretical enterprises would be incapable of adding new furniture to our descriptive accounts of it. Kant's very system allowed for new developments like Einstein's work and non-Euclidean geometry before that to eventually emerge (Kant's prediction in the quote below). But those innovations didn't alter the human brain/mind's "old" operating system (figurative) or our usual manner of representation in perception. Such only expanded our axioms for geometry and other abstract thought inventions.
Immanuel Kant: "As long as the cognition of reason is homogeneous, definite bounds to it are inconceivable. In mathematics and in natural philosophy human reason admits of limits but not of bounds, viz., that something indeed lies without it, at which it can never arrive, but not that it will at any point find completion in its internal progress. The enlarging of our views in mathematics, and the possibility of new discoveries, are infinite; and the same is the case with the discovery of new properties of nature, of new powers and laws, by continued experience and its rational combination." --Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics
Extracts of the meat... From Chapter 7 of Ronald C. Pine's book "Science and the Human Prospect"... Not all presented in order...
Ronald C. Pine: [...] Kant's philosophy also prepared the way to think about the possibility that there are many real events, other worlds, happening all the time right in front of us, so to speak, even though we are incapable of directly experiencing them. It would soon be common place for scientists to believe that there are many realities beyond the perceptual window allowed by Newtonian conceptual filters. Kant was right about our normal perceptual window. It is Newtonian. Every observation scientists make, whether it be in an Earth laboratory or of deep space, will be framed within a normal three-dimensional window. [...] it would soon be common place to believe that [...] indirect methods [...] made in our normal mode could indicate or point to a world totally different from what we normally observe. Scientists would soon be routinely setting up laboratory conditions to reveal the heretofore unimaginable and invisible realities of electromagnetic radiation, of electricity, of X-rays, of AM and FM transmissions, and eventually announce theories such as the Big Bang, the description of which cannot be imagined through our Newtonian common sense.
Ironically, in his attempt to establish Newtonianism as a priori, Kant prepared the way for us to think the unthinkable: that we could conceptualize, understand, and even have knowledge of new unimaginable realities, that our common notion of three-dimensional space, our normal experience of the unidirectional flow of time, our thoughts about causality, could be but a human point of view.
- - - - - - -
[...] In the eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) discovered another paradox, a paradox which clashed with the astounding success of the new science of his time and its rudimentary technological applications. [... amounting to problems with induction and causality...] With Hume, philosophy was embarrassing the whole show. Philosophical analysis showed that there was no proof that the fundamental concepts of this understanding represented reality. From a logical point of view, all the useful discoveries could be nothing more than a large number of coincidences. [...] But for a philosophically minded German physicist, Hume's work was the challenge of a lifetime.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) [...] was shaken by Hume's critique of Newtonian concepts. Hume awoke Kant from a "dogmatic slumber," to use Kant's words. Kant taught physics and philosophy at the University of Konigsberg and had contributed to the theoretical applications of Newton's work by proposing a hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, known as the "nebular hypothesis." He also noted that the tides would, over a long period of time, slow the Earth's rotation, and proposed that earthquakes were caused by shifting and faulting of large sections of rock. But he quickly saw that Hume's work questioned the very foundation of not only Newtonian physics but all of science as well and any attempt to know the causes of things.
Kant wrote his book primarily for scientists and scientifically minded philosophers to allay their fears that any attempt at a unified body of knowledge was a hopeless dream. There was a solution to the problem, according to Kant, but the solution would have to be a radical one. Just as the Sun-centered system of Copernicus was a radical revision of our normal thinking about our place in the universe, a switch from being central to being simply on another planet, so the epistemological solution to Hume's problem would also be an "inversion" of our thinking about reason and knowledge.
[...] According to Kant, [David] Hume was right to an extent: There would be no way to logically deduce an objective reality of causal connections independent of our thinking about reality. We can, however, deduce from human experience a kind of "meta-knowledge." We can deduce that causality and other fundamental scientific concepts, such as three-dimensional space, a universal time, and the basic principles of mathematics, will always be the framework for which all human observations of the world will take place. These concepts will always be with us and will never be overthrown by any future experience of reality because these notions are an inherent part of the human mind. They are the "filters" through which we will always view the world.
No matter where we travel in this great universe, space, time, causality, and mathematics will be the same, not necessarily because the universe itself is always this way but because wherever we go, every interpretation, every observation made by human beings will always conform to our filters, the "categories of understanding" as Kant put it. The objective universe might conform exactly to the way we filter it, but there would be no way to know this. When we observe reality, we must do so through our filters, and there is no way of stepping outside of our minds and filters and seeing how reality is when we are not looking at it.
[...] We cannot know if reality itself matches these fundamental concepts, it might, it might not. Rather, we can only be sure that reality will always appear this way for us. It is our view of things, a universal, but human perspective. It is as if all humans regardless of culture were born with rose-colored contact lenses as a natural part of our visual physiology. Suppose that without the lenses we would not be able to perceive anything meaningful; we would be effectively blind. With the lenses we see an organized, but always rose-colored, world. For all we know the real world is rose-colored also, but there will never be any way to tell.
In this way Kant turned subjectivity into objectivity and overcame he thought the problem of induction. We do not need to worry about proving on the basis of our experience that causality is a valid concept or that it will not be overthrown someday; we know that it will always be a valid concept and never be overthrown, because it is one of the fundamental concepts that makes any experience of the world possible. The validity of causality does not depend upon experience; it is not "a posteriori," to use Kant's terminology. It is "a priori," it is independent of experience. In other words, we do not derive the concept from our experience of the world, we bring it to the world, just as we would not derive our experience of rose-coloredness from the world, but impose it upon the world. --Science and the Human Prospect