Re: Gross National Happiness

On 9 Mar, 23:43, "Dave Smith" <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8 Mar, 11:37, "Paul" <pgr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



If you don't want to explain and defend your views that, of course, is> > > up to you. :>)

I hoped you were going to say, "OK I'll read the books" :-)

It seems to me that it is a waste of time speculating wildly about
"transcendental entities". How could such things be shown to exist or
not exist? How could people 'tap into' them?>
Here are some notes I took from Magee's Confessions He spends a lot of
time speculating about transcendental entities, shows how they might
exists. The term transcendental refers not to objects but to ways of
knowing objects. It is the purely cognitive part of experience.
Transcendental knowledge, therefore, is (partly) knowledge of the
conditions of possible experience of everyday objects. For instance,
'objects must be unique'. Therefore there is nothing difficult about
'tapping in' we do it when we see a tree and a car. Anyway...

----Magee on Kant------

The subject for who the world is object cannot be found in this world.
No foundation for moral or aesthetic judgements can be found in this
world. We cannot help ask questions about the world to which, such is
our reason, we can never know the answers. The antimonies of space and
time imply that reason leads us into contradiction, therefore reality
cannot be found by reason alone. But experience cannot give us
knowledge of reality, since our sense-perceptions are not the
(supposed) external objects.

"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. "Kant believed
that for us to have the experiences we do have, such metaphysical
objects must exist as their causes. Locke also believed this, though
it breaches the fundamental principle of empiricism (all postualtions
about the world are checkable by experience).

The whole nature of the world as we experience it is dependent on our
apparatus for experiencing. Things as they appear to us are probably
nothing like they are in themselves.

If there are no moral choices there is no free will. If you disown the
possibility of moral choice you must be an extreme psychopath
(believing there is no right or wrong). So, accepting free will,
bodily movements in time and space are not determined by physical (or
bilogical) scientific law. But everything in the empirical world is
subject to scientific law, therefore acts of will do not occur in the
physical world. There is some part of reality that is not the
empirical world, and part of each person belongs to it, and (partly)
what goes on in it is making decisions, i.e. acts of will. You cannot
ask how this part of reality is composed, because it is beyond such
empirical questions. We have not the remotest idea how we initiate
bodily movements.

We are permanently unable to have knowledge of the part of total
reality that is not part of the empirical world. So there cannot be
direct knowledge of a transcendental God, or knowledge that we have
souls - still less that they survive death.There can be no religious
knowledge, there cannot be knowledge of reality that cannot be tested
by experience. For the same reasons we can never know that there is a
God, we cannot know that there is not a God. Kant ruled out knowledge
of God, but still had faith that he existed. Like Magee, I am an
agnostic wiyth an inclination to disbelief - but am embraced by the
reality of unknowable possibility (of the existence of God, of my own
soul being immortal). Atheistic humanism lacks all sense of mystery.
It is positively mistaken in believing there is no reality outside the
empirical real - there must be, even though we cannot understand it.

"At the very deepest level, our understanding of the human condition
remains where Kant and Schopenhauer left it... What relationship there
is between the willing me and the physical me is a mystery that has
baffled understanding since the beginning of human enquiry."[Magee
167] I am the embodied interface between the empirical and the non-
empirical. These interact, or relationships exist, and "questions
about the nature of this connection - and following on from these,
questions about the nature of the non-empirical - are the most urgent
and compelling of the questions we are left facing by the end of our
study of Kant's philosophy." Schopenhauer took up these questions,
making him Kant's lawful heir.

Magee summarises K's ideas about the role played by imagination in
perception. To have an experience of the world I need i) sensory
imputs ii) to sustain representations of the inputs in imagination
iii) to link the representations iv) grasp the linked chains in a
conscious experience as wholes representing experience (hearing a
tune, or a sentence). Understanding is the bringing of experiences
under concepts, and those concepts are used in reasoning. In the
CoPR he aims "to provide a fully analysed account of what reason is
and can do, what all its available materials are and how it aquires
them, so that we shall fully understand in a fully supported way what
its limitations are: what kind of thing it is impossible for us to
know, what kind of thing it is impossible for us to even think or
understand."

Kants doctrine of the ideality of space and time implies that noumena
are not in time or space. The world of experience, and time and space,
die with us. Kant argued that noumenal reality can contain God and
immortal souls of which we would have no experience because our senses
would not experience them.

Thanks for taking the trouble to provide the above. I find the last
paragraph particularly puzzling. It reminds me of one of my father's
dry sayings: 'You don't know, I don't know, nobody knows .... but I'll
tell you". How could Kant know anything about noumenal reality?

Strictly, he can't. And he knows it. But he really wanted to believe
in God. For at
least 4 reasons (i) to keep the populace in order through fear of hell
fire (ii) because he
liked the argument from design -- which was much more appealing before
Darwinism. At least it gave some explanation for us being here,
what else he have -- 'it just happened'! (iii) he really liked and
respected the simple, virtuous ways of his parents - who were poor
Lutherans. He thought their belief in God and the bible had given them
so much that he could not just throw away his background. (iv) to keep
his job.

I disagree with much of Magee's position.

How can you without reading him? You disagree with my presentation of
Magee's position, his version is a better presentation.

I think the self is just the
organism, I don't believe in the libertarian version of free will

It certainly can't be proven, but I think Magee's 'look it's just
obvious we have it'
arguments are very persuasive -- and my summary doesn't do justice to
them.

I think knowledge is a matter of degree of correspondence between our
models of reality and the outside world.

What outside world? We only have the knowledge of our senses, we
know nothing about the outside world beyond what we experience. Have
you
forgotten Kant's main points already? The empirical mind set will do
that to
you.

Your sentence is a nice summary of Popper's position -- Magee's
accounts
of the argumenst he had with Popper over this and other matters is
great reading.
Another great benefit of Magee's books are his insights into Popper
the man -- he
was probably clodser to him than any other philosopher. I read his
Fontana modern
masters on Popper back in the 70s -- one of the main the main books
that turned me on to philosophy.

I have read (in 'The Nature of Knowledge' by Henry Plotkin) that the
phrase 'evolutionary Kantianism' is sometimes used "to describe the
scientific understanding of the existence of a priori or innate
psychological devices that make it possible for us to know the world,
in the ordinary usage of that word 'know'". Plotkin comments: "We do
indeed come into the world with innate determiners of knowledge. These
innate determiners, themselves a priori forms of knowledge, are a
priori to us as individuals, but they have been gained a posteriori by
the long evolutionary history of our species".

Like Popper's analysis of Kants' position on Newton, this doesn't
affect
Kant's main argument - but nicely supplements it.

.

Relevant Pages

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