Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amSelf-Lightening wrote: ↑Wed Aug 28, 2024 9:39 pmIt doesn't have to be an assumption, it can be a postulation... You seem to at least postulate some universal existence. Isn't that, too, delusional then?
I don't think so, the world seems to exist, but it doesn't seem mind-like to me, nor have I seen anyone actually show that it is.
At this point, at least, I wasn't thinking of a
single mind (a universal mind), but a great many
particular minds. And I'm not claiming that anyone could actually
demonstrate that it is.¹ But take this image again:
If you postulate a universal existence that does not consist of mind(s), of (a) subject(s), you postulate one that consists of "matter", of (an) object(s)... But, as I put it recently,
'A subject is a being about which the question "what's it like to be that being" makes sense and has an answer; an object is a being about which the question makes no sense and has no answer.
(I suppose we could distinguish between real and unreal subjects, with an unreal subject being a being about whom the question makes sense but doesn't have an answer, but that would really just be another object: an object of imagination. And in fact,
all objects are imaginary like that, being mental constructs on the part of subjects. They may consist of subjects or a subject may consist of them, but they themselves don’t really exist, e.g. in Heidegger’s sense:
"Dasein existiert"!)'
As a mind, you only have actual experience of being a mind and having ideas. So why posit some third thing which is neither a mind nor an idea? That's just irrational!
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amWhy must it just be all the other people you encounter in your life that never actually exist?
"In a river mist, if another boat knocks against yours, you might yell at the other fellow to stay clear. But if you notice then, that it's an empty boat, adrift with nobody aboard, you stop yelling. When you discover that all the others are drifting boats, there's no one to yell at. And when you find out you are an empty boat, there's no one to yell."
—Zhuangzi
To be sure, though, Nietzsche taught that Kant was no genuine philosopher, but 'merely' a "philosophical labourer and m[a]n of science", a "scholar". And then it makes perfect sense to think he was driven by fame first and foremost. However, that would mean he arguably cared more about other people than a genuine philosopher needs to... After all, fame requires other people. The philosopher needs only the appearance of (other) people.
My current understanding, which can easily be wrong as no one quite knows what Kant was thinking,
Interesting! Could he have been an exoteric writer? Or do you just mean that no one quite knows what (and whether!)
anyone else is thinking?
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amis that in Kant's transcendental idealism other people (with their identically structured personal streams) can only be speculated to exist, but are all located in the unknowable noumenon if they exist. So the content of my experience is 100% unrelated to them (minus the structure). The people I do encounter in life aren't actually the real other people, they are just parts of a coherent solipsistic experience-stream I'm having. However Kant also denies solipsism, he says we should always totally act like we weren't solipsists and treat our stream with the apparent other people in it as real.
That's some next level twisted shit that Kant came up with imo. He "cared" for other people within the above mindset.
I don't see what's twisted about
any of that. Can you explain?
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amI see no parallel to the Zhuangzi quote, I don't think Kant was talking about a no-self philosophy at all.
I wasn't so much thinking of Kant there, as of myself and others (no pun intended):
"Nihilism means that nothing -- and only nothing! -- has an identity or nature, a being not subject to radical, random change or obliteration at any moment. No divine or natural support exists for the common-sense faith that anything is more than nothing. Nothing is more than what it experiences or what is experienced about it. There is nothing in, behind or above things to make them more than empty experiences (thoughts, perceptions, moods, feelings, etc.), impressions as Hume called them. Nihilism is not solipsist nor does it make man the measure of all things. The nihilist 'self' or 'man' which experiences its 'world' is itself no more than empty impressions. It too is nothing." (Harry Neumann,
Liberalism, page 27; cf. 44.)
Note the mention of Hume:
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amKant was no man of science either imo. He unified 18th century rationalism and empiricism in a horrific way, created an abomination, just because why not, he could get away with it.
No. He specifically responded to
Hume. He replaced Hume's fundamental distinction between 1) relations of ideas, and 2) matters of fact, by that between 1) analytic judgments
a priori, 2) synthetic judgments
a posteriori, and 3) synthetic judgments
a priori:
Professor Lawrence Cahoone, "Kant's Copernican Revolution" (YouTube)
(I'm linking here to the heart of the matter, but I recommend watching the whole lecture, if not the whole series.)
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amAnd since he was a super-high IQ autistic in the 18th century, people thought that he was some kind of superhuman with some next level insight.
And he
was—if only next level insight into systems, not individuals; next level insight into individuals may require a super-high
EQ
allistic, i.e., not a neurotypical either but a neurodivergent in the
opposite direction...
How autism drives human invention with Simon Baron-Cohen (YouTube)
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amYou're saying that they themselves aren't really malicious or anything, but can come up with a philosophy that's evil, right? But even if that philosophy is realist, is it evil if it's concerned more with its author than with others? People aren't necessarily equal. As Heraclitus said, one was myriads for him, if he be best (áristos).
I think Kant knew somewhere that his philosophy is rather anti-life,
Is it, though? See above.
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amhe just didn't want to go there, didn't really care. Luckily his philosophy was sufficiently refuted since then,
Was it, though? See below.
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amit's just not true that mental categories come from a universal mind,
It's not
necessarily true, no, and I'd agree that it's probably not true, but is it really what Kant was saying? Wasn't belief in a God for him an imperative of
practical reason, not of
pure reason? Like belief in other human beings?
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amand (Einsteinian) space and time are almost certainly not mental categories at all,
Why?
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amand his phenomena-noumena distinction is also dead wrong.
How?
Atla wrote: ↑Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:36 amThe correct philosophy is probably indirect realism.
I disagree.
"The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws." (Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Architecture of Theories".)
"Peirce's objective idealism is the paradoxical doctrine that what is most intimate and private, not observable but only introspectable [namely, feeling], in fact exists objectively: it composes the universe and all the things in it that we objectively observe. The 'law of mind' must be known by introspection but applies objectively, so that, by looking within our own minds, we grasp the fundamental law of the universe.” (Thomas L. Short, “What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism?”)
¹ "Socrates and Nietzsche share the basic features of philosophy itself: an inquiry into being that comes to recognize the need to inquire first into the inquirer and his fitness to know—epistemology—and only then a properly prepared inquiry into being as far as it is knowable—ontology. Guided by Parmenides, Socrates arrived at a fundamental skepticism about the possibility of direct human knowledge of the world, just as Nietzsche’s early study of Kant and Schopenhauer led him to an epistemological skepticism comparable in scope and radicality. That insight led Socrates, as it led Nietzsche, to a study of the human soul not only in its capacity to know but also in its fundamental passions—'Know thyself' in each case. Study of the human soul led each of them to the study of humans in groups, the 'city' [pólis] or culture in the broadest sense. Such study led both thinkers to a genealogy of morality, knowledge of good and evil in their rootedness in the passions. Ultimately, knowledge of the self and the human pointed each of them to an ontology that could never be more than inferential, the result of moving from the truth about human being to a posited truth about all beings, a sovereignty of becoming more exacting than mere process, an active, generative power at work in every event in nature. Call it eros, call it will to power; the names matter, but no name is completely adequate for what Leo Strauss called, in connection with Nietzsche's view, 'the most fundamental fact'." (Laurence Lampert, How Socrates Became Socrates, page 223.)