At the end of my last Relativity post, I briefly mentioned the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Some of you were mystified by his odd ideas about space and time, while some others were simply awestruck by his stunning good looks and distinguished hairline. Whatever the case may be, I figured that I would take some time to elaborate on how he arrived at his bizarre conclusion that space and time are products of the function of the mind, rather than something existing beyond ourselves. Believe it or not, his ideas are considered extremely influential in the world of modern philosophy. So, I suppose they're deserving of some attention, although I can't really say I agree with them.
If you look up information on Kant you quickly find yourself bombarded by terms like "analytic judgments", "synthetic judgments", "a priori", "a posteriori", and so on. Soon your mind begins to wander and you start to wonder what's on TV. Well, maybe I can try to make it a little more accessible. Basically, Kant argues that our minds come equipped with a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge that allows us to make sense of the world we perceive. Among this pre-existing knowledge is our concept of space and time. We draw certain conclusions and learn certain things from experience, but we're able to learn these things because already have an understanding of space and time to begin with. In other words, he argues that we don't learn about space and time, rather we learn everything else because we already know about space and time. From this, he draws the conclusion that our concept of space and time are not something that we arrive at from observation or experience. Instead, he says that they are concepts generated by our minds.
Think of it like this: When you buy a new computer, it comes pre-installed with an operating system. If you're poor like me, it's probably Windows. Anyway, this operating system also probably comes with a basic internet browser pre-packaged. With this browser you can surf the internet, download software, or even download a better browser. However, none of this is possible without the initial pre-installed browser which allows you to get that first foot-hold in the world wide door. So, if we follow this analogy, then the computer is your mind, the operating system is the pre-existing "a priori" knowledge that Kant says we bring to the table of experience, the internet browser is our concept of space and time, and finally, the internet itself is the real world out there beyond ourselves. So the argument goes that all of this stuff, the operating system, the browser, ect. can't be part of the "internet" because we need that stuff to log onto the internet in the first place.
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| This is your brain on Kant. |
I could go into detail about how Kant partly formulated this to lend support to the argument for the existence of God, you know, sort of as a way to explain why our minds starts running in circles when we try to contemplate things like, "What happened before the beginning of time?". But I don't feel like clouding the issue at the moment. I think I've laid out his case in a fairly succinct manner. As I said, I don't really agree with it. I just can't accept the idea that space and time are all in our heads. I can't see how reality would make any fundamental sense that way. Of course, the Kantian comeback to that would be that that's just because I can't comprehend reality beyond the way my mind perceives it, anymore than I can log onto the internet without a computer. Still, I'm not buying it. I guess my most basic objection would be, why can't space and time be pre-installed and be something objectively real? Either I'm missing something or this is this one of the best con jobs in the history of thought.
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| I think some people are using an outdated operating system, if you know what I'm saying. |
Anyway, I turn the floor over to you all. What do you think of this? Is there someone among you that understands Kant better than I do, and can help make sense of this? Does anyone agree with his idea, or does anyone have any good knock-down arguments against it? I eagerly await your responses.
I'd help you out, but I can't wrap my mind around it much. Why can't you talk about something a little more simple? Like poop. I have opinions about poop. I would be willing to share them with you.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I want to hear any opinions about poop.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, Doug, I changed the name of the turd blog, because somebody pointed out my spelling error. http://mybrownlog.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteI liked the mispelled "douce"...it seemed fitting with the reasons for beginning the blog in the first place. Oh well...my brown log is pretty funny too. I also have tons of opinions on poop.
ReplyDeleteInteresting ideas. I tend to think we do come preinstalled with some things in our brains, but I'm not entirely sure what those are and if space and time are part of that. We already know animals have instincts hardwired in.
I have heard before that time is an invention we apply to movement. Relativity does throw some kinks into how we assign time and how we percieve it. To be honest with you, I have no sense of time. I cannot hold dates in my head and assigning a time stamp to an event feels wrong. Maybe my mind transends all the misguided imaginings of time or perhaps I missed a crucial install.
Then the double slit experiment throws some kinks into the mix where observation messes with reality. So maybe we are born with something that forces an observed reality of energy to coalesce into what we are preprogrammed to see and experience. Wait...going too deep now...my brain hurts.
In my humble opinion..... In the absence of certain Einsteinian-space-bending phenomenon like black holes and such, space and time are constant. Time flows at a constant rate, passing by second by second and space is there. You occupy it and, as you get older, you tend to occupy more and more and your world grows. At the first spark of awareness in the womb, you begin to experience these two things first because that is pretty much all there is to process. There's an incomplete nervous system so you cannot receive sensations of warm and soft and floaty and such. There is nothing but time passing and a slowly growing sense of space as things develop. It is the first things your brains process, as that is all that there is to process. There doesn't need to be an operating system embedded for this. If you wind up a top and send it spinning on the floor, it will go this way and that, driven by the forces that drive it and the vagarities of the surface of the floor. The same way that a brand new brain absorbs the new sensations of space and duration and reacts to them. We don't recall this because they are our very first thoughts and since we haven't learned a language at that point, we have to reference points to remember them by. I suspect that if Kant had known enough about the development of the fetal nervous system he would have realized that he was a bit mistaken.
ReplyDeleteBut then again, I'm no philosopher.
And of course now I have Monty Pythons "Philosophers Song" stuck in my head along with everything else:
ReplyDeleteImmanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
You've taken a fairly complicated subject and simplified it to fairly understandable levels. But I don't know what I think of it. It sounds plausible, but my understanding of relativity is fairly basic. Actually, it's probably less than basic. I don't think I understand it at all. So I have no opinion except to say that I do not want you to ever talk about poop.
ReplyDelete@Charlie: Don't get me started on the double slit experiment. At this point, I don't know what to think of that...like, at all. As far as time, it can be a difficult thing to even define, because our idea of it is so bound up in our human conventions of measurement (seconds, hours, days, years, ect.). However, I can't accept the idea that it exists solely in my head. Even less so than space. How can you even have a universe without distances between things? I don't get it.
ReplyDelete@Rev: You raise a good point. Kant would be hard pressed to prove that we don't learn about space and time as one of our earliest formative ideas. At the very least, it's more plausible than saying its all in our heads. That's the thing about it. It seems like such an outrageous conclusion with very little in the way of proven argument backing up. Do people actually believe this?
I never heard that song, but it definitely sounds like Monty Python.
@Chanel: If that's how you feel, then I would stay far, far away from that link in my reply to Doug.
I was going to make a comment like I should have this morning along the lines of "if Immanuel kant get the concept through to you, then who am I to show you the light?" - double pun, yea Doug - but I just clicked that link.
ReplyDeleteRevenge is sweet, Bryan. Revenge is sweet.
I'm more the type to read a nice succinct summary of a philosophical theory and say, "Hmmmmm, very interesting." Then I read the comments to see how many people agree and/or disagree... or have no opinion. My sociological conclusion here is: more people have opinions on poop than Kant. :)
ReplyDelete@Doug: :D
ReplyDelete@Rachel: That's the truth.
I think your questions stand up on their own without involving Kant, whether his hairstyle is viewed frontways or a posteriori. My brain gets tired very soon, and it's in my vested interest to let the poor man turn in his grave ad libitum.
ReplyDeleteBut I am very interested in the idea that space and time are concepts generated from our minds, and would like to turn from eighteenth century philosophy to 20th century ethology and 21st century neuropsychology for enlightenment. However, I don't propose to go deep into either, but to indulge in a simple thought experiment.
As a member of a single species out of millions, I like to imagine that instead of being human, I'm a migratory bird. Not only do I have to wrestle with what, if I were human, I would call space and time; I also have to calculate how much stored food I must keep in my body without being overweight for the journey, and estimate whether I will be able to arrive at the Azores for a rest and snack, bearing in mind the wind speed, visibility and so forth.
Though I don't know what it is to be a bird, subjectively, I know that a bird is properly equipped to deal with the practical needs, without probably having a word for ‘space’, another word for ‘time’---or indeed any words in its non-existent vocabulary.
To be a human being, on the other hand, is to be confused. Some of us wear ourselves out into an early grave through excess of demanding physical labour. Others, that we call philosophers, wear our brains out imagining an objective world beyond the reach of our subjective world. But we are not gods. We do not know. We just amuse ourselves with these questions, same as chimpanzees amuse themselves with grooming rituals and the like.
That's the wonderful thing about philosophy, isn't it? It neither proves nor disproves, it merely theorizes. I could do that for a living.
ReplyDelete@Vincent: True, but I somehow get the sense that Kant specifically engineered all this to plant the seed of doubt that the world is not as we perceive it. The idea has persisted in various subtle forms ever since. I proceed from the assumption that my senses are well-equipped to perceive actual reality. It's true that this is merely an assumption. For all we know, the sky we see as blue is really orange or polka-dotted or some color we don't have a name for; maybe color only becomes color in our eyes. It's the old tree falling in the woods thing. Does it make sound or merely vibrations in the air? Kant takes it a step further. Is the tree really falling? Is there even a woods? However, assumption or not, it hasn't failed me yet. So I'm sticking with it. It's built sky scrapers and taken us to the moon. It can't be all wrong.
ReplyDelete@Rev: Yes, it definitely one of the sophter sciences. God, that may have been the worst pun yet.
Color is a great example. Color exists. We know it has to do with light being absorbed and reflected. The perception of color is entirely in our heads though. Eyes that developed from a pathway not on earth may very well see colors in a different way, but they will most likely still draw lines between the color of leaves and the color of grass because similar light is being absorbed. Our color perception is also incomplete. There are colors we do not see.
ReplyDeleteVibrations exist. Our perception of them is in our head and incomplete as well. We experience some through sound and some through heat, but there are many vibrations we fail to sense.
Kant's proposal that space and time are constructs in our head is, of course, stupid and way off base. Space and time both exist. But, our perceptions of space time are entirely in our head and I'm willing to bet incomplete. We already know our neat little equations that define space time break down when we apply them to black holes, time before the big bang, and quantum realm. We know we are missing pieces, but we don't know what those pieces are as of yet. So, I guess I'm trying to say that people like Kant often have a tiny kernel of truth in their misguided approach...but we need people who push against what we perceive or we wouldn't have the wireless network of invisible waves that I am using to type this from twenty feet away from my computer.
Right. For instance, we can only see a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. I'm sure things would look very different if we could see radio waves.
ReplyDeleteIf knowledge of space and time are virtually programed in our brains at birth we must lose this ability as we age. The way I perceive time is getting all misconstrued, maybe because I work nights.
ReplyDeleteI would say that there is a natural rhythm of time perception that we relate to, having evolved on the planet Earth
I work nights as well. My concept of time is definitely screwed up.
ReplyDelete