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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

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Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn
    #29676250 -

Hume vs. Kant: Does the mind construct reality, or are we just running on habit?

Hume came in with radical empiricism and essentially argued that all knowledge comes from raw sensory impressions.

Under strict observation, you never actually see cause and effect. You just see Event A happen, followed by Event B (e.g., one billiard ball hitting another).

"Necessary connection" isn't a property of reality; it’s just a psychological habit/expectation of the human mind. Induction, scientific laws, and metaphysics aren't rationally justified—we're just relying on custom.

Kant famously admitted that Hume "woke him from his dogmatic slumber." He realized that if Hume was right, objective science (like Newtonian physics) collapses into mere human habit.

Kant conceded that all knowledge begins with experience, but insisted the mind actively structures it.

Space, time, and causality aren't out there in the world to be passively picked up. They are the pre-installed software of human cognition.

We get certainty about the phenomenal world (how things appear to us, because our mind built the framework), but the noumenal world ("things-in-themselves") remains forever out of reach.

What makes this clash interesting is that philosophy basically spent the next two centuries trying to deal with the mess they left behind:

Hegel & Fichte: Doubled down on Kant, got rid of the "unknowable noumena," and turned the mind’s active structuring into a dynamic, historical unfolding of Spirit/Reason.

Nietzsche: Looked at both and went full perspectivism: "causality" and "synthetic a priori" are just useful fictions and psychological survival mechanisms born from our drive for order.

Quine & Sellars: Attacked Hume's "Myth of the Given" while reworking Kant’s categories into holistic webs of belief and linguistic conventions.

Heidegger: Bracketed the whole subject-object debate to ask how consciousness discloses Being in the first place.


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rahz

comfort pleasure power love     truth awareness peace I am      I feel      I do     I love  I speak    I see    I know

why there is reality and patterned, law-like consistency at all, rather than noise or non-reality is not a question physics answers. It's a question physics presupposes an answer to in order to provide other answers.

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Rahz] * 1
    #29676255 -

Alternatives to the Hume/Kant divide:

Pragmatism (Peirce, James, Dewey): Reality isn't built in the head or passively received; it is tested through action. Ideas are tools, and truth is what proves functional through dynamic feedback loops with the environment.

Embodied & Enactive Cognition (Merleau-Ponty, Varela): Cognition is rooted in having a physical body with specific sensory-motor capabilities. Perception isn't abstract computation—it emerges dynamically from how a living body physically moves through and navigates its world.

Evolutionary Epistemology (Lorenz, Campbell): Kant’s "a priori" categories (space, time, causality) exist, but they aren't uncaused metaphysical structures. They are real, hardwired biological adaptations that evolved because they accurately tracked the physical world well enough for our ancestors to survive.

Naturalized Epistemology (Quine): Epistemology is treated as a branch of empirical science (specifically psychology and neuroscience). We study how sensory inputs actually produce theoretical outputs without needing pure, unassailable philosophical foundations.

Neutral Monism (James, Russell): Mind and matter are not two distinct realms interacting with each other. Fundamental reality consists of a single "neutral" stream of experience; "mind" and "matter" are just different ways of grouping and analyzing those same events.

Process Philosophy (Whitehead): Reality is not made of static "objects" observed by "minds," but of interconnected, dynamic events and relations. Receptivity and creative spontaneity are basic features of all natural processes, not unique properties of human cognition.

Direct / Critical Realism: Rejects the idea that we only ever perceive internal "impressions" or "phenomena." Instead, we directly perceive real external objects, even if our perceptual mechanisms add noise, framing, or specific constraints.

Speculative Realism / Object-Oriented Ontology (Contemporary): Explicitly aims to overturn Kant's legacy (what Quentin Meillassoux calls "correlationism"—the claim that we can only ever think the relation between thinking and being). It asserts that real entities exist and interact entirely independent of human consciousness.


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rahz

comfort pleasure power love     truth awareness peace I am      I feel      I do     I love  I speak    I see    I know

why there is reality and patterned, law-like consistency at all, rather than noise or non-reality is not a question physics answers. It's a question physics presupposes an answer to in order to provide other answers.

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Rahz]
    #29676320 -

Isnt the question whether the mind constructs our perspective of reality?

Because asking whether the mind constructs reality is like asking if the mind causally constructs the tree you're looking at.


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I am whatever Darwin needs me to be.


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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: sudly] * 1
    #29676328 -

Yes, that's a better way to phrase it. Kant's claim was that the mind contributes the structure under which a tree can appear to us as an object of experience at all.


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rahz

comfort pleasure power love     truth awareness peace I am      I feel      I do     I love  I speak    I see    I know

why there is reality and patterned, law-like consistency at all, rather than noise or non-reality is not a question physics answers. It's a question physics presupposes an answer to in order to provide other answers.

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Rahz]
    #29676336 -

I'm always amazed by what short shrift Schopenhauer is given in philosophical circles, whereas Kant and Nietzsche no one can ever seem to shut up about. Schopenhauer did more than anyone to clean up the crap in Kant's tortured metaphysics, and had perhaps the greatest influence on Nietzsche's development as a philosopher.

Though not a philosopher, the physicist John Wheeler, who coined the terms "wormhole" and "black hole," thought very hard on his idea of a "participatory universe." His conclusion that we, as observers of the universe, actually create what we identify as the universe's "past," derived from his intimate knowledge of quantum physics and relativity theory, the mathematics of which afforded him (as he saw it) no other way out.

So, I give Wheeler an honorable mention as one who proposed that the mind constructs what we call physical reality (the realm of sensory forms). He did not seem to subscribe to an idealist metaphysics or to be much acquainted with the psychological mechanisms of mind. He got stuck in the last couple decades of his life (he died aged 95 in 2006), the problem being that he could not see how it is that separate conscious subjects should be able to form a shared physical reality.

He was brilliant, but alas, if he had only thought to place an ontologically primary first-person subjective view at the ground of reality and hit upon cognitive dissociation as the mechanism whereby individual subjects arise within a transpersonal field of experience, he could perhaps have found his peace. He was not a physicalist, but what I'd call a metaphysical informationalist: he believed information is the ground of reality ("it from bit"). But information is nothing but so much insensate gibberish without a mind to contemplate it.

Here is an interesting article about Wheeler that hints at how a participatory universe should work:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-wheeler-saw-the-tear-in-reality-20240925/

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Rahz]
    #29676345 -

Rahz said:
Yes, that's a better way to phrase it. Kant's claim was that the mind contributes the structure under which a tree can appear to us as an object of experience at all.


Yes, and a bee or a bird will see a tree in quite different ways than a human.

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Soothfast]
    #29676512 -

A bee isnt creating the flowers it feeds upon.


--------------------
I am whatever Darwin needs me to be.


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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: sudly]
    #29676721 -

Wheeler's participatory universe doesn't work that way, really, where a single individual directly and immediately instantiates a nourishing substance as if by magic. Far too simplistic a take, there.

I suppose I should say that I don't wholly endorse Wheeler's notions. I'm open-minded about alternative ways in which the universe may have originated and evolved, with the Big Bang perhaps not being what it appears to be; but since I can idly spin multiple viable-seeming (and likely unfalsifiable) hypotheses in my mind about the matter, I'm not prepared to advance and defend any one of them.

Wheeler in his earlier days worked a lot on trying to derive all of physics (matter, energy, forces, etc.) from the geometry of spacetime itself. In the end he concluded that there was something more primary than spacetime.

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Rahz]
    #29676958 -

Rahz said:
Yes, that's a better way to phrase it. Kant's claim was that the mind contributes the structure under which a tree can appear to us as an object of experience at all.


I do wonder if I agree that the mind reconstructs the experiences of the reality. And I think I do.

But that isnt the same as the idea of the mind constructing reality, just the reality of our experience within it.


--------------------
I am whatever Darwin needs me to be.


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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: sudly]
    #29677104 -

Reconstruction was the view of Descartes/Locke.

Kant believed there was a mind independent reality but there is still debate about what Kant was suggesting. Either that space and time weren't true aspects of reality (he ruled them out), or that we couldn't know whether time and space were true aspects of reality and thus should make no comment about it.

"Space does not represent any property of things in themselves... Space is nothing other than the form of all appearances of sense."

This is the reason people tend to take his work as suggestive that space and time are only situated in the construction we perceive. But this strong interpretation suffers from the same type of epistemic issue as suggesting space and time certainly do exist outside the mind.

He seems to have been breaking his own rules. Part of it seems to stem from his consideration of unity and plurality, which he argued were certainly numerical interpretations, a quality which he argued wasn't intrinsic to reality. Thus, space and time are constructs existing only in the mind.

FWIW, in so much as I'm required to make assumptions, I lean Locke.


--------------------
rahz

comfort pleasure power love     truth awareness peace I am      I feel      I do     I love  I speak    I see    I know

why there is reality and patterned, law-like consistency at all, rather than noise or non-reality is not a question physics answers. It's a question physics presupposes an answer to in order to provide other answers.

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Rahz] * 2
    #29677178 -

sometimes I think that familiarity feels like an internal model of space overlapping sense-able reality.
things move around in 'familiarity space' in familiar ways (though there are huge gaps), and we keep on adjusting for what needs correction based upon what is sensed which may differ from how things went before.

If we did not use this model-approach, our assessments and responses would be much slower - in the sense of being "from scratch" approaches to each noticed change. As hunters and as prey, the familiarity models are of much service in quick reactions.

To be fluid in this world, we have to keep stepping in and out of our familiar models.


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: redgreenvines]
    #29677339 -

redgreenvines said:
To be fluid in this world, we have to keep stepping in and out of our familiar models.


Yes, and I would extend that idea even to one's philosophizing. Everything about what we call "reality" should be questioned to at least some degree.

When a model of the solar system, for example, starts accumulating epicycles in order to better match observations, and epicycles withinin epicycles, it comes time to ask whether something major is out of place with the underlying paradigm. "Put the sun in the center, you say!? Expect a visit from the Pope Police!"

So, what were we talking about here again? Oh yes: Kant, dead for centuries, and how his metaphysics were murky in some places, overwrought in other places, and arguably self-contradictory in spots.

But Kant had the right idea, I think, as regards space, time, and causality. Our acquaintance with the external world is wholly comprised of perceptual qualia. We have to be dead honest about that, and not get ahead of ourselves by imputing to such qualia ontological properties that simply are not in evidence. Plato advanced his allegory of the cave in The Republic, and it just didn't stick in the West for some inexplicable reason; meanwhile the East didn't get the memo yet still came to a more satisfactory rapprochement with reality. Now today we find ourselves in a muddle, wandering in a labyrinth of sensory forms like carnival-goers in a hall of mirrors, wondering why the solid matter we once thought we had firmly in hand turns out to be probabilistic phantasms describable only with mathematical equations.

So yes, our senses form what we call the physical universe. Physicality is perforce phenomenality. I think this is almost too obvious to debate. Now it's just a question of how the forms we perceive are arranged. The forms are arranged around us, and the "stage" upon which the arranging occurs gives us a sense of "space." The configuration of the forms appear to change, and change again, and again—ah, so, we have a sequence of configurations, and the "flow" or ordering of the sequence we identify as "time." Both "space" and "time" appear to be a scaffolding upon which the doings of the world play out, and since the playing out is only ever observed in consciousness, like the perceptual forms themselves, the only thing we can ever really say with certainty is that the whole production is coming to us as a conscious experience and nothing else. Physics (the study of the behavior of sensory forms) has formalized the idea of causality which human intuition has grokked since paleolithic times; and relativity theory, in particular, sussed out a connection between time and space, interweaving them into a Riemann manifold. As for quantum mechanics, well, that's a problem for the "matter before mind" crowd, and if it had been discovered in Plato's time, physicalism would have been laughed off as patently absurd, never to return. But nowadays too many people have invested too much of their heart, mind, and soul in the idea that you can conjure first-person conscious awareness from a handful of dirt, wholly forgetting all that we really know of matter ontologically; namely, it's a collage of sensory forms we experience exclusively in consciousness.

Kant, dummy version: something objectively real exists behind it all, backstage, but we can't ever observe it "as it is"—not even a bit. Then Schopenhauer came along and pointed out the bloody obvious: we can get glimpses into the noumenal realm, because after all, we each have direct access to our own immediately experienced subjectivity.

Schopenhauer was possibly the first Western philosopher to pull out of the West's millennia-old rut and take a hard look at what the East had to say about reality, rather than sit and twiddle with the same tired old tales handed down from the ancient Greeks.

Almost every one of these types of threads here has a suffocating Western slant. It gets boring.


Edited by Soothfast (09/24/26 01:35 PM)

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Soothfast]
    #29677406 -

Quote:
...So yes, our senses form what we call the physical universe...


who said that?
not me


our senses fire signals at the brain, and then activated cortical neurons become interlinked (associative memory), and perceptions emerge where the active neurons match with parts of familiar resting memory.
reactivated memory becomes a model of the physical contexts, but it is just another part of a changing mental context.
the inner (mental) contexts are seldom so complete that they overpower the sensory context entirely, but that does happen in hallucinatory experience.


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: redgreenvines]
    #29677413 -

redgreenvines said:
Quote:
...So yes, our senses form what we call the physical universe...


who said that?
not me



I never said you did.

I say it.

But I want to emphasize that it's not really a point to be argued. Everything we call physical is in one-to-one correspondence with sensory qualities.

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Soothfast]
    #29677420 -

"Everything we call physical"

could be not is

"in one-to-one correspondence with sensory qualities"

in this forum it is ok to argue


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: redgreenvines]
    #29677471 -

As much as physicists these days are all too willing to reify their mathematical prestidigitations in their minds, that still doesn't instill the equations they've scribbled down on paper with a magical Promethean fire.

Anything that eludes the senses, even with the aid of instrumentation, is not deserving of entering the canon of physics alongside the law of gravitation or the basic principles of thermodynamics, and that's because any such chimera lie outside the purview of the scientific method. I say this even as one prepared to accept as "physical" such things as dark matter, which we cannot detect directly, but may be able to infer the existence of by indirect means that nonetheless must rely on sensory input. (Whether dark matter exists or not is still an open question.)

In the end, it's still a fact that physics is done by observing the universe, and everything known or reasonably inferred is informed by sensory input. There exists a vast graveyard of beautiful mathematical models authored by smart theoreticians who thought the equations were telling them something about the universe, but in the end the experimentalists proved it was not so.

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Soothfast]
    #29679492 -

What do you think of a naturalist view?


--------------------
I am whatever Darwin needs me to be.


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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: sudly]
    #29681574 -

sudly said:
What do you think of a naturalist view?


The metaphysical model I find the most compelling these days, analytic idealism, adheres strictly to a naturalist framework. It contrasts with physicalism foremost by substituting consciousness for matter (or energy) as the sole ontological primitive. Among the motivations for this move is epistemic humility: consciousness is something we each know firsthand, without mediation, whereas the experience of matter depends on mediation of the senses—that is, qualities experienced in consciousness.

The choice to place a particular kind of experience of mind, namely the sensory qualities we identify with "matter," in an ontological category of its own is a leap. The further choice to take the contents of that invented category and claim they can be arranged in special ways to produce the minds that conceived the invention is a galactic pole vault.

Like physicalism, analytic idealism does not explain everything. It is a paradigm shift that is in harmony with, and preserves, the established scientific corpus. Regardless of which metaphysical model one subscribes to, though, whatever is at the "bottom" of reality, if there is a bottom, is likely to be wild—perhaps incomprehensibly so. The naturalists of Enlightenment times, I think, would hardly recognize quantum mechanics as being natural, yet it is. Deists would say that's just how God decided to set up the universe before He walked away from it to let it do its thing according to its prescribed laws or logos.

I am a naturalist, because whatever is true of reality's workings is perforce natural, and I don't believe there exists some Power "outside" reality that can step in and, intentionally or not, override the expression of natural processes.

Edited by Soothfast (09/29/26 10:01 PM)

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: Soothfast]
    #29681581 -

Soothfast said:
...consciousness is something we each know first-hand...



how do you mean this?
when did you first know consciousness?


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: Hume vs. Kant: Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber and the Critical Turn [Re: redgreenvines]
    #29681814 -

redgreenvines said:
Soothfast said:
...consciousness is something we each know first-hand...



how do you mean this?
when did you first know consciousness?


Ah, that old uncharitableness again: pretending you're too dense to get the gist of what I'm saying, and demanding something above and beyond. I assume you take yourself to be conscious, despite feigning otherwise in this thread? Yes? Well then—there's your answer.

If I said we each know matter firsthand, may I assume you would accept that without question, despite the epistemological freight that weighs so very heavily upon such an assertion?

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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

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