Re: Gross National Happiness

On 9 Mar, 14:35, "Lance" <LanceG...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 9, 3:22 pm, "Paul" <pgr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



1. Kant relied quite a lot on the truth of the science he knew - for
example that there was only one geometry, that newton's physics was
the last word on physics, etc. In this he has turned out to be wrong.

Magee (p.194) quotes Popper, suggesting you are right, but
that his error was unavoidable and not damaging to the solution of his
main problem. His main problem was "solving the riddle of
experience... to explain how natural science and experience are at all
possible":

"Kant was in error about one important point.... but his error was
unavoidable [before Einstein]... This error was believing Newton's
theory was true. This conclusion was inescapable. Newton's theory had
made the most exact predictions... all correct...even Henri Poincare
believed that Newton's theory was true."

Kant assumed that "the world as we know it is our interpretation of
the observable facts in the light of theories that we ourselves
invent.. As Kant puts it, 'Our intellect does not draw its laws from
nature .... but imposes them upon nature.'"

Popper thinks Kant is essentially correct but modifies his assumption
to '"Our intellect tries to impose upon nature laws which it freely
invents." He points out the difference:

"Kant believed that Newton's laws were successfully imposed upon
nature by us: that we were bound to interpret nature by means of these
laws; from which he concluded that they must be true a priori."

Poincare thought this as well.

------------------

Caygill (p.286) points out that Kant entertained the possibility
of non-Euclidean gemetries in early texts. But by CPR he could only
accept a geometry whose axioms, like
'the straight line between two point is the shortest' can
be exhibited in intuition .

2. There have been many attempts to use Kant's ideas scientifically.
Oddly, none of the scientists are much sold on the claim that
the world is unknowable, even allowing for the fact that we can only
experience what our sense organs provide.

Yes, they accept empiricism as dogma. Even Popper couldn't go as far
as Kant, he was a transcendental realist rarher than a transcendental
idealist.

3. In fract of course, science does not limit itself to the
information that our sense organs provide. We extend them in various
ways, and create sensors that allow us to read the world in ways other
than our sensory experience. for example, we know that elephants
communicate through infra-sound even though we can't hear it because
we have instruments that can record this sound. So we can get a long
way to knowing the world in itself despite being trapped in our own
sensory experience.

But they are just like telescopes, aids to our senses. Kant obviously
knew about these, and they do not make one jot of difference to the
truth or falsity of his ideas.

4. Have you read Libet's experiments on willing?

Is that the theory showing that a person's actions precedes the act of
will that created it? As the transcendental is outside time and space,
order in time is neither here nor there.

All that Kant's argument actually establishes is that you need to have
some kind of mental tool set to make sense of information as provided
by the senses.

That's a small part of what he establishes.

... neither the senses nor the necessary
mental structures absolutely limit what we can understand about the
world.

To repeat:

"If we abstract from our notion of an object all those aspects of it
that are sense-dependent and mind-dependent we are left with...an x,
to which we cannot assign any observable or concepualizable
characteristics." Magee p147. This x is metaphysical.

The tools can relay extra information to the senses, but this extra
information is sense-dependent. Call this extra information y.
That still leaves us with an x. You can extend y by building better
tools. That still leaves us with an x.

nonsense. As for being outside of space and time...

Given my total pilfering from Magee, remember it is Popper, Kant and
Magee who you are calling purveyors of nonsense. Of course great minds
often slip into nonsense. Tolstoy's slip into religion, for example.
But I don't think P, K, and M make such a slip. Tolstoy could not find
the answers in philosophy so sought them in religion. As Magee says:
ignorance is ignorance, no right to believe anything follows from it.
But I don't think you can dismiss metaphysics as nonsense - there
always has to be something beyond what we know as physics and that is
by definition metaphysics. Kant gives good arguments for there always
being something beyond what we can know through physics - he might be
wrong but it's not nonsense.

Some more quotes and summaries from Magee:

"If I try to grasp in my imagination what it would be like to achieve
an understanding of the world and its existence I find myself
confronted by the idea of what amounts almost to a mystical
experience, a sense of being wholly and completely at one with
everything in a timeless state of fully achieved awareness - an
experience which it would then be impossible to articulate in
language, or any other medium, including artistic ones."(P.461)

No philosophy that equates reality with actual or possible experience
can be right. The way we apprehend material objects is dependent on
our sensory apparatus. If objects are independently real then time and
space must be independently real. But paradoxes occur when we consider
space and time to be independently real. Popper - we have no knowledge
other than theories which are the products of our minds (a Kantian
view). Schopenhauer (S) attacked Kant because such a view allows us to
carry on making theories without taking sensory experience as of first
importance. Popper did this but never addressed himself to the
ontological status of epistemological pheneomena, because his
epistemology did not require it.

Descartes in pursuing certainty sent philosophy on a fools errand for
three centuries (K and S were even misled). Popper is a realist but
believes that reality is something we can never directly know, but our
knowledge gets asymptotically closer to it over the course of time.
Like K & S, Magee (M) is an empirical realist and a transcendental
idealist. Young Wittgenstein (W) was also, and tried to polish off
empirical realism in the Tractatus - though he did not do it and
Popper (P) came closer.

P was a transcendental realist and M's attempts to get him to address
his mind to the possibility that empirical reality might not be
everything were in vain. He agreed this was a possibility but could
see nothing that anyone could say about it. This is unfair, K and S
and others have said interesting things about the nature of human
limitations and what might be outside the range of our understanding.

The reasons for believing that reality extends way beyond what we
apprehend are (i) we have a limited physical apparatus [even with
instruments] (ii) ignorance imposed on us by our culture (iii) the
boundedness of subjectivity, all knowing happens in us alone.

'Most people tend to believe that all reality is in principle knowable
or believe that there is a religous dimension to things. A third
alternative - that we can know very little but have equally little
ground for religious belief - receives scant consideration'.(p.468)

Magee argues that at the heart of the mystery of the world must be the
nature of time. We cannot conceive of a time before which there was no
time, and as an infinite series has no end there cannot have been an
infinite series of instants up to the present time. The same applies
for space. As K & S said, time and space are thought but never
experienced, and impose their form on our perceptions.

Physics forms objective conceptions of time that are not dependent on
anyone's experience. But in such time there is no place for a 'now'.
'Now' is subject dependent, and so, therefore, is the passage of time.
The ordering of events in time is objective, but 'now' is not. All
instants of time are, objectively, equally present.

Magee points out that Schopenhauer, amongst others, stressed that the
self is not a possible object of experience. But space and time are
conditions for possible experience. Therefore total reality involves a
self that is not in space or time. Choices made by this self could be
free, i.e. not bound by scientific law. But, Magee asks, 'How can an
immaterial self move a material object? What is the ontological status
of this immaterial self? Is its existence dependent on that of a
material object, our body? If so, how does it come into being? If not,
what is the nature of its apprently specific relationship to a
particular body? Can it have only one such relationship, or can it
have more than one? When the body dies, what happens to the immaterial
self that is uniquely attached to it? Is this self in some way the, or
at any rate a, connection between the empirical world and what lies
outside the physical world? Questions such as these would be the
fundamental questions of philosophy if the theological possibility of
a self's existence outside space and time were realised?'(p.473)

I have direct control of some bodily movements involving free choice
on my part. I do not know how I do it, but that I do it freely and
with direct control I know as much as I know anything, as much as
perceiving the redness of a rose. To say freedom is an illusion is
like saying all perceptions are optical illusions, which if accepted
takes away all possibility of perceiving anything. The fact of my own
freedom to choose is felt as strongly (at all times) as the feeling
that what I am seeing is a valid object. Therefore, just as the
validity of perception, it must be accepted as necessary for any
understanding of the world. If determinism is true we could never have
refrained from anything that we have done. So a sadistic murderer can
never be called 'evil or 'wrong' for what he has done, because it was
determined by his upbringing.

I cannot apprehend myself as an epistemological object, it is from the
capacity to make free choices that I know I am or have a self. I can
never have direct knowledge of myself, as all knowledge is
epistemological. But the possibility of 'knowing' self via an indirect
method remains. 'Perhaps what is needed is to start from the premiss
that the self exists but is not an object, and then proceed in a
direction wholly different from Heideggers.(p.480) My self may haved
come in to being soon after my body appeared, and may disappear when I
die, or it may not. It may have evolved over millions of years in
undisentagleable relationship with brains - this is Poppers idea but
Magee is unconvinced.

'If our conscious selves do not comprise the whole of reality, what is
the relationship between these conscious selves and the rest of
reality?'(p.481). A self cannot be located as an object in the world,
but a self can control bodies in the world. Selves experience a tensed
time framework but nothing else does. The next revolution may involve
the relationship between tense and intensed time.'

.

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