Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Uriahharris]

In this is it possible to know? Even if you deprived a baby of its senses and could access its brainwaves to retrieve information, would you be able to determine if it is experience or the absence of, a priori, that brought about thought? for if we have experienced experience, could we ever be at a stance that we could make a thought at it? Such is the problem, one with which contradiction and paradoxes share.

[Quotidian]

The spacetime paradigm, for instance is founded on a conclusion extrapolated from observation, a process Herr Kant would sniff at in haughty contempt.

Not at all.

Despite being a well-known Philosopher, [Kant's] early works focused more on geology, astronomy, and physics. In his 1755 work, “The Universal Natural History and Theories of the Heavens,” Kant talks about astronomy and two noteworthy theories about the Heavens. The first is his “Nebular Hypothesis” on star and planetary formations, where he theorized that thin, dim clouds of dust and gas out in the cosmos would collapse in on themselves under the force of gravity, causing them to spin to form a disk. From this spinning disk, stars and planets would form, and from this type of formation, the rotation of Earth and the other planets would be explained.

Kant always maintained that he was a 'transcendental idealist but empirical realist'.

[Obvious Leo]

Quotidian. Your point is well made and I agree completely with your understanding of Kant's philosophy. However the spacetime paradigm is not an analogous example to the one you gave. Spacetime is inaccessible to reason and only expressible in the language of mathematics. Hence the haughty sniff.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

Curious, then, that Einstein relied so much on 'thought experiments' - such as riding a light-beam - to arrive at his revolutionary theory of relativity.

While I do agree that physics is not founded entirely on a priori principles, the notion that real facts can be deduced from a purely abstract mathematics is central to it. Indeed maths itself is largely founded on things that can be known or proven a priori.

[Obvious Leo]

Modern physics is not founded even slightly on a priori principles, a fact which Einstein was fully aware of. The Kantian space is a non-physical abstraction, a conclusion he shared with every major philosopher since the pre-Socratics. Einstein was a philosophical dunce when he published his relativity models but he was no dickhead and he knew how to interpret the conclusions of physical experiments correctly. The Michelson-Morley experiments conclusively showed that the 3 dimensional space is relational only and not a physical entity. All the luminiferous aether theories were slain in one fell swoop and disappeared into physics history to join phlogiston. A non-physical space can have no physical properties and thus spacetime must not be regarded as physically real. This was a point which Einstein made quite unambiguously after the publication of General Relativity and one which he repeatedly stressed throughout his life. Spacetime must only be regarded as an epistemological model and can have no ontological currency. This view was shared by Bohr and Wheeler in particular, two other towering geniuses of 20th century physics.

For some reason these salient facts have got lost in the wash but in due course spacetime will wind up in the history books with phlogiston and the aether. Once that happens physics might begin to make some sense and Herr Kant can breathe a sigh of relief.

Regards Leo

P.S.

the notion that real facts can be deduced from a purely abstract mathematics is central to it

I'd be interested to hear what Gottfried might have to say about this. I suspect the haughty sniff might have to give way to the apoplectic fit.

-- Updated July 25th, 2014, 2:30 pm to add the following --

Immanuel I meant. I'm in the middle of a Leibniz essay and I can't walk and chew gum.

[Quotidian]

Modern physics is not founded even slightly on a priori principles...

I don't see how you can sustain that. The first web definition that I find says:

a priori: relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.

How can you say that mathematical physics is not reliant on that? It seems to me that at every point in physics, you're observing the interplay between theoretical deduction and observational results. The physicist is saying, Because of this, then we infer that that must be the case - and then an observation or experiment is conducted which either validates or falsifies that logical inference. So it is the interplay between logical speculation and observational results at every step, isn't it?

A non-physical space can have no physical properties and thus spacetime must not be regarded as physically real. This was a point which Einstein made quite unambiguously after the publication of General Relativity and one which he repeatedly stressed throughout his life.

What bearing does that have on the reality or otherwise of a priori knowledge?

-- Updated July 25th, 2014, 4:06 pm to add the following --

Returning to the subject of this thread, namely whether a priori knowledge is a tenable hypothesis. Curiously, also a mosquito must have recourse to a "transcendental ego", according to the Kantian view of a priori categories as constitutive of the world. After all, it lives in a causal and temporal universe, too. This is baffling, in view of the mosquito's miniscule brain, which can hardly be responsible for the complex task of the ordering of existence. Thus, the transcendental ego must be a mind common to all living creatures, a kind of spirit enveloping existence, which the brain is capable of connecting with in order to extract its knowledge. It is a standpoint akin to New Age superstitions. It is curious that scholarly philosophers, even to this day, subscribe to such a theory.

M. Winther 1

Well, it might be because this misrepresents what the theory means. A mosquito, or any other kind of sentient but non-rational intelligence, is obviously unable to bring into conscious reflection, what it means to be a mosquito, or to ponder the distinction between real and apparent, or to form theories of the world, or consider the meaning of things.

However any living thing is in some sense a manifestation of what Kant's successor Schopenhauer would declare as 'the will'. But again, in regards to non-rational animals, such as insects and so on, the fact that they are manifestations of such a 'will' has no particular significance for them. It is only in the human form that one is able to contemplate such questions; the ability to do so is indeed the thing that differentiates humans from other animals.

[wanabe]

Scott,

Greetings.

I believe that all knowledge is a priori, then forgotten. We then attempt to remember and use that knowledge through our life experience, while combating lies. Knowing and doing are also very different.

Certainly we can agree that many animals have innate knowledge -- sorry, "a priori" just seems like snooty jargon -- humans are not all that different essentially. Animals know how to walk, hunt, etc. instinctively. Humans have adapted to modern society so much our innate knowledge is labeled -- incorrectly --as irrelevant.

I think that we should leave consciousness -- if there is such a thing objectively -- out of the equation for now. To avoid the egotistical, humans are the best brand of thinking.

Genetic information is absolute proof of innate knowledge. So innate knowledge is defiantly possible, and I'll assert dominate.

[Obvious Leo]

a priori: relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.

How can you say that mathematical physics is not reliant on that?

The spacetime paradigm derives from a single observation, namely that the speed of light is observed to be a constant. From this it was deduced that the speed of light actually IS a constant which is patently impossible and easily disprovable.

So it is the interplay between logical speculation and observational results at every step, isn't it?

Indeed it is but this is making a monstrous assumption that Kant would recoil in horror from. The observation does not exist in a conceptual vacuum and therefore must be interpreted by an observer. In his own words:

“(...) Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognising it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object”. (Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic.)

In other words what's going on isn't always what we think is going on. It depends entirely on how we set up our experiments and interpret the results, which depends entirely on our prior assumptions. If we design our models to predict what the observer will observe we can scarcely claim a victory when the observer duly goes ahead and observes what our models have predicted and thus we approach no closer to the truth. The Higgs boson and the gravitational waves are the most recent examples. It's all very clever but not helping things a bit, as the physicists themselves will ruefully concede. Observer problems have been the curse of physics for a century and this is possibly because for a physicist to be caught reading a philosophy book would be tantamount to career suicide.

Leo wrote:A non-physical space can have no physical properties and thus spacetime must not be regarded as physically real. This was a point which Einstein made quite unambiguously after the publication of General Relativity and one which he repeatedly stressed throughout his life.


What bearing does that have on the reality or otherwise of a priori knowledge?

I have no problem at all with the reality of a priori knowledge and this is my entire point. If we make the wrong a priori assumption there be dragons lying in wait. Spacetime makes the a priori assumption that space is physically real. Space can evidently expand and contract and bend and twist and curve and do all manner of miraculous things, which is no mean feat for an entity with no physical properties. Has anybody ever seen space doing any of these things? If this assumption is false then the spacetime paradigm is false, which explains why it makes no sense. It is an "as if" model which means it models reality "as if" space could do these things. However I'm not anxious to chuck out the baby with the bathwater. It makes astonishingly accurate predictions about the behaviour of matter and energy and its utility is unquestionable. However it is a predictive model only and has no explanatory authority.

n regards to non-rational animals, such as insects and so on,

How dare you say this, you speciesist. Irrationality is an entirely human characteristic, as a brief stroll through some of the threads here will show you. Have you ever seen an insect do something that doesn't make sense? I'm a biologist by training and I can assure you that I never have, but I see humans do such things every day of the week and I don't exempt myself from this failing.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

Thanks, Leo, but I don't think the quotation from Kant illustrates the point you're trying to make! It actually is a criticism of the 'correspondence theory of truth' (and, incidentally, thanks for it, I was casting about for that exact quotation the other day.)

What is it that Kant would recoil in horror from?

Oh never mind.

I think, anyway, all this is besides the point, as you have already admitted that you have no problem with the reality of a priori knowledge. So I take it that, if you agree that a priori knowledge is possible, on that point at least we're in agreement.

Observer problems have been the curse of physics for a century and this is possibly because for a physicist to be caught reading a philosophy book would be tantamount to career suicide.

There are some philosophically-inclined physicists, I think, but they are few in number. I daresay that by far the greatest number of physicists are employed in either industry or weapons research (at a guess) and for them, the whole game is simply 'shut up and calculate'.

Irrationality is an entirely human characteristic

Perhaps it is better to say that it is something only humans can recognize. I don't think that humans are fundamentally rational, or that reason always determines their actions, but at least they are capable of reason, which other creatures are generally not, apart from some primitive forms in the higher animals.

[Obvious Leo]

There are some philosophically-inclined physicists, I think, but they are few in number. I daresay that by far the greatest number of physicists are employed in either industry or weapons research (at a guess) and for them, the whole game is simply 'shut up and calculate'.

The tide is definitely turning quite quickly and the philosophy of physics is now being very seriously questioned in high places by most of the leaders in the field. The collapse of string theory brought this about and it's not before time.

The "shut up and calculate" mentality derived from the Solvay conference and the Copenhagen interpretation of QM. It essentially paraphrases Bohr, who famously said: " It is not the role of the physicist to explain what the universe is, but merely to determine what we can meaningfully say about its behaviour". It's hard to conceive of a more precise definition of the difference between an epistemological and an ontological truth and I regard it as a great pity that nobody bothered to heed his words.

My crack about the insects was intended to be facetious and I knew perfectly well what you meant. These are weighty subjects and sometimes it doesn't hurt just to lighten the moment.

We are in furious agreement on the subject of a priori knowledge and can now get back on topic with my apologies for the digression. I found you the quote you were looking for even though I didn't know you were looking for it so it was worth the exercise.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

Nice to make your acquaintance, Leo

[Obvious Leo]

Nice to make your acquaintance, Leo

Ditto my friend.

[Felix]

"Have you ever seen an insect do something that doesn't make sense?"

Well, would you call it sensible for a moth to fly into an open flame?

[Obvious Leo]

Well, would you call it sensible for a moth to fly into an open flame?

Absolutely yes. Moths are not well known for their cognitive capabilities but they are attracted to light for a bloody good reason. They are nocturnal lepidoptera who navigate at night by using the light of the moon. The technique they use for doing this is called transverse orientation and it relies on them maintaining a constant angular momentum relative to the fixed light source. Artificial light sources interfere with this mechanism and send them into a contracting spiral of flight to the brightest local source. It is a perfectly logical behaviour and this means it can be explained. The behaviour of humans can't be explained in such a simple fashion, of course, but some human behaviours are irreducible to reason by any standards of logic whatsoever. Irrationality is a unique human feature which is not seen elsewhere in the animal world. This is the view of the mainstream behaviourists in biology and one with which I concur. My anecdotal experience confirms it.

Regards Leo

[Belinda]

Leo, please see my discussion of your latest in the ' Pride and Prejudice' thread.

We are irrational because we look backwards with limited comprehension and we face the future inadequately prepared only by blindly leaping. By way of contrast with us, a mouse cannot cast its eye backwards at all nor guess and fear about its future. ( With thanks to Robert Burns, "To a Mouse" )