rubbercok3000

Hello all!! I have a term paper dealing with Kant due soon. I am attempting to refute his assertation that we "only see things as we perceive them, not how they really are". I mean is it really possible to "know" empirical things for a fact, or a priori? Any help would be appreciated on this topic. Kant is a hard guy to understand and even harder to argue against since I myself agree with most of his stuff.

mnkbdky

I am not going to give arguments against it, but I will ask you questions. Hopefully, they'll lead you in the right direction. If you want critques of your arguments post them and I am sure we will all be happy to respond. The sharks cannot feed until someone jumps in the tank.

First question: Why do you think he is wrong? Is it just intuition? Why do you think you have access to reality an sich?

Farren

Just a thought (from a non-academic):

What about examining the relationship between the concept "how we see them" and "how they really are".

If "how things really are" can be shown to be indistinguishable from "how we see them" (i.e. that the existence and qualities of a thing are established and defined by its interactions with other things - like us), then obviously what we percieve is what they are.

What instantly leaps to mind is that mental processes can alter the raw (sensory) perception so much that what we see in a thing can seem to be utterly different to what another sees, and this could be grounds for seperation of the independent reality of the thing and the translated reality.

But my (off the cuff) thinking is that this presumes the mindset that the thing is a static source from which differing perceptions flow. If you reconstruct this as "a thing is all of the perceptions of it, throughout its history", your perception of it becomes a fraction of an objective truth rather than a subjective perception.

What I'm trying to get at is that if you say is that if you try to describe a thing that does not interact in any way with anything, you end up with all the criteria for a nothing. So you can only describe a thing by describing the interactions with it. And all of the described interactions with it are taken from perception (which is itself interaction).

Then, after the fact, we boil this down to the simplest explanation of our mutual observation, making "objective" assumptions about each other's perceptions in order to do so. Now we have already performed this reducing process on our understanding of each other (we have the same eyes, they work the same way etc)...

...

(mind maze)

...

um, what I think I'm trying to say is that Kants argument (as paraphrased) relies on objective and subjective being a valid dichotomy, but the objective reality might be the sum of subjective realities - reality as a a network of perception rather than reality as empty space with bits of subjective perception floating round. This in some respects is a recurring theme in general relativity and quantum physics.

Sort of thing...

rubbercok3000

Wow nice reply Farren!!!!

That is really where I was headed was to argue that our perceptions in some situations are indeed seeing "things in themselves" in an objective way. Another way that would be hard to argue for but unique would be the relation of psychadelics to the human "perception" of things. Could it be possible that there are neurological pathways that could free the "filter" that Kant talks about. A way to free your caged psyche from thinking in "I" terms. I probably will not argue this but I was thinking it in class the topic of psychadelics because of the heavy emphasis Kant puts on not actually seeing analytically. It might just be possible to some day get a human to see the actual underlying "objective" free flow of energy to matter and vice versa. This would qualify as seeing things in themselves I would imagine. On the molecular level. But that would be too hard to logically put together in my Peon state of intellectual bliss.

rubbercok3000

Nice Quote!!

Farren

Thx, made it up myself

btw on the psychadelics thing (I've had a few in ma yuthe), I always had a gut feel that this is what they did, brought you closer to the raw perception by collapsing the filters. Interesting that certain Native American tribes use them in religious ceremonies to "get real".

One definite effect I've observed from LSD is that the "hallucinations" are more "reperceptions". i.e. without filters and value judgments, you see the same forms in a thousand ways. I never saw something that wasn't there, as implied by popular mythology, just what was there, differently.

Farren

On the "I" issue and psychadelics, I have to recount a story.

One night living in a hippy like commune I picked up a guitar. I've always been very left brained and not in touch with my "groove" and I'd been bashing away at it, learning chords with no sense of rythm or why it sounded so crap for over two years.

That one magical night I took LSD when everyone was asleep and played like an angel (with the few chords I knew) the whole night. I felt like I was literally "one" with the guitar. The guitar did not begin where my fingers ended. It was just this farrenguitar entity and the universe all blending together. There was no I. In fact it was more like farrenguitaruniversemusic.

What convinced me that this was not self-induced delusion was that the next night, still feeling shmoozy from the magical effect of the previous night, I played my girlfriend the song I'd written and memorized overnight (my first), and everyone (they were straight) heard and went Wow! What the Fuck! Is that you?

Suffice to say two days later I was playing like a brick hammering a fish again and couldn't get through the whole song without losing my rhythm or getting the words wrong.

I can't take LSD anymore without freaking out. Don't know why but like some guy said in the sicties: When you get the message, hang up the phone. Still, it does point to some untapped wilderness of human potential.

rubbercok3000

Wow Farren that is amazing man!!! So I am just curious as to what your beleifs are? You dont have to answer but you seem like an open minded guy like myself that doesnt mind "living outside of the intellectual box" so to speak. Like I can see that there could be truth to a lot of different philosophies/religons/etc and that possibly as time and spae change than so do the Truths!! What is true yesterday doesnt mean it is today. I really like Philosophy because it allows you just to use your reason and Kant really goes the length to define things very precisely. BTW I do perform Shamanistic rituals with psychadelics once in a blue moon because I find the intellectual/spiritual and just plain out experience itself to be more real than real. You really can see what lurks in the dark recesses of your mind. What your motivations are. Done properly it can balnce you out - like with the guitar example. I know what you mean when you said that you see things changing into all sorts of energy patterns like you really see the thing for what it is - and that being changable at every passing second.

All in all it makes you wonder what kind of stuff a guy like Kant would have said if you slipped him a tab and left him in the woods with a pad of paper and a tape recorder!!! Scary Man!!!

But back to the subject I think I will go with the whole sum of subjective equals objective things in themselves, that is a really good conclusion to build upon and makes a lot of sense because Kant basis all initial knowledge off experience and "raw" materials coming in at you.

John Page

Rubberlad:

I wish to add that the person who claims that they really know how things are is claiming a priviledged position. I would argue they are limited by their organs of perception.

The debate thus descends into whether there are absolutes (the right way up, how things really are etc.). Experience requires no a priori except the organ of experience, which in humans appears to be the brain. Thus it can be argued that no synthetic a priori is required for experience to occur.

One has to be careful of what is included in the category "synthetic", though. Does this mean the products of all brain activity or just assumptions consciously selected in a particular case?

You might find fruitful ground in arguing that delusions and illusions really occur. This approach can allow you to show some things are definitely not how they are in external reality. In turn you might conclude that such examples show knowledge has sources, its just a question of how well they can be correlated with measurable reality. This being the case, we are measuring the distortion introduced by the natural a priori state of the world.

Cheers, John

Farren

[QUOTE]Originally posted by rubbercok3000
Wow Farren that is amazing man!!! So I am just curious as to what your beleifs are? You dont have to answer but you seem like an open minded guy like myself that doesnt mind "living outside of the intellectual box" so to speak.

Your enthusiasm is infectious Sure I've live most of my life outside of the box and its had as much negatives as positives, I have to admit. I mean, the drugs thing actually fucked me up in some ways. But it opened my mind in ways I can't concieve of happening otherwise and when it was time to stop, I stopped. Well actually about four years after it was time to stop...

Yeah, I think in some ways what I've heard about Kant (I haven't read any of his stuff but he seems to be frequently quoted - btw, is it really pronounced "cunt"?) comes closest to the living philosophy I find the most appealing, namely Daoism, closely followed by the less superstitious (and in fact closer to Budda's teachings) forms of Buddism. Second place in European philosophy would be existentialists like Camus and Sartre, although I feel they concentrate on the "half-empty" rather than "half-full" cup of life.

I say living philosophy because the daoists and buddists have extended these principles of thought from the realm of pure philosophy to an actual system of life. The practice of Chi Gung (internal energy exercises) I'm learning from a Kung Fu practitioner at the mo' is heavily impregnated with Daoist principles.

The Buddhism I've been exposed to also seeks a state of complete flowing harmony with all the energy around you, expressed as "enlightenment". People often seem to misinterpret this as some kind of religious, mystical state, but in fact it relies entirely on painstaking attention to your sensory perception of the world and yourself, preferably with as few filters as possible.

In the Chi Gung practices we've been doing, for instance, we take an hour focusing on five organs, one at a time, while breathing deeply and slowly and standing or sitting comfortably. As you think of each organ you have to visualise its actual spatial position in your body, associate a color and an element with it, such as red and fire for your heart. Then you imagine, for instance, each breath making the fire in your heart burn brighter, and your heart smiling at you.

This sounds like mystical claptrap to the more cynical, but in fact its purpose is quite rational. Like the mnemonics used to improve memory for study, hitching each organ to mnemonic while focusing on it provides a mental "handle" that allows you to readily access that awareness again, and the focus makes you aware of your heart in a non-abstract "feeling" way.

The idea behind Chi Gung is that eventually you start to "feel" the condition of your heart, your stomach, your liver and so on more directly rather than relegating them to unconscious control. Once you have this automatic conscious feedback happening all the time, you are able to feel if a shift in posture, a change in breathing or other subtle activities improve or deplete their condition.

The eventual aim is to reach a point where you respond individually to each part of your body as you would to someone you loved, optimising the metabolic flow of energy and reaching a state of internal harmony, from which external harmony flows naturally.

Interesting that psychedelics have featured so strongly in our discussion, because Native South and Central Americans use peyote and other substances in "religious" ceremonies. I recently read a book (which I think you'll enjoy) by Martin Pretchel called "Secrets of the Talking Jaguar. He's a US-educated Mayan shaman (for the last 30 years).

One of the lessons he recounts is the awareness training he had to do over and over. His mentor would tell him to go find a spot in the jungle and, stretching his arm as far as he could from where he sat, draw a circle round himself in the soil/undergrowth. For the rest of the day he could then not look at or think about anything outside of the circle.

This forced him to really examine every blade of grass, every passing insect, every petal on every flower in a way that people don't ordinarily appreciate nature. A fascinating exercise, I thought.

Be warned, while beautifully written, the Mayan belief system is not pared down and economically elegant like Daoist (Taoist) writings. His story is full of poetic anthropic Gods and plains of existence. My own beliefs incline me to seeing these as fairy tales. Poetic and lovely fairy tales though. That said, the underlying implications of his shamanistic belief system are harmonic with the compassionate and perception oriented system of thought I find appealing.

From what you've posted, I can't help thinking you'll enjoy this book