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Braininvat » Wed Jan 07, 2015 12:37 pm wrote:Yep. Thinking along these lines preceded Darwin and so there wasn't much consideration given to the idea that there might be a selective advantage to brains that create a phenomenal world that is a close match with the noumenon. In a world that is ever-changing, time is real to the degree that some rates of change are consistent and regular. A brain that is "in tune" with these regularities in change in the environment has a better chance of passing along its genes. A brain that is awestruck at a timeless world tends to get eaten by a tiger.
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Neri » January 10th, 2015, 1:16 pm wrote:I am afraid that I do not completely agree with comments. In particular, I do not think it would have made any difference to Kant if he knew about evolution.
Kant’s basic notion that time, space and causation were creations of the mind that were conditions precedent to all understanding was fundamentally anti-realistic. This necessarily means that things as they really are [things in themselves] are unknowable. To Kant, all science concerned itself only with appearances [phenomena] and was not capable of knowing things in themselves [noumena]. There is no reason to think that biology in general and evolution in particular would have been any exception.
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Kant wrote:Appearances, so far as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phenomena. But if I postulate things which are mere objects of understanding, and which, nevertheless, can be given as such to an intuition, although not to one that is sensible ... such things would be entitled noumena. ...
If the senses represent to us something merely as it appears, this something must also in itself be a thing, and an object of a non-sensible intuition, that is, of the understanding. In other words, a [kind of] knowledge must be possible, in which there is no sensibility, and which alone has reality that is absolutely objective. Through its objects will be represented as they are, whereas in the empirical employment of our understanding things will be known only as they appear. ...
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Neri » January 15th, 2015, 3:20 pm wrote:James,
The quotes you provide are inapposite in that they concern knowledge “in which there is no sensibility” or “an object of non-sensible intuition. Here I think Kant must be referring to moral duty or some such thing.
Kant wrote:If the senses represent to us something merely as it appears, this something must also in itself be a thing, and an object of a non-sensible intuition, that is, of the understanding.
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Neri » Thu Jan 15, 2015 9:20 am wrote:James,
The quotes you provide are inapposite in that they concern knowledge “in which there is no sensibility” or “an object of non-sensible intuition. Here I think Kant must be referring to moral duty or some such thing. Although you have not provided a citation, I suspect the quotes may be from the Critique of Practical Reason, but I am not sure. At any rate, we instantly concern ourselves with “objects of sensible intuition”—that is, phenomena resulting from sensory encounters with real things outside of us.
I will now treat your own comments [even though there is not much in them that has anything to do with the quotes you provide].
Your use of the expression, “otherwise” is misplaced. Kant is clear that, with or without sensible intuitions, we can know nothing about things as they really are. That is, although a sense object may be said to “represent” a real object, it does not really resemble it in any way. To put it more precisely, our sensory encounters with real objects do not contribute anything to our experience of the object--even though, according to Kant, our minds would not form that experience absent that confrontation. As I explained in my previous post, this lack of correspondence between an object of sense and a real object (thing-in-itself) is traceable to Kant’s insistence that that time, space and causation are neither real objects nor conditions of real objects but rather pure creations of the mind.
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Positor » Fri Jan 16, 2015 7:34 am wrote:James,
Are you interpreting Kant to mean that each individual phenomenon (appearance of a thing) corresponds to an individual noumenon (that thing itself)? If so, I think this is problematic. I can elaborate on this if necessary.
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Neri » Fri Jan 16, 2015 11:17 am wrote:James,
If by “CPR” you mean “Critique of Practical Reason,” I take it that your quotes were taken from that source. If so, you are “comparing apples with oranges”—that is, comparing the internal experience of free will with the experience derived from sensory encounters with real things outside of us.
Below Kant states the objections to his view, on the one hand, of the self as phenomenon [in The Critique of Pure Reason] and, on the other hand, as noumenon [in The Critique of Practical Reason] where free will and morality are concerned:
“…the most considerable
objections which I have as yet met with against the
Critique [of Practical Reason] turn about these two points, namely, on the one
side, the objective reality of the categories as applied to
noumena, which is in the theoretical department of
knowledge denied, in the practical affirmed; and on the other side,
the paradoxical demand to regard oneself qua
subject of freedom as a noumenon, and at the same time
from the point of view of physical nature as a phenomenon
in one’s own empirical consciousness; for as long
as one has formed no definite notions of morality and
freedom, one could not conjecture on the one side what
was intended to be the noumenon, the basis of the alleged
phenomenon, and on the other side it seemed
doubtful whether it was at all possible to form any notion
of it, seeing that we had previously assigned all the
notions of the pure understanding in its theoretical use
exclusively to phenomena.”
The Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant
translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (1788); page 6.
Unfortunately, Kant never satisfactorily resolves this ontological conundrum.
However, it is abundantly clear that the experience of the moon (to use your example) does not involve an exercise of free will in making moral choices and therefore would not be considered as corresponding to a noumenon even in the “CPR.”
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owleye » January 16th, 2015, 4:45 pm wrote:The moon, as a thing in itself, is not knowable, according to Kant. If you recall, Leibniz held out for windowless monads, one where the moon would have a form of consciousness in its inner core. This idea is how Kant launches his moral theory, which is basically his main objective, except that Kant restricts it to humans, and human consciousness. For the moon, the thing-in-itself term is a bit unfortunate. The idea of 'in itself' represents a sense in which there is an 'inside', or 'other side' to reality, one that consciousness can only refer to, but can't actually get at. Though it might lead us to think that the moon is some windowless monad, there's something to this idea, seeing as how we continue to ask as we gain more knowledge of things at ever finer levels, that we're not actually getting at the object itself, but rather getting at only its properties. Note that I think it would be better to say the object is not knowable itself, rather than 'in itself'.
Kant wrote:The non-sensible cause of these representations is completely unknown to us, and hence cannot be intuited as an object.
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Positor » Sat Jan 17, 2015 9:00 pm wrote:You distinguish between the 'moon itself' and its properties. But I would say the moon (itself) is the sum of its (intrinsic) properties. If the idea of the moon having consciousness (or any other exotic transcendent property) is ruled out, then all its intrinsic properties are physical, and discoverable by us in principle. Therefore, if we could discover all its properties, down to the smallest subatomic detail, we would therefore empirically know it 'itself'. Meanwhile, we have partial knowledge of the moon 'itself', to the extent that we know some of its properties.
Positor wrote:The problem with this 'analog' interpretation of the noumena/phenomena relation is that it seems to me indistinguishable from straightforward realism. If there is nothing unknowable in principle about the moon itself, there seems no room for 'transcendental idealism' (at least as far as non-conscious objects are concerned). The more we discover about the moon, the more exact the mapping between its sensible properties and its intrinsic properties.
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owleye » January 18th, 2015, 3:44 pm wrote:So, you think that objects don't exist apart from the (essential) properties themselves. Well, this is certainly radical. Properties aren't really properties of things that exist.
owleye wrote:It more or less completely eliminates the existence of such objects as the moon about which we only think exists because it just so happens to exhibit properties all at some point in space and time. There's nothing there to make us think that the moon is what has these properties. The moon exists in name only. To adopt this position, I think, one would need an explanation of why these properties come to be bundled together and given to us as if there were an object that had these properties and located at a certain place in space and duration in time.
owleye wrote:Why conclude that the moon, as we learn more about it, can't sustain its ontology? Indeed, isn't it reasonable to conclude that because we are learning more about its properties and have identified them with one and the same object, that the object is merely being clarified, not eliminated?
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Positor » Tue Jan 20, 2015 3:42 pm wrote:[quote="[url=http://www.sciencechatforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=274056#p274056]owleye » January 18th, 2
No, when I stated that the moon is the sum of its properties I didn't mean that it does not exist as an object. One of the moon's properties is that it consists of various basic physical entities (particles, fields etc) spatially and temporally configured in a particular way.
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