Demring

A couple of months ago, I wrote to Mike Earl, suggesting that his position is very close to Kant’s. He responded with this video (where he reads out loud what I wrote to him, making the video accessible for anyone):

I think it’s a great idea to make our discussion public. That’s why I’m posting this my (embarrasingly late) reply here:

Hey Mike. Thanks for giving my suggestion serious consideration. I’m sorry it has taken me this long to reply. I’ve tried several times to compose a text, but found it very hard to do properly. I now see that my attempts failed because I was trying to dig into too many issues at once. This time, I’ll try to keep the focus on the central issue you bring up, about compositeness.

The number analogy was a bit confusing at first, as mathematical and empirical objects are understood by both Kant and myself as belonging to completely separate realms (in Kant’s terminology, a priori and a posteriori). I think I understand what you’re saying though, at least when you relate the analogy to things (like the table). But you’re wrong about Kant’s position:

First of all, Kant didn’t see numbers as “out there” in the empirical world, whether composite or singular ones. He did view mathematics as objective, but not in the sense of being external, only in the sense that it is true regardless of which subject is engaged in mathematical thought.

Secondly, things-in-themselves are not viewed by Kant as having definite properties like for instance spatial extension or causal relations to other objects. Properties such as these are supplied not by objects but by our cognitive apparatus when we’re viewing objects. The particular ones I mentioned are “transcendental concepts”, the full set of which I think could be called “the necessary and constitutive optic of experience”, by which I mean that experience would be impossible (or at least unintelligible) if the transcendental concepts (extension, duration, causality etc) hadn’t been applied. The application of transcendental concepts is a minimal requirement for cognition, and are thus present in all functioning humans. This is the ground for Kant’s peculiar form of “physical objectivity”, where the objectivity in question is similar to mathematical objectivity in that it contains no claim about external reality.

Kant would probably sympathize strongly with the view you attribute to him, that things-in-themselves are composite entities, but his own system prohibits him from any positive claims about noumena at all. The concept of noumenal reality is in fact defined as radical negation, as a resounding “I don’t know” to the question of what is the source of empirical appearances. To Kant, the answer to this lies beyond our cognitive limits, and we have no choice but to be agnostic about it. The only thing we can obtain certain knowledge about is the rules of cognition (math and the transcendental concepts).

You claim that “independent of our experiences, there are only prime entities”. I sympathize with this view, but just like with Kant and his opposing (hypothetical) preferences above, I too have to suspend judgment, because the claim is a metaphysical one. Strictly speaking, agnosticism is the only viable position here. (But of course, there is no reason one has to be this strict all the time! I’ll come back to this important point and elaborate in a later post here on my blog.)

“Green and hairy” is to Kant not a priori categories. A green and hairy experience is to Kant just a confused one. If the confusion is overcome, the experience becomes clear and distinct, but not because one has connected somehow to the noumenal realm, not at all. Clarity or purity of thought is merely an internal matter of mental discipline, not about taking part in noumenal reality. 

To your last point, the one with the painting analogy: I wholeheartedly agree, and I think this is a profound and very important issue. Not that I think it would change the course of scientific research a whole lot — because science needs communicable results to progress, and must therefore limit itself to what’s quantifiable (in other words, it is necessarily materialist, at least methodologically so) — but it certainly would be very valuable for scientists to frame the problem in the way you describe. I think their theoretical intuition would benefit. But the most important consequences of “physical subjectivism” is for philosophy. I see it as an intellectually fertile new “platform of the age”, much like how Kant’s system was in the 19th century, but in an improved, modern skin, complete with clear language and the possibility of direct connection to frontier sciences (in particular neuroscience and computer science). I think you’ve done a wonderful job explaining the basics of the theory, particularly in the first two videos of your Emergence series (for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, see my previous post). I’d love to see more videos from you on the subject. And I’d like to make a serious contribution of my own. This fall, I started on a master’s program in philosophy, and hope to be writing my master’s thesis on “virtualism” (as you know I prefer to call it). I won’t be starting on that until next fall, but it is, of course, constantly present in the back of my head. And any discussion that relates to it is much appreciated.

One last remark, about Kant: I’ve been having second thoughts about him lately, because of a class I’m taking where we’re reading the Critique of Judgment. I now think his whole “critical approach” is flawed, in that the posited transcendentals are given a status that is far too high. They should not be priviledged and set apart from other concepts (like table-ness or redness or personality etc). The so-called transcendentals are elevated above the rest of our perspectival capabilities only (it seems to me) in virtue of their quantifiability. And this is a rather arbitrary attribute, as can be demonstrated by how technology conquers new ground in what can be quantified, e.g. in neuroscience.

Instead, I now think Nietzsche is the closest to both our positions. I recently read an excellent unpublished essay by him called “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” that I think is very opportune for me to recommend in this context. It’s not very long, and can be found in its entirety online, here.

I’m curious of what you think of Nietzsche. How familiar are you with him, and how close do you think your position is to his?