How important is to know the realty? This is the question. I think a human being can be far, far away from the reality.
I would say it’s possible to research for the realty. To know more about it. Or to have a mind more synced with it.
I think this is a question worthy of debate, for it defines the limits of what we are capable of.
I would say, like Kant, that the world is largely unknowable. Therefore, I would argue on phenomenological accounts.
From this, the principle of abduction follows. Thus meaning you have to understand then explain. Thus. I would argue that science roughly encompasses the world, since it follows from the principle of abduction. However this is not a deductive argument, hence the permissive stances people take towards this argument.
I would argue that experience is primarily the mode of which humans operate in and defines their world within phenomena. From this, we can differ from what science says. Thus the preponderance of various philosophical schools in explaining what things are.
I would argue that things are roughly knowable and not precisely. This argument holds ground as currently science is nearing the limits of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which may preclude the truest understanding of what reality may entail. Thus we would be stuck with only approximations, and this looks largely to be possibly true; this may turn out to be necessarily true in the future depending on further scientific advancement (pure speculation).
Now the world, thus defined as science, is a 4D spacetime thing. From a more poetic lense, it is the thing in which we exist in. To attune to the world, you may appeal to Heidegger’s Being and Time, in which he argues for analyzing the constructs of our being. Whether that is reality is another affair I suppose, but it is a guesstimate that works for us, since we are “beings in the world”, to paraphrase Heidegger.
What do you mean by the world being largely “unknowable”? Kant’s main argument, postulated in the Critique of Pure Reason, is to distinguish Phenomena (How things appear to us via Experience) from Noumena (How things actually are). So, humans are incapable of observing the world as it truly is, but from the purview of human sensory data, which, if evolutionary theory is true, may be wildly inaccurate, given that evolution entails that our senses are developed for the mere purpose to survive, not to be able to accurately represent the world as it is. This presents to us an enormous problem related to inductive experience, which is predicated on the quality of our sense data; if our senses are, in the case that they enhance our survivability, wildly misrepresentative of what objects actually are, then how can we know anything about reality, objectively?
Kant’s suggestion is that humans ought not try to make our senses conform to what objects really are. He reverses the role; objects ought to conform to how our senses are, and so from this perspective, we are able to use our inherent possession of reason to draw relations between these objects as they conform to our senses, and so, while humans are incapable of figuring out how the world really is via pure reason, we can map out the real world via our sense data into a rough outline, and use reason to draw relations within that synthetic world. Therefore, via this argument by Kant, humans are able to make sense of the world, and draw out reasonable conclusions from it, but we have no authority to infer anything deeper than what our sensory experience can map onto. In this sense, Kant’s argument is a middle ground between the positions that for one, because human sense data is flawed, we can’t know anything about reality to a certainty, and two, that human sense data is the most effective source of knowledge, and so ought to be trusted above all else. It is an epistemologically humble position to take, allowing us to trust science while not overstepping its main limitations.
1 Like
You know there are some recent insights into how humans perceive colors, for example. Human sensory data tries to correct for various modes like gradients and shadows etc. to get a coherent theory of color. Note I mention coherent as this applies to the coherence theory of knowledge. Thus is an apply actually red? Is a very subjective opinion to hold. Yet we hold it to be true. The very senses in this regard are a subjective interface, one that is useful to live but not necessarily the truth.
What the truth is is beyond our knowledge. I find this to be true, which is a strange opinion to hold. I say this as maths doesn’t necessary hold the truth (trivially, things like Collatz Conjecture or such and so forth) and sensory data doesn’t necessarily hold the truth. I would argue that truth is something much deeper, that pertains to the structures of the universal, which science just dimly perceives. I say dimly as we use useful heuristics like Occam’s razor to discern as well as abductive reasoning. But is this the truth? Perhaps, it appears to be so. But it is a matter of appearance. This is something that has been debated in the 20th century, as people try to explain the resounding success of science and it’s seemingly inductive success.
You know I made a common sense approach to ontic reality as a post earlier. But the more I reflect on it, reality is stranger than we think.
I would model our knowledge as a local minima, on a very complicated graph. This means we are more like the AI than we would like to admit, as we are essentially doing high-dimensional non-linear maths like a machine does. But we are still more effective than a machine. This means that topology matters more, based on this arguments we have observed.
I have more to say but honestly I need to think about it more. My mantra Something to think about.
There is not objective truth to what color is? I would contest this, as color, to us, is an expressed emergence to our eye’s reception to varying light wavelengths, and so color isn’t some thing our minds made up for the sake of itself, but would be something that would, from our sensory data, act in response to something that does exist as a matter of fact, yet our sensory data, being flawed, receives it in a form contrary to what it actually is, which pertains to Kant’s distinction between Phenomena (the color itself) and Noumena (the light wavelength). So, I would hotly contest that color is subjective, even though it can be processed in slight variations, in due part to flaws in human sense data.
Math is not necessarily true? Are you not conflating principles in physics (Which are contingently true) to those in math (Which are necessarily true)? Your example for this claim is the collatz conjecture. But the collatz conjecture is simply an unsolved puzzle in math, not a proof that mathematical axioms, themselves, are false; 2 + 2 = 4 is true by necessity, because if 2 + 2 = 17 in one world or something else, then this would cause enormous problems in the real world: we wouldn’t be able to accurately measure out things in construction, trust time itself—which runs on arithmetic principles—, or engineer, or commit to medicine, or any other discipline with an enormous foundation in mathematics, because this would mean that some of the methods by which we do these professions could, at one point or another, suddenly fail to stop working, which would lead to buildings falling apart, inhibit our abilities to document historical events (Since they are predicated on time, which is measured arithmetically), make it impossible for us to automate, for us to create proper medications, or anything else, on the condition that math isn’t necessarily true, as your statement suggests.
How are we like AI in any degree except for computational abilities? I would even dispute that we are more effective at “high dimensional non-linear maths” than a computer is, given that such AIs have a sufficiently large mathematical database to parse from, and that most regular people, generally, aren’t very skilled at abstract forms of math. Aside from this, is AI able to achieve conscious thought like humanity can? To be able to make a machine that can achieve conscious understanding, or can apply meaning to things in a similar manner as a human, or any other exclusively conscious acts, presupposes that we understand consciousness with enough sufficiency to replicate it. But we have not overcome the Hard problem of consciousness yet; How can material matter access immaterial content? When we make AI, it has to be supplied material by an exterior agent, otherwise AI cannot replicate it on command when prompted. So if AI needs an agent to supply it with whatever knowledge necessary and cannot draw from it on command, abstractly, like a human can, and humans themselves don’t know how we can access immaterial content, then how are we expected to grant AI this capacity for conscious thought? I don’t think we can, and so I would separate the line between comparing man and machine, were I in your position.
But what is the reality? Could you define what the reality is?
Can there be a fake reality? Is it still a reality?
Although it’s very common, I view this as a serious misreading of Kant.
First, I think you go wrong with your phenomena/noumena distinction. Phenomena are the objects of experience, objects we know about objectively, i.e., they are the “how things are”. Noumena names the unavoidable thought of what these objects are apart from the conditions of experience. When you label the latter as “how things actually are,” you are importing a non-Kantian, empiricist/phenomenalist view associated with Berkeley and Hume.
Crucially, a large part of the aim of the first Critique is to prove the legitimacy of our objective knowledge—and, in properly redescribing the objects of experience as known situatedly (not from a God’s view from nowhere), Kant does manage to do this. That this is not satisfactory to some thinkers is a problem for their thinking, the thinking that assumes that knowing things as they are in themselves is the only legitimate objective knowledge.
The general point I want to make to correct your interpretation is that while you and @Bizet read Kant as saying that human faculties form a veil of perception (and knowledge), an inescapable barrier that separates us from the world as it “truly” is, Kant is actually doing nothing like that. He is accounting for, and justifying, our successful access to and involvement with the world around us—namely, by means of faculties that constitute* the objects of experience.
This only seems unsatisfactory if you remain committed to a noumenal gold-standard of access; but Kant showed that this is a chimera.
* Where constitute does not just mean something like fabricate or construct in the head.
1 Like