Re: Stack Overflow
From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/01/04
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Date: 1 Dec 2004 00:39:40 -0800
christhomsonshomepage@yahoo.com (Chris Thomson) wrote in message news:<9b67858b.0411300539.3031efa2@posting.google.com>...
> Let's say we try to understand the mind. We imagine a universe full of
> people, and those people have minds, in those minds these people can
> imagine a universe full of people, who have minds, etc, etc.
Interesting because you reach the same conclusions, more or less, as
Kant.
These conclusions are superficially phrased as "things in themselves
are unknowable".
A deeper reading of the Critique of Pure Reason, however, shows that
if we accept the split between experience and reality as fundamental,
many philosophical problems dissolve.
Another way of looking at the problem is found by means of
"phenomenology": there is no such thing as "experience" without
experience-of, while we can coherently imagine a physical reality
(such as that famous tree falling in that famous forest, of the Earth
before sentient beings, or the Ben Affleck movie Gigli) which was
never experienced.
[Of course, Gigli was facetious. Surely some people saw it in the
theaters or rented the DVD.]
But we cannot have an experience without
experiencing...something...even while watching Fox News after having
imbibed ten shooters. A blinding white light, perhaps, or, perhaps a
sort of grey light with someone reading George Bush's State of the
Union address in Etruscan...the point is, no experience without
experience of.
Kant, the granddaddy of phenomenology, shows how experience and its
content have their own "logic" outside of classical logic in which the
synthetic a priori (such as "no experience without content") is less
proved by syllogistic means or by calculation (processes which in this
plane only generate strange recursive loops) as by the further
synthetic apriori "claim" (more like a realization than like a
proposition) that "experience has content" is a proposition which IF
REJECTED destroys the ability to think coherently.
The Kantian system, in other words, is prix fixe and not ala carte.
Certain forms of OS programming as in the case of bootstrap loaders
put their coders into Kantian forms of thought when they realize that
their loader's bug is explained by its presumption of preconditions
which it itself is responsible to enforce.
Could Kant's thought processes be simulated by means of a Prolog
program? I suppose you could preassemble the assertions AS TEXTS and
link them deductively but then the problem is that the system would
essentially parrot the conclusions, like a trained cockatoo or Ben
Affleck.
Recall that "experience has content" is in Kant less a proposition and
more a realization which Kant hopes to cause in the reader's mind by
means of text.
But since the circuits of any conceivable computer are insofar as we
know (keeping in mind the unknowability of things in themselves) then
our very acceptance of the Kantian system means that we would be
wasting our time, because the computer would NOT have an experience,
an experience of the very proposition "experience has content", only
print the LIE that it does after a completely explainable series of
states, during which the computer is a thing and not a Kantian
subject.
And note that once you self-apply Kant's system, the computer
scientist cannot suspend his belief in Kant's conclusions while
conducting this experiment.
Why is that?
It is because IF the transcendental synthetic a priori is
transcendental BECAUSE its acceptance is the ground of thought itself,
the computer scientist would not be able to think out the experiment!
Kant is more than ala carte. It's take it or leave it, which means
that the only valid methodology is transcendental reflection or
contemplation, not experimentation, because the ability to experiment
at all is in play once we depart from the synthetic apriori.
Kant in fact escapes the ignorant Anglo American Philosophy for
Boneheads 101 taxonomy between (putatively good) empirical pool sharks
like Hume, and (putatively bad) cheese eating rationalist Frogs like
Descartes, because his method in its central moves is NEITHER
empirical nor "deductive". Indeed, Kant returned to the world
tradition in philosophy of CONTEMPLATION in which the truth, for
example, of Confucius Kong-Fu is "proven" neither by induction nor
deduction yet strangely "truer than", say, Sun Tzu.
This is confused with imprecision yet Kant and Confucius are strangely
precise.
[And there was Kung Fu fighting...]
Transcendental "logic", unlike what most Anglo American philosophers
mean by "logic" is part of ontology and not epistemology.
Of course, given the original unknowability of things in themselves we
cannot reject the hypothesis that Windows 2000 is indeed sentient. But
it is in fact far easier to believe that natural objects are sentient.
No, Windows 2000 is fully explainable.
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