Philosophy Now Forum

Kant vs. the Quantum Mystics

In this article I will re-assess Immanuel Kant by means of encyclopedia articles written about him. I will be drawing from two sources here, one the Internet Encyclopedia of philosophy hosted by the University of Tennessee, and two, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Below the former will be called "utm.edu" and the latter "stanford.edu". utm.edu should carry additional weight of authority, since all of its articles are peer-reviewed.

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), produced a body of work that is itself encyclopedic in size. He wrote on nearly every academic subject that existed at the time, from religion, to pure ethics, to metaphysics, logic, and even articles on dynamics and mechanics in physics. The volumnous size of his work makes it appropriate to discuss Kant even from second-hand sources, as I will do here.

In this article I will be concentrating only on Kant's ontology; in particular, the thorny question of the existence of an objective world persisting independently of observers, and independently of observers' minds. I will be defending three assertions in this regard.

1. ) Immanuel Kant was actually responding to the solipsism of George Berkeley, and in the negative. Kant was defending the existence of an objective world and defending the persistent existence of objects outside of us.
2. ) Kant's distinction between a Noumenon and Phenomenon turned out to be correct. More than correct, this distinction was the very key ingredient for unleashing all of science in its modern form.
3. ) Quantum mystics of the Deepak Chopra variety, and New Age writers of various stripes should not utilize Immanuel Kant as a person who lends authority to their claim that we "create our own reality". Whether quantum mysticism is true or not is not investigated here. Instead, mystics and woo-woo peddlers should discontinue quoting Kant, since Kant's entire body of work was actually reinforcing the opposite view.

Kant lived in agrarian Prussia, and so he did not have the luxury of being surrounded by powerful technological artifacts which could be listed as example cases supporting his assertions. The way daily life appeared to Kant and his contemporaries was that people were still largely subject to natural forces that were out of their control. Weather, droughts, famine, illness, deadly infections, et cetera. Women would die in childbirth, and even infant mortality was high (by today's standards). To move over distances on land, people would ride on the back of a horse, and to get water for any purpose required pumping it from a well, manually with a crank. Illnesses were treated by "bleeding", which was presumed to re-balance the "humors".

In the 21st century, (particularly the developed world) appears quite alien to this. We are awash in powerful technologies which could not be conceived of at the end of the 18th century. A list is worth mentioning. A schoolgirl can take a wafer of plastic from her pocket, press a few buttons, and be talking to a parent who is 80 miles away, all without connecting the plastic rectangle to any wires. We call these devices "mobile phones". We travel over land in metal and glass carriages that move over giant strips of concrete, at speeds near 70 miles per hour. We call these devices "cars". Humans in the 21st century can fly through the air faster than eagles, ( indeed we have jets that travel 3 times the speed of sound.) Our submarines can fire missiles that travel 8000 miles, guided by computers inside of satellites. This missile can be launched while the submarine is still underwater. We have created bombs which can flatten cities, and we flattened two cities in Japan, in actuality. We had astronauts hopping around on the moon. We have dissected the human body down to its constituent molecules. Not only do we understand how these molecules fit together, we have sequenced the human genome. We have telescopes that can see so far into space that they can see back into time itself. We believe we may even be seeing the beginning of time.

The list serves the purpose of example cases demonstrating that humans have measured and understood the objective world, and applied that knowledge to create powerful technologies. The noumenon is distinct from our phenomenal experience, as Kant correctly noted. That is to say, although we do not experience the noumenon directly, we can use the tools of reason, statistics, and logic to deduce its properties by proxy. Since Kant lived in agrarian Prussia, he was hesitant to declare that we could understand the noumenon through reason. Nevertheless, his position was a significant advancement over Berkeley, who claimed that an objective world was not even "possible"!

If Kant were alive, he could simply point around himself (at indoor lighting, vaccines, electricity, commercial airlines) and declare that the noumenon has an independent existence, and humans have reasoned about it. Electricity and FM radio work as Maxwell's equations said they would, showing that human reasoning was, at the least, partially correct. This even while these magnetic fields are totally invisible to our eyes.

We will start with Stanford showing the landmark distinction between noumena and phenomenal experience.

stanford.edu wrote:Throughout the Analytic Kant elaborates on this general view, noting that the transcendental employment of the understanding, which aims towards knowledge of things independently of experience (and thus knowledge of “noumena”), is illicit (cf. A246/B303). It is in this connection that Kant states, famously, in the Analytic, that “…the proud name of ontology, which presumes to offer synthetic a priori cognitions of things in general… must give way to the more modest title of a transcendental analytic” (cf. A247/B304). Filling this out, Kant suggests that to take ourselves to have unmediated intellectual access to objects (to have “non-sensible” knowledge) correlates with the assumption that there are non-sensible objects that we can know. To assume this, however, is to conflate “phenomena” (or appearances) with “noumena” (or things in themselves). The failure to draw the distinction between appearances and things in themselves is the hallmark of all those pernicious systems of thought that stand under the title of “transcendental realism.” Kant's transcendental idealism is the remedy for these.____ {1}

This author has never seen, smelled, nor tasted a Higgs boson. (I would presume the readers of this article have not done so either.). Certainly then, we would not say that we have unmediated intellectual access to Higgs bosons. In other words, Higgs bosons are not part of my phenomenal experience. The same can be said of electrons. So either the lighting in the room is done by "lightbulb faeries", or we can postulate electrons racing in the metal of the wires. Though no human being has ever seen an electron, their existence can be reasoned out from their effects. Transcendental realism (to which Kant was opposing) would force us to commit to the conclusion that since electrons are not part of phenomenal experience, that they also do not exist.
Many applications of methods of reasoning must be utilized in order to arrive at knowledge of Higgs bosons. Deductive, inductive, inferential, and statistical methods must be employed to state, with any credibility, that a Higgs boson exists and has certain properties. Like forces in magnetic fields, and energy, the Higgs boson is an aspect of the noumenon (that "objective world"), which is arrived at through circuitous paths in our reasoning.
Another striking example. The bacteria which caused a plague in 13th century Europe. Such bacteria was not seen, tasted, felt, or heard by those whom it was killing. Phenomenal experience must be distinct from a noumenon. Because we citizens of the 21st century are post-Kant, we can state this with impunity, and to us it seems evident. Kant , however was forced at the time of his life, to defend this position through the methods of pure reason.

utm.edu wrote:It should be pointed out, however, that Kant is not endorsing an idealism about objects like Berkeley’s. That is, Kant does not believe that material objects are unknowable or impossible. While Kant is a transcendental idealist–he believes the nature of objects as they are in themselves is unknowable to us–knowledge of appearances is nevertheless possible. As noted above, in The Refutation of Material Idealism, Kant argues that the ordinary self-consciousness that Berkeley and Descartes would grant implies “the existence of objects in space outside me.” (B 275) Consciousness of myself would not be possible if I were not able to make determinant judgments about objects that exist outside of me and have states that are independent of my inner experience. Another way to put the point is to say that the fact that the mind of the knower makes the a priori contribution does not mean that space and time or the categories are mere figments of the imagination. Kant is an empirical realist about the world we experience; we can know objects as they appear to us. He gives a robust defense of science and the study of the natural world from his argument about the mind’s role in making nature. All discursive, rational beings must conceive of the physical world as spatially and temporally unified, he argues. And the table of categories is derived from the most basic, universal forms of logical inference, Kant believes. Therefore, it must be shared by all rational beings. So those beings also share judgments of an intersubjective, unified, public realm of empirical objects. Hence, objective knowledge of the scientific or natural world is possible. Indeed, Kant believes that the examples of Newton and Galileo show it is actual. So Berkeley’s claims that we do not know objects outside of us and that such knowledge is impossible are both mistaken. ____ {2}

This paragraph (from utm) re-iterates what was said above. Kant was responding to Berkeley's solipsism. And this describes exactly how Kant framed the argument. All minds with rational faculties must share some common foundational attributes (Kant likes the word "categories"). It is through this commonality of reason that a consistent outside world is found to exist and be persistent.
The utm writer uses the word "intersubjective" to describe this state of affairs. I would suggest a better word here is trans-subjective. It is not the case that we are all schizophrenics whose subjective minds are an unstructured cluster of willy-nilly thoughts (David Hume claimed this). At the least, most of us have minds structured by capacities for reason. "Interplay" between those commonalities is not as accurate as saying "translation" between them.

stanford.edu wrote:In the General Remark to Dynamics Kant addresses two main issues. First, Kant considers how it is that the specific varieties of matter (e.g., water as different from mercury) might be reduced, at least in principle, to the fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion. The second issue concerns the fundamental distinction between the “mathematical-mechanical” and the “metaphysical-dynamical mode of explanation”. The former mode of explanation, which is associated with the postulation of atoms and the void, employs nothing more than the shapes and motions of fundamental particles and empty interstices interspersed among them. It contrasts with the metaphysical-dynamical mode, which employs fundamental moving forces (e.g., attraction and repulsion) in its explanations. Kant grants that the mathematical-mechanical mode has an advantage over the metaphysical-dynamical mode, since its fundamental posits can be represented (indeed, “verified” (4:525)) mathematically, whereas he repeatedly admits that the possibility of fundamental forces can never be comprehended, i.e., their possibility can never be rendered certain. However, Kant thinks that this advantage is outweighed by two disadvantages. First, by presupposing absolute impenetrability, the mathematical-mechanical mode of explanation accepts an “empty concept” at its foundation. Second, by giving up all forces that would be inherent in matter, such a mode of explanation provides the imagination with more freedom “than is truly consistent with the caution of philosophy” (4:525). ____ {3}

Here we see Kant utilizing reasoning that is suspiciously "ultra-modern" in scope. Kant is already thinking about methods of verifying theories of the material world through mathematics. This is precisely what is done in the 21st century when computers are used to simulate various physical systems. Scientists then rely on the results of those simulations as being very close to the real thing. (It should be noted that what a computer simulation is doing, at the fundamental level, is numerically solving various equations. Usually these are partial differential equations derived from formulas taken from scientific theories.) We see this done by meteorologists on the news, who refer to several different weather prediction models, whenever a major storm is threatening. Kant goes on to say that forces cannot be comprehended. (This was somewhat premature). Nevertheless, Kant's thinking is demonstrably 200 years ahead of its time.
So in this context, Kant is speaking of mathematics as a tool of verification of scientific theories; theories which presuppose that matter is particles moving in a void. At no time, do we see Kant harping on the "unreliability", or "non-truth", or "speculative" aspects, of this methodology. Kant is silent on scientific theories being "tentative guesses" to be overturned by new evidence. There is nothing here which is analogous to the anti-scientific posture seen in many amateur philosophy forums.

stanford.edu wrote:Kant's Second Law of Mechanics, stated in Proposition 3, is that every change in matter has an external cause. (Immediately after this principle, Kant adds in parentheses a version of the law of inertia that is much closer to Newton's: “every body persists in its state of rest or motion, in the same direction, and with the same speed, it is not compelled by an external cause to leave this state” (4:543). Since Kant's Second Law of Mechanics is not identical to Newton's law of inertia, it would require argument to show that, and by means of what additional assumptions, the former entails the latter.) The proof of the main principle depends on the Second Analogy of Experience (which asserts that all changes occur in accordance with the law of cause and effect and thus entails that every change in matter has a cause) as well as on the further assumption that matter has no internal grounds of determinations (such as thinking and desiring), but rather only external relations in space. In his remark to this proposition, which clarifies this “law of inertia,” Kant explains that inertia is to be contrasted with life or the ability of a substance to determine itself to act from an internal principle. Thus, a body's inertia “does not mean a positive striving to conserve its state” (4:544), but rather what it does not do, its lifelessness. ____ {3}

That matter has no internal determinations (thinking, desiring, feeling) is a modern conception of matter. To highlight the philosophy of matter embodying "only external relations in space", it is fitting to surround it with several philosophies who are contrary to it. For short lets refer to this as mechanical conception.

Hegel (1770 – 1831), proposed that the cosmos contains both a material and a mental aspect. The material aspect would be correspond to the mechanical conception above. Hegel asserted this only describes one side of affairs in his book, 'Phenomenologie des Geistes.'

David Chalmers ( 1966- ) has recently uncovered an ambiguity that he calls the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He advocates a solution to this problem, which many now call a Dual-Aspect theory. So while matter contains an external spatial relations of force, it must also contains an internalized experiential aspect.

Hylozoism. A philosophy with origins tracing back to at least Greek antiquity. The philosophy involves collapsing distinctions between living and non-living material.

Kant then goes on to segregate off the phenomena of life, from matter. He asserts that matter is subject to the law of inertia, while living organisms are not. While this is somewhat premature in a scientific context, the distinction that there is a "life-less" material world separate from living organisms is present in Kant's writing. That is, here is Kant (again) talking about material outside of life -- and that material having predictable, rational laws by which it abides. In this isolated case, it is the law of inertia.

Kant's Role in the history of science

Kant died in 1804. The 19th century would experience the rise of technological science ("applied science" we might call it) to a rapid pace not seen at any other time in history. By the end of the century, bacteria had been discovered, land was covered in railways, the steam engine was ubiquitous, artificial lighting existed, metallurgy gave rise to submarines, ships and other modern military weapons (e.g. rifling, dynamite). Darwin had published his landmark thesis, electricity was united with magnetism, and the seeds of Special Relativity were in place (e.g. the modern concept of "energy").

Kant's realization of a noumenal aspect of the world , which cannot be perceived directly, opened up the pandora's box of technological innovation. Instead of the noumenon being received as a persistent, perplexing mystery, the scientific world instead approached it as a challenge. Scientists agreed to its existence, but wanted to see how far logic, statistics, and inference could be stretched to try to uncover its properties. As it turned out, science rose to the challenge, and the results were catastrophic.

This author realizes that it is no longer en vogue to refer to Truth in philosophical writing. By the 1920s, work in physics was going to give rise to something referred to now as Quantum Mechanics. At least as a temporary exercise, we might revisit Truth (with a capital T), in the old antiquated Greek sense of the word. Imagine that philosophers can seek out Truth, and maybe even find it some day. Imagine that Quantum Mechanics is actually the right theory of matter, and that all previous conceptions were incorrect. That is, Quantum Mechanics is "True" in the Greek sense. If we entertain this, at least for the sake of discussion, then Kant is re-invigorated twice over. The original quandaries of the noumenal world re-surface in a new and unexpected way. But this is a topic for another article.


REFERENCES ____________________________

{1} http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/
{2} http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantmeta/
{3} http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-science/

Ironically Kant was instrumental in influencing quantum mechanics, Luddites perhaps not so much.

if kant had lived today would he have been a quantum mystic.maybe he was to dumb.

Kuznetzova wrote:Kant vs. the Quantum Mystics

In this article I will re-assess Immanuel Kant by means of encyclopedia articles written about him. I will be drawing from two sources here, one the Internet Encyclopedia of philosophy hosted by the University of Tennessee, and two, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Below the former will be called "utm.edu" and the latter "stanford.edu". utm.edu should carry additional weight of authority, since all of its articles are peer-reviewed.

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), produced a body of work that is itself encyclopedic in size. He wrote on nearly every academic subject that existed at the time, from religion, to pure ethics, to metaphysics, logic, and even articles on dynamics and mechanics in physics. The volumnous size of his work makes it appropriate to discuss Kant even from second-hand sources, as I will do here.

In this article I will be concentrating only on Kant's ontology; in particular, the thorny question of the existence of an objective world persisting independently of observers, and independently of observers' minds. I will be defending three assertions in this regard.

1. ) Immanuel Kant was actually responding to the solipsism of George Berkeley, and in the negative. Kant was defending the existence of an objective world and defending the persistent existence of objects outside of us.
2. ) Kant's distinction between a Noumenon and Phenomenon turned out to be correct. More than correct, this distinction was the very key ingredient for unleashing all of science in its modern form.
3. ) Quantum mystics of the Deepak Chopra variety, and New Age writers of various stripes should not utilize Immanuel Kant as a person who lends authority to their claim that we "create our own reality". Whether quantum mysticism is true or not is not investigated here. Instead, mystics and woo-woo peddlers should discontinue quoting Kant, since Kant's entire body of work was actually reinforcing the opposite view.

Kant lived in agrarian Prussia, and so he did not have the luxury of being surrounded by powerful technological artifacts which could be listed as example cases supporting his assertions. The way daily life appeared to Kant and his contemporaries was that people were still largely subject to natural forces that were out of their control. Weather, droughts, famine, illness, deadly infections, et cetera. Women would die in childbirth, and even infant mortality was high (by today's standards). To move over distances on land, people would ride on the back of a horse, and to get water for any purpose required pumping it from a well, manually with a crank. Illnesses were treated by "bleeding", which was presumed to re-balance the "humors".

In the 21st century, (particularly the developed world) appears quite alien to this. We are awash in powerful technologies which could not be conceived of at the end of the 18th century. A list is worth mentioning. A schoolgirl can take a wafer of plastic from her pocket, press a few buttons, and be talking to a parent who is 80 miles away, all without connecting the plastic rectangle to any wires. We call these devices "mobile phones". We travel over land in metal and glass carriages that move over giant strips of concrete, at speeds near 70 miles per hour. We call these devices "cars". Humans in the 21st century can fly through the air faster than eagles, ( indeed we have jets that travel 3 times the speed of sound.) Our submarines can fire missiles that travel 8000 miles, guided by computers inside of satellites. This missile can be launched while the submarine is still underwater. We have created bombs which can flatten cities, and we flattened two cities in Japan, in actuality. We had astronauts hopping around on the moon. We have dissected the human body down to its constituent molecules. Not only do we understand how these molecules fit together, we have sequenced the human genome. We have telescopes that can see so far into space that they can see back into time itself. We believe we may even be seeing the beginning of time.

The list serves the purpose of example cases demonstrating that humans have measured and understood the objective world, and applied that knowledge to create powerful technologies. The noumenon is distinct from our phenomenal experience, as Kant correctly noted. That is to say, although we do not experience the noumenon directly, we can use the tools of reason, statistics, and logic to deduce its properties by proxy. Since Kant lived in agrarian Prussia, he was hesitant to declare that we could understand the noumenon through reason. Nevertheless, his position was a significant advancement over Berkeley, who claimed that an objective world was not even "possible"!

If Kant were alive, he could simply point around himself (at indoor lighting, vaccines, electricity, commercial airlines) and declare that the noumenon has an independent existence, and humans have reasoned about it. Electricity and FM radio work as Maxwell's equations said they would, showing that human reasoning was, at the least, partially correct. This even while these magnetic fields are totally invisible to our eyes.

We will start with Stanford showing the landmark distinction between noumena and phenomenal experience.

stanford.edu wrote:Throughout the Analytic Kant elaborates on this general view, noting that the transcendental employment of the understanding, which aims towards knowledge of things independently of experience (and thus knowledge of “noumena”), is illicit (cf. A246/B303). It is in this connection that Kant states, famously, in the Analytic, that “…the proud name of ontology, which presumes to offer synthetic a priori cognitions of things in general… must give way to the more modest title of a transcendental analytic” (cf. A247/B304). Filling this out, Kant suggests that to take ourselves to have unmediated intellectual access to objects (to have “non-sensible” knowledge) correlates with the assumption that there are non-sensible objects that we can know. To assume this, however, is to conflate “phenomena” (or appearances) with “noumena” (or things in themselves). The failure to draw the distinction between appearances and things in themselves is the hallmark of all those pernicious systems of thought that stand under the title of “transcendental realism.” Kant's transcendental idealism is the remedy for these.____ {1}

This author has never seen, smelled, nor tasted a Higgs boson. (I would presume the readers of this article have not done so either.). Certainly then, we would not say that we have unmediated intellectual access to Higgs bosons. In other words, Higgs bosons are not part of my phenomenal experience. The same can be said of electrons. So either the lighting in the room is done by "lightbulb faeries", or we can postulate electrons racing in the metal of the wires. Though no human being has ever seen an electron, their existence can be reasoned out from their effects. Transcendental realism (to which Kant was opposing) would force us to commit to the conclusion that since electrons are not part of phenomenal experience, that they also do not exist.
Many applications of methods of reasoning must be utilized in order to arrive at knowledge of Higgs bosons. Deductive, inductive, inferential, and statistical methods must be employed to state, with any credibility, that a Higgs boson exists and has certain properties. Like forces in magnetic fields, and energy, the Higgs boson is an aspect of the noumenon (that "objective world"), which is arrived at through circuitous paths in our reasoning.
Another striking example. The bacteria which caused a plague in 13th century Europe. Such bacteria was not seen, tasted, felt, or heard by those whom it was killing. Phenomenal experience must be distinct from a noumenon. Because we citizens of the 21st century are post-Kant, we can state this with impunity, and to us it seems evident. Kant , however was forced at the time of his life, to defend this position through the methods of pure reason.

utm.edu wrote:It should be pointed out, however, that Kant is not endorsing an idealism about objects like Berkeley’s. That is, Kant does not believe that material objects are unknowable or impossible. While Kant is a transcendental idealist–he believes the nature of objects as they are in themselves is unknowable to us–knowledge of appearances is nevertheless possible. As noted above, in The Refutation of Material Idealism, Kant argues that the ordinary self-consciousness that Berkeley and Descartes would grant implies “the existence of objects in space outside me.” (B 275) Consciousness of myself would not be possible if I were not able to make determinant judgments about objects that exist outside of me and have states that are independent of my inner experience. Another way to put the point is to say that the fact that the mind of the knower makes the a priori contribution does not mean that space and time or the categories are mere figments of the imagination. Kant is an empirical realist about the world we experience; we can know objects as they appear to us. He gives a robust defense of science and the study of the natural world from his argument about the mind’s role in making nature. All discursive, rational beings must conceive of the physical world as spatially and temporally unified, he argues. And the table of categories is derived from the most basic, universal forms of logical inference, Kant believes. Therefore, it must be shared by all rational beings. So those beings also share judgments of an intersubjective, unified, public realm of empirical objects. Hence, objective knowledge of the scientific or natural world is possible. Indeed, Kant believes that the examples of Newton and Galileo show it is actual. So Berkeley’s claims that we do not know objects outside of us and that such knowledge is impossible are both mistaken. ____ {2}

This paragraph (from utm) re-iterates what was said above. Kant was responding to Berkeley's solipsism. And this describes exactly how Kant framed the argument. All minds with rational faculties must share some common foundational attributes (Kant likes the word "categories"). It is through this commonality of reason that a consistent outside world is found to exist and be persistent.
The utm writer uses the word "intersubjective" to describe this state of affairs. I would suggest a better word here is trans-subjective. It is not the case that we are all schizophrenics whose subjective minds are an unstructured cluster of willy-nilly thoughts (David Hume claimed this). At the least, most of us have minds structured by capacities for reason. "Interplay" between those commonalities is not as accurate as saying "translation" between them.

stanford.edu wrote:In the General Remark to Dynamics Kant addresses two main issues. First, Kant considers how it is that the specific varieties of matter (e.g., water as different from mercury) might be reduced, at least in principle, to the fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion. The second issue concerns the fundamental distinction between the “mathematical-mechanical” and the “metaphysical-dynamical mode of explanation”. The former mode of explanation, which is associated with the postulation of atoms and the void, employs nothing more than the shapes and motions of fundamental particles and empty interstices interspersed among them. It contrasts with the metaphysical-dynamical mode, which employs fundamental moving forces (e.g., attraction and repulsion) in its explanations. Kant grants that the mathematical-mechanical mode has an advantage over the metaphysical-dynamical mode, since its fundamental posits can be represented (indeed, “verified” (4:525)) mathematically, whereas he repeatedly admits that the possibility of fundamental forces can never be comprehended, i.e., their possibility can never be rendered certain. However, Kant thinks that this advantage is outweighed by two disadvantages. First, by presupposing absolute impenetrability, the mathematical-mechanical mode of explanation accepts an “empty concept” at its foundation. Second, by giving up all forces that would be inherent in matter, such a mode of explanation provides the imagination with more freedom “than is truly consistent with the caution of philosophy” (4:525). ____ {3}

Here we see Kant utilizing reasoning that is suspiciously "ultra-modern" in scope. Kant is already thinking about methods of verifying theories of the material world through mathematics. This is precisely what is done in the 21st century when computers are used to simulate various physical systems. Scientists then rely on the results of those simulations as being very close to the real thing. (It should be noted that what a computer simulation is doing, at the fundamental level, is numerically solving various equations. Usually these are partial differential equations derived from formulas taken from scientific theories.) We see this done by meteorologists on the news, who refer to several different weather prediction models, whenever a major storm is threatening. Kant goes on to say that forces cannot be comprehended. (This was somewhat premature). Nevertheless, Kant's thinking is demonstrably 200 years ahead of its time.
So in this context, Kant is speaking of mathematics as a tool of verification of scientific theories; theories which presuppose that matter is particles moving in a void. At no time, do we see Kant harping on the "unreliability", or "non-truth", or "speculative" aspects, of this methodology. Kant is silent on scientific theories being "tentative guesses" to be overturned by new evidence. There is nothing here which is analogous to the anti-scientific posture seen in many amateur philosophy forums.

stanford.edu wrote:Kant's Second Law of Mechanics, stated in Proposition 3, is that every change in matter has an external cause. (Immediately after this principle, Kant adds in parentheses a version of the law of inertia that is much closer to Newton's: “every body persists in its state of rest or motion, in the same direction, and with the same speed, it is not compelled by an external cause to leave this state” (4:543). Since Kant's Second Law of Mechanics is not identical to Newton's law of inertia, it would require argument to show that, and by means of what additional assumptions, the former entails the latter.) The proof of the main principle depends on the Second Analogy of Experience (which asserts that all changes occur in accordance with the law of cause and effect and thus entails that every change in matter has a cause) as well as on the further assumption that matter has no internal grounds of determinations (such as thinking and desiring), but rather only external relations in space. In his remark to this proposition, which clarifies this “law of inertia,” Kant explains that inertia is to be contrasted with life or the ability of a substance to determine itself to act from an internal principle. Thus, a body's inertia “does not mean a positive striving to conserve its state” (4:544), but rather what it does not do, its lifelessness. ____ {3}

That matter has no internal determinations (thinking, desiring, feeling) is a modern conception of matter. To highlight the philosophy of matter embodying "only external relations in space", it is fitting to surround it with several philosophies who are contrary to it. For short lets refer to this as mechanical conception.

Hegel (1770 – 1831), proposed that the cosmos contains both a material and a mental aspect. The material aspect would be correspond to the mechanical conception above. Hegel asserted this only describes one side of affairs in his book, 'Phenomenologie des Geistes.'

David Chalmers ( 1966- ) has recently uncovered an ambiguity that he calls the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He advocates a solution to this problem, which many now call a Dual-Aspect theory. So while matter contains an external spatial relations of force, it must also contains an internalized experiential aspect.

Hylozoism. A philosophy with origins tracing back to at least Greek antiquity. The philosophy involves collapsing distinctions between living and non-living material.

Kant then goes on to segregate off the phenomena of life, from matter. He asserts that matter is subject to the law of inertia, while living organisms are not. While this is somewhat premature in a scientific context, the distinction that there is a "life-less" material world separate from living organisms is present in Kant's writing. That is, here is Kant (again) talking about material outside of life -- and that material having predictable, rational laws by which it abides. In this isolated case, it is the law of inertia.

Kant's Role in the history of science

Kant died in 1804. The 19th century would experience the rise of technological science ("applied science" we might call it) to a rapid pace not seen at any other time in history. By the end of the century, bacteria had been discovered, land was covered in railways, the steam engine was ubiquitous, artificial lighting existed, metallurgy gave rise to submarines, ships and other modern military weapons (e.g. rifling, dynamite). Darwin had published his landmark thesis, electricity was united with magnetism, and the seeds of Special Relativity were in place (e.g. the modern concept of "energy").

Kant's realization of a noumenal aspect of the world , which cannot be perceived directly, opened up the pandora's box of technological innovation. Instead of the noumenon being received as a persistent, perplexing mystery, the scientific world instead approached it as a challenge. Scientists agreed to its existence, but wanted to see how far logic, statistics, and inference could be stretched to try to uncover its properties. As it turned out, science rose to the challenge, and the results were catastrophic.

This author realizes that it is no longer en vogue to refer to Truth in philosophical writing. By the 1920s, work in physics was going to give rise to something referred to now as Quantum Mechanics. At least as a temporary exercise, we might revisit Truth (with a capital T), in the old antiquated Greek sense of the word. Imagine that philosophers can seek out Truth, and maybe even find it some day. Imagine that Quantum Mechanics is actually the right theory of matter, and that all previous conceptions were incorrect. That is, Quantum Mechanics is "True" in the Greek sense. If we entertain this, at least for the sake of discussion, then Kant is re-invigorated twice over. The original quandaries of the noumenal world re-surface in a new and unexpected way. But this is a topic for another article.


REFERENCES ____________________________

{1} http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/
{2} http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantmeta/
{3} http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-science/

By describing the "thing-in-itself" as "objective" you seem to be giving it the status of a knowable substance or entity. I don't think this is what Kant meant, but I can see that this would be debatable.

As far as the "thing-in-itself" being 'knowable' I suggest that this world mean knowable to the senses, via sense perception. In other words, we know the physical world in terms of local spheres of influence; sight, sound, touch and smell. The exception to this would be the modern world were our senses are augmented by technology. This also applies to modern scientific equipment. However, this changes nothing.

If the quantum mechanical world did not exist, then the very small would still be accessible to us through technology. The world of the small would still be subject to the senses, all be it through technology. Such a world can still be accounted for in terms of three dimensions and one of time. Another way of saying this would be that the world of the small still obeys the laws of cause and effect and so we can say it is still and objective account.

The whole thing changes when we start of deal with the extraordinary small. Distances smaller than a Planck length. We enter the strange world of quantum mechanics which is characterized by particles that pop in and out of existence with no apparent cause. This of course raises a number of interesting issues in relation to the "thing-in-itself" being objective. That is to say objective in the same way as "things-for-us" are considered objective.

The answer to this question seems pretty straight forward if we say the Kantian "things-in-themselves" are actually referring to the quantum world therefore cannot be objective in the same way as the macro world. Unfortunately it may not be that simple if we think of the "things-in-themselves" and "things-for-us" in terms of non-locality and locality...But I will stop there for the moment other than to say the quantum world doesn't always obey physical laws, so perhaps some aspects of this world are not actually physical.

Kant vs quantum mechanics, he wouldn't of been against it, Einstein on the other hand hated it.

Ginkgo ,

(..not sure why you pressed the quote-button)

Many of the things you said are all very late modern contemporary observations about quantum mechanics. That is, most of your reply has not a lick to do with Immanuel Kant or anything he wrote.

If you are claiming that somehow Kant "foresaw" quantum mechanics in the 1790s; that is just silly. My thesis was that if Kant was foreseeing anything with his philosophy, it was things like bacteria and magnetic fields. both of which are completely invisible, and both of which were not yet discovered in his lifetime. The notion that light is electromagnetic radiation and that visible light is part of a much larger spectrum, these ideas came some 80 years after Kant died.

You have to remember this Kant was writing decades prior to anyone penning the theory of "magnetic field". The notion that there is an entire invisible aspect to the material world which we cannot sense directly is, to us moderns, completely self-evident. We are surrounded by radios, television, wifi, et cetera. This notion is not contentious to us. In the 1790s, this notion was radical, speculative philosophy. It is very difficult for us to put ourselves in the shoes of those who rode around on horses and pumped their water out of a well with a crank.

As far as the "thing-in-itself" being 'knowable' I suggest that this world mean knowable to the senses, via sense perception. In other words, we know the physical world in terms of local spheres of influence; sight, sound, touch and smell. The exception to this would be the modern world were our senses are augmented by technology. This also applies to modern scientific equipment. However, this changes nothing.

You are confusing the verb "to know" with the verb "to sense".

Regardless, most scholars agree that the "to know" issue of the noumenon is not clear in Kant's writing. I don't think this affects the core of my thesis. It was actually George Berkeley that had claimed that the noumenon does not exist full stop. Kant never once implied the noumenon does not exist. There are some fuzzy passages on this topic, in the section titled Transcendental Aesthetic. (see COPR)

Some more research on my part turned up some surprises. The ideas in my article have already been written about by others. Particularly here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/

Hi Kuznetzova.

You ideas a re interesting but I would like some clarification of you initial claims, especially in relation to the use of "objective". After that Perhaps we can move on.

Basically if the "thing-in-itself is actually "unknowable" then it cannot be objective. That, is objective in the sense of being external to the mind. I don't think this is what Kant is trying to say, but I accept there is a lot of debate to be had.

And, no I am not committed saying that Kant foreshadowed quantum mechanics. However,if it is the case then the noumenon is actually objective then this would exclude quantum mechanics. I think this is the basis of your argument and I would agree with that.
However, I am not convinced that your "objective" interpretation of noumenon is correct. I would like a clarification of your understanding of "objective" in relation to Kant and the "thing-in-itself".

Ginkgo wrote:I would like a clarification of your understanding of "objective" in relation to Kant and the "thing-in-itself".

The encyclopedias I have used in reference contain authors who are happy to define "objective" this way: Those objects outside of ourselves which have states that are independent of our inner experience.

Kant uses exactly the same meaning in his own writing. See,

Kant wrote:It would be my own fault, if out of that which I should reckon as phenomenon, I made mere illusory appearance.* But this will not happen, because of our principle of the ideality of all sensuous intuitions. On the contrary, if we ascribe objective reality to these forms of representation, it becomes impossible to avoid changing everything into mere appearance. For if we regard space and time as properties, which must be found in objects as things in themselves, as sine quibus non of the possibility of their existence, and reflect on the absurdities in which we then find ourselves involved, in asmuch as we are compelled to admit the existence of two infinite things, which are nevertheless not substances, nor anything really inhering in substances, nay, to admit that they are the necessary conditions of the existence of all things, and moreover, that they must continue to exist, although all existing things were annihilated-- we cannot blame the good Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusory appearances. Nay, even our own existence, which would in this case depend upon the self-existent reality of such a mere nonentity as time, would necessarily be changed with it into mere appearance--an absurdity which no one has as yet been guilty of.

(SS 9. General Remarks on Transcendental Aesthetic. III)

Kuznetzova, this is completely and utterly false. I find it disappointing. I have NEVER in any forum, professional or non-professional attacked anyone personally. I always attack the argument NEVER the person making the argument.





I'll put my comment on hold. I just saw that you are doing some editing.

Right, so the quantum mystics (who are smoking too much of whatever they smoke) would contend that objective reality cannot be ascribed to anything whatsoever, because "all reality is created by the mind". In the very paragraph above, from COPR, Kant calls this an "absurdity" which not even George Berkeley had committed!

Ginkgo wrote:Kuznetzova, this is completely and utterly false. I find it disappointing. I have NEVER in any forum, professional or non-professional attacked anyone personally. I always attack the argument NEVER the person making the argument.





I'll put my comment on hold. I just saw that you are doing some editing.

See this is a straw man qauntum mechanicists would neither contend with reality or out ability to know it, they would just shut up and calculate. The experiments show it is true as far as we can know for reasons we can not know, whilst that might no be the b all and all until someone explains why it is clearly nonsense it remains science.

right, so the quantum mystics (who are smoking too much of whatever they smoke) would contend that objective reality cannot be ascribed to anything whatsoever, because "all reality is created by the mind". In the very paragraph above, from COPR, Kant calls this an "absurdity" which not even George Berkeley had committed!

Well quite there is a reallity it may well be we have not evolved to see it.

See this is a straw man quantum mechanicists would neither contend with reality or out ability to know it, they would just shut up and calculate. The experiments show it is true as far as we can know for reasons we can not know, whilst that might no be the b all and all until someone explains why it is clearly nonsense it remains science.

It fucking works this shit, it created a lot of modern technology get over it, your inability to comprehend the reality of QM is not questioning Kant's it is just iterating what he already said, Complimentarity and Philosophy of mind, look them up.

It seems to me that Quantum Mechanics actually implies a plurality of objectivity. So the orthodox street philosopher says that when a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound. Well that is a form of certainty. It is a "Certainly not". QM suggests something completely different from this. Rather than not making a sound full-stop -- the tree both makes a sound and it does not make a sound, and it does everything in between those two possibilities.

The contemporary analogue are two photons in a lab that are fired at the same time, and sent towards partially-silvered mirrors. At some point, we don't know which photon went which way. And both of the earlier paths have polarization plates, with one set to vertical polarization, and another set to horizontal. Prior to measuring either photon, the photons are "entangled", and their polarizations are unknown (in terms of known-by-measurement). In that entangled state, the polarization of the photons is BOTH horizontal and vertical at the same time. The word "neither" is an error in this context. Upon measurement of one of the photons, the revealing (or whatever happens here) takes place of its polarization state, and the other photon magically assumes the opposite state.

In any case, there is nothing in the above paragraph that implies or suggests the photons are "not there" -- or that their very existence is predicated on observers creating them as a category in their minds.

Kuznetzova wrote:It seems to me that Quantum Mechanics actually implies a plurality of objectivity. So the orthodox street philosopher says that when a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound. Well that is a form of certainty. It is a "Certainly not". QM suggests something completely different from this. Rather than not making a sound full-stop -- the tree both makes a sound and it does not make a sound, and it does everything in between those two possibilities.

The contemporary analogue are two photons in a lab that are fired at the same time, and sent towards partially-silvered mirrors. At some point, we don't know which photon went which way. And both of the earlier paths have polarization plates, with one set to vertical polarization, and another set to horizontal. Prior to measuring either photon, the photons are "entangled", and their polarizations are unknown (in terms of known-by-measurement). In that entangled state, the polarization of the photons is BOTH horizontal and vertical at the same time. The word "neither" is an error in this context. Upon measurement of one of the photons, the revealing (or whatever happens here) takes place of its polarization state, and the other photon magically assumes the opposite state.

In any case, there is nothing in the above paragraph that implies or suggests the photons are "not there" -- or that their very existence is predicated on observers creating them as a category in their minds.

Very interesting observations K


Firstly, I would question the claim that quantum mechanics, "implies a plurality of objects". This is of course assuming that "objective" means mind independent. Perhaps we discuss the idea of, 'plurality of of objects" in relation to the wave function. I am of course assuming this is what you are alluding to.

Secondly, trees falling in a forest when there is no one around to hear them fall ( as per Berkeley) is not really about a dichotomy in terms of making a sound or not making a sound. What it actually refers to is the idea of EXPERIENCED sound. If there is no one to hear a tree fall then there is no first person EXPERIENCE of the sound.

"Also, because it has a reputation for weirdness, quantum mechanics is used too much as a justification for things (Philosophy) that have nothing to do with quantum mechanics . There is an expression, "quantum woo," where people attempt to make Philosophy credible by somehow affixing quantum mechanics to it to try to make it sound scientific."

The effort to advance/create philosophical knowledge got off to a bad start from the beginning. The so-called philosophers never have understood the nature of knowledge and how knowledge is constructed and their effort to construct philosophical knowledge has resulted in twenty-five centuries of philosophical gibberish and contradiction. Evidence of this is the many Schools of Philosophy, all contradicting each other, and the mind warping terminology invented to explain what philosophers can not understand. There is nothing philosophical that philosophers can understand without first having a universal comprehensive definition that explains the nature knowledge and how knowledge is constructed. I would wager that 95%, or more, of those who identify themselves with Philosophy will not recognize the logic of this statement. I ask the 95%, instead of attacking me, explain how the writings (propositional statements) of philosophers can create sensible knowledge when they have never understood the nature of knowledge itself?

kelly