On the purpose of metaphysics, historically and today

Metaphysics & Epistemology
243

Not sure if it is that simple. The duality of the world in Kant is interesting, practical and making sense.

I agree that we perceive and understand in the world is phenomenon, which is based on the appearance. I see an apple, and know it is apple. I see a cup and it is a cup.

But there is noumenal side of every object I see. Beyond the appearance, we always tend to go further for more epistemic info such as where is the apple grown from? What would be like inside the apple? How would it taste like? Some info is never known. Some info can be known if it can be known via experience such as cutting it open, and eating it.

A cup is for coffee. But who made the cup? Where is it made? When was it made? I don’t know. I know how it looks, and it will hold coffee, but that is all I know.

It is same with everything existing in the world, and even the world is only partially perceivable. All I can perceive is what I see when I open the window of my room, a patch of sky, the hill, houses, streets, and part of the mountain far away. I have no idea what is happening beyond the the sight, definitely I have no idea what is happening in all the countries I am not staying in.

I would imagine God would be the same. God may exist in somewhere beyond my vision and sight, but I cannot perceive God. But I postulate God, because there is no other way the universe could have existed. This world view was only possible with Kant’s idea, which was not just saying noumena is unknown, and phenomena is known.

And also isn’t QM’s objects in particles and energy level, which are out of range for our normal senses? When the objects are being observed, the only way we can know about then would be via imagination, inference, belief or faith. Would it not be the methodology what religious objects are being observed?

I don’t know much about QM, but my curiosity on the subject seems increasing recently. My main interest on the subject would be are QM and science possible without metaphysics. Is QM a science, or metaphysics?

244

This is not a valid conclusion. I am not defending a “young earth” theory".

Think of it like this. What I am saying did not exist before 555mya is consciousness and the present moment. There was no “now”. Instead, the entire history of the cosmos - or rather an entire set of histories of the cosmos, existed as an informational block. Many people believe this is how reality actually works. They have no place in their model of reality for a “now” anyway (it is missing from the scientific model), so they believe the past and future exist, already determined/unchanging. Does this make geology wrong, or support “young earth” theories? Of course not.

What I am saying was that until there was consciousness and a “now”, the cosmos really did exist in that state. No present, no conscious perspective (what Kant called “phenomena”), just a block of information in a mindless universe, containing every possible history (apart from those containing conscious beings).

Then, when consciousness evolves (the first animal with a brain enters the cosmos) then one of those potential timelines is selected into classical phase 2 reality.

My description of Phase 1 – the MWI-like phase – is exactly analagous to reality as people who accept MWI actually believe. And MWI is not young earth creationism! The only reason MWI is absurd is that it claims minds can split.

245

Regarding noumena. According to Kant it is unknowable. Yes, it includes noumenal equivalents of phenomenal objects like cups. But because it is unknowable, it is not possible to exclude other things as possibilities. For example, if Jungian archetypes exist, then they are noumenal. The same goes for Platonic forms, and not just God but almost every kind of deity humans have ever believed in (the obvious exception being the Greek gods, which were more real than that). “Noumena” is the realm of anything which exists but isn’t phenomenal. So why can’t that include the uncollapsed wavefunction (if it exists)?

Some critics might say that. A strict instrumentalist with respect to science might say “we have no more reason to believe wavefunctions/superpositions are real than we have reason to believe gods exist”. Logical positivists (if any still exist) might also say this. These are exactly the sort of debates that take place in the subject of quantum foundations (quantum metaphysics).

It is both.

There is a very large number of people who think they understand the debates about QM, but really understand almost nothing. In order to actually grasp what is going on, it is essential to understand the history. If you have some time, then please take a look at the following link. It is about a ten minute read, and describes the whole history. Follow the sub-links in the order they appear.

The Quantum Measurement Problem | Two-Phase Cosmology

If you’d prefer a single document then download this and read chapter 6 (the same material): The Sacred Structure of Reality / Two-Phase Cosmology and a Metaphysics for the Quantum Age | Zenodo

246

Regarding noumena. According to Kant, they are unknowable — but there’s a point of Kant scholarship here (not that I’m well-credentialed!): noumena and the Ding an sich aren’t quite the same concept, although Kant is not always consistent in his terminology and sometimes seems to treat them as interchangeable.

Noumenal derives from the Greek nous, (traditionally translated as ‘intellect’.) Before Kant, the noumenon could therefore be understood as something apprehended by intellect — an intelligible object, in something like the Platonic sense. Kant adopted but substantially re-defined the terminology. His insistence that “thoughts without content are empty” and that the content of cognition ultimately depends upon sensibility rules out our having knowledge of objects through pure intellect. Hence his famous claim that “concepts without intuitions are empty”: a concept by itself does not give us knowledge of an object.

This was one reason Schopenhauer was critical of Kant’s use of the terminology: he thought Kant had appropriated noumenon for a purpose different from its traditional meaning (although that also is contested.)

The Ding an sich, on the other hand, is the “thing in itself”: the object considered independently of the conditions under which it can appear to us. It is therefore not simply another name for “noumenon”, although Kant’s discussion sometimes seems to use them interchangeably.

The way I parse the ding-an-sich is to omit ‘ding’ (thing). The ‘in itself’ is precisely the world (or object) unobserved, outside our contact with it or knowledge of it. So, it’s not an ‘unknown thing’. Not even an ‘it’, really, just the ‘in itself’. The Noumenal, meanwhile, I’m inclined to interpret in a more Platonist way - ideal objects which are grasped entirely by intellect but which have no material existence.

247

Yes, I am aware of this distinction in Kant scholarship. But it remains the case that ever since Kant, “noumena” and “things themselves” have been used interchangably. I don’t think this makes much difference to my own argument here.

248

If we think about knowledge of objects, it is not clear cut category of knowable and unknowable. There is also partly knowable and partly unknowable.

Nothing it completely unknowable. Even God or universe, we know something about them, but not completely and totally know them.

That doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about them either. If we don’t know anything about them, then we wouldn’t be even able to talk about them.

Hence it wouldn’t be incorrect to say something is unknowable or knowable? Because what is thought to be known can harbour something unknown, and what is known to be unknown can be known by further observations and reasoning?

The fact that we can talk about them seem to suggest we know something about them. Even if we don’t know anything about something, that tells us that we know the fact that we know nothing about them, which means we know something about them?

Thanks for the link. Yes, will have read on them, and find more about QM and Cosmology. It looks interesting stuff.

249

The distinction matters to me because it leaves open the possibility that something can be real without being phenomenally existent. That is how I would characterise the wavefunction: it is real in the sense that it is indispensable to our account of quantum phenomena, but it is not itself phenomenally existent. We can’t encounter Ψ in experience in the way we encounter a detector reading - but it is real nonetheless.

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250

How can we know anything about God, given that the people who believe in God all believe different things, and a large proportion of people don’t believe in God at all?

251

If you read William James, he talks about religious experience of some folks. Of course it is not for everyone. Some folks have them.

We all know something about God. If you say, you don’t know anything about God, that is still your some knowledge of God that you don’t anything about God.

So you know something about God, even if you don’t believe in God, and you have not perceived God.

252

To me this is like saying we can’t encounter a marriage or a song in experience. The wave function is temporally and spatially extended, irreducible to this or that particular “now” of perceptual presence.

253

It is not. It’s a mathematical formula. How can a mathematical formula be ‘temporally and spatially extended’? It may refer to something spatially extended but in this case even that can be called into question (I mean, is a Hilbert space a space?)

254

To me we can approach this in terms of the “infinite richness” of every object. The object shows itself as also hiding itself. The object has “infinite depth.”

Leibniz offers us one beautiful approach to this “infinite depth” of the world that lives primarily “always around the corner.”

Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls.

Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond.

And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the garden or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to be imperceptible to us.

I am not endorsing Leibniz’s specific claims here, but presenting an example of a philosopher with a sense of the “temporal depth” of the world.

The “real thing” isn’t hiding behind the face that it shows us. Instead that thing has an infinity of faces that it hasn’t yet shown.

The “idea” of the thing “glues these faces together.” We live the “idea” of thing as we enact our sharing of the world with others through interacting with and discussing objects that show themselves as “also for others” and “still in progress.”

This is what I meant elsewhere by saying that the future is “more real” than the present. We are “as consciousness” the continuing and progressive disclosure or unveiling of the things in the world.

255

I’m happy to meet this challenge, though I don’t think you’ll like my approach.

Let me take a detour through Saussure. How can the same word be temporally and spatially extended ? A particular vocalization is a saying of the word but not — in any simple way — the word itself. Especially if we stick to the “sound image,” we have a signifier that is “nothing” but sensory (sonic) form. No particular saying of the word “mother” is the “true” or “official” pronunciation. All these unrepeatably unique vocalizations, scattered over space and time, play the same enough “role” in the world through having the “character” of “a saying of mother.” We enact the categorization of the sound as the saying of “mother” rather than “water” or “weather.” This enacting is primarily visceral, though of course we theorize about by using our voice and hands to make marks and noises in the world — which depend on the very “principle” under discussion here.

Math is included in this general point. But we have to move beyond Saussure’s sonic approach and include Goodman’s concept of “character” for repeatable inscriptions that cannot be localized temporally or spatially in any particular inscription.

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The phrase “vector space” employs a beautiful and appropriate metaphor.

One of the most familiar examples of a Hilbert space is the Euclidean vector space consisting of three-dimensional vectors, denoted by R3{displaystyle mathbf {R} ^{3}}, and equipped with the dot product.

This particular vector space is one that every math major tackles in later calculus classes. A vector is intuitively a movement in 3-D space. Or it can be imagined as an “arrow” in 3-D space. Since they are primarily used to predict movements in “lived space,” it makes sense that an idealization of this lived space would be called a “space” in mathematics.

256

It’s too much of a digression. The point I’m making is that the wave function and other comparable items from the lexicon of mathematical physics are real in the original sense of ‘noumenal’, i.e.real as intelligible ‘objects’ (although in this context ‘object’ is also metaphorical as in ‘an object of thought’) . But they’re not reak as phenomenal existents. I see that as a valid metaphysical distinction.

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257

It’s a traditional distinction, of course. You will do as you see fit, of course, but I don’t think it was a digression. Arguably everything in this thread hinges on how we understand the “being” of math.

I’m trying to point out that all objects as such are “intelligible.” A marriage is an “intelligible” object just like \Psi. A particular puppy or mountain is an “intelligible” object. A melody that can be played on many instruments is such an object. But what is intelligibility ? I suggest, following Plato, that it is “absolutely basic.” But so is the “quality” that manifests in “chunks.” It’s approximately Kant’s intuition and concept, but with the recognition that “inside” versus “outside” is not fundamental like “form” and “quality.” I’d call it a better “quasi-hylomorphism.” We have only the collision, though the concept of unity is extremely formal, basically the form of forms. The “one” is the “good” as the principle of the intelligibility of the world.

We talk about “mind” and shove aside a consideration of the basic structure of signs ? But math is “at the very least” inscriptions in the world. What gives an otherwise “meaningless scribble” its “significance” as a piece of math that “models” some aspect of the world ?

That image offers many numerals that are “faces” of the same number.

258

But….why?

While this is logically correct, under what conditions is it true? What if the primary reason d’etre of epistemic metaphysics is knowledge, which makes existence necessary and at the same time makes possibilities irrelevant? Which just means….so what if other existences are possible if they are necessarily beyond the capabilities of the cognitive system intrinsic to the human intelligence, for knowledge of what they are?

Kant has already provided the ground by which your reconstruction of metaphysics may proceed, in pursuit of, if not a proof for your thesis, than at least a conclusion that does not contradict itself nor antecedent experience.
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In Kant, noumena are NOT things as they are in themselves, those being, you know, like…..things-in-themselves, originally the ding an sich.
(Has it ever registered, that there is no mention anywhere of a “noumenon-in-itself?)

In Kant, noumena are treated the same as things-in-themselves, by the understanding. Which is to say they are both merely that which understanding thinks, one in relation to an appearance, the other in relation to absolutely nothing at all. From which follows, noumena are only, in both Aristotle and Kant, things as they are thought, NOT as they are in themselves.
(“….I can think whatever I like, as long as I do not contradict myself…”)

The chapter in CPR regarding the exposition on phenomena vs noumena is a mere sixteen pages (Guyer/Wood, 1998), and inclusion of “Distinction” in the title should be a clue: if it is proved necessary that things are distinct from each other, they cannot be alike under the same conditions.

In any case where noumena and things-in-themselves are contextually integrated, which is represented in text as “thing-in-itself (noumenon)”, it is from the perspective of either reason or understanding, and not the system as a whole, having empirical knowledge as its ends.
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How can that thing cognized as, e.g., “God”, whatever it may be, be a noumenon, if it is the case noumena are impervious to cognition?

Anything labeled with a name becomes so by cognition, sufficient reason for the fact there is no, and never was, any named noumenal object, ever. From which follows as a matter of metaphysical course, to say there is a noumena side of every object is catastrophically false, insofar as objects are possible cognitions and noumena can never be.

Again…….but, why?

259

I have read The Varieties of Religious Experience. That is about experiences, not God.

But that reduces “God” to a word, doesn’t it?

260

Kant invented the phenomenal/noumenal distinction in response to Hume’s arguments about the limits of consciousness and the apparent paradoxes between the objects of perception and supposed “real objects” beyond the veil of perception.

Because noumenal causality affects phenomena. Noumena isn’t irrelevant to the world we experience, because part of what we experience is only possible because noumena exist (free will, for example).

Now I am not following you. Why would we need a concept of noumenon-in-itself?

But a large number of people don’t accept there even is any “God”, and yet they can still use that word.

Are you attacking my position here, or Kant’s?

I am really struggling to follow this. I don’t understand whether you are attacking my position in general, my interpretation of Kant, or Kant himself.

261

Yours does not answer the “why” question.

Kantian nonsense; free will isn’t Kantian for one thing, and the will acting freely, which is Kantian, is certainly not noumenal.

Before calling that abysmal Kantian nonsense, insofar as noumena are claimed as unknowable, I should ask what part of our experience is it, that can only be possible because of that of which nothing at all is knowable?

You may be right, but you are not right because of anything of congruent relevance to Kantian metaphysics.
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The fact there isn’t one illustrates the absurdity of the claim that noumena and things-in-themselves are interchangeable, beyond the faculty in which they are conceived.

To cognize either existence or non-existence has nothing to do with the impossibility of cognition itself. That a word represents a conception does not mean there is necessarily an object related to it, insofar as the word may very well merely represent the idea the conception expresses.
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I’m arguing the misunderstanding of transcendental philosophy is reason to eject it from legitimizing even the very ground of theories necessarily predicated on a metaphysical system not in conformity with it. Or, on the other hand, all that which is grounded on transcendental philosophy, albeit illegitimately, is thereby illusory.

You haven’t stated for the record what you think metaphysics actually is, or what kind of metaphysics grounds your thesis, only that a new one is going to be required by those interested in understanding its construction. You haven’t even said you understand it yourself, but under the assumption you do I wonder what kind of metaphysics you used, such that it isn’t, for all intents and purposes, the same as mine.

262

OK, so I am getting the impression that you really don’t like Kant.

I stated in the OP what I think metaphysics is. It is whatever connects first principles (which must be defined as part of the system), to the best available science.

or what kind of metaphysics grounds your thesis

The Void | Two-Phase Cosmology

0|∞

How can something come from nothing? The answer is simple, and has been known since antiquity: Ex nihilo nihil fit – from nothing, nothing comes. If absolute nothingness had ever been real, there would still be nothing now. The existence of anything at all means that, barring a logic-defying miracle, some kind of eternal ground must underlie reality. That leaves us with two options. One is an eternally complex source such as an Abrahamic God – a pre-existent being who chooses a possible cosmos and wills it into being. The other is an eternally simple source – a condition with no prior structure, no determinate content, but infinite potential. The simplest possible paradox: an Infinite Void.

I have never believed in the intelligent designer God which so many Western theists are convinced is real. By the time I was old enough to have formed a view on such things, I had decided it was about as believable as Father Christmas, and I chose Christmas Day to refuse to attend church ever again. Much has changed about my understanding since then, but the idea of God as a kind of CEO and project engineer of reality has never made sense to me. If such a being actually does exist – a God who thinks, designed the cosmos, and makes strategic decisions about the course of human history – then I have a lot of questions to ask about the details of Its decision-making. So for me this is not a tough decision – the Two-Phase Cosmology begins with an Infinite Nothingness. I write this as 0|∞. This represents the unity of absolute absence and limitless possibility – the paradoxical ground from which all structure arises.

This intuition is not new…

[continues]