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Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a good summary of Kant. For full context it's good to get a picture of the philosophical movement around him during his era which was attacking rationalism and promoting a sort of extereme form of empiricism.

(Ie science and the visible world being all that exist, and rational concepts like numbers or math is just an extrapolation from the material world.)

Kant sort of puts that idea to rest somewhat (although it remained popular well into the 20th century).

But the way he did so was unsettling. The conclusion we are left with after reading this is there is a sort of human perspective that shapes our understanding of reality and there is an underlying reality apart from that which we can never know.

I don't like it, I think when Einstein or Newton make statements they are making statements about reality and not just sense impressions. I don't like the idea that reality is something foreign and unknowable to humans.

Maybe time isn't real in the way we perceive it but I don't think the underlying nature of time is something undiscoverable.

What's my reasoning. I don't know I just don't like the idea I guess. Plus I don't think the attack on rationalism and reason was as warranted as it may have seemed to Kant in his time.

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> I think when Einstein or Newton make statements they are making statements about reality and not just sense impressions.

Einstein in particular made huge strides by thinking in terms of sense impressions, e.g. by using his imagination to take on the perspective of an observer falling off a roof:

> I got the happiest thought of my life in the following form:…for an observer in free-fall from the roof of a house there is…no gravitational field. Namely, if the observer lets go of any bodies, they remain relative to him, in a state of rest or uniform motion, independent of their special chemical or physical nature. The observer, therefore, is justified in interpreting his state as being "at rest."

The emphasis on sense impressions over an appeal to an external reality is something he owes to Mach: https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/church-of-reality-ernst-mach-...

On the other hand, Einstein's goal in the second of his annus mirabilis papers (the one explaining Brownian motion) "was precisely to prove the reality of atoms", in the face of the then famous skepticism of thinkers like Mach.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/

Einstein had a very thoughftul and sophisticated take on the philosophy of science, and had thoroughly read the works of a great many philosophers and scientists. His introduction to an essay he wrote for the centenary of Maxwell's birth is another fantastic snippet:

> The belief in an external world independent of the observing subject lies at the foundation of all natural science. However, since sense-perceptions only inform us about this external world, or physical reality, indirectly, it is only in a speculative way that it can be grasped by us. Consequently our conceptions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these conceptions, i.e. the axiomatic basis of physics, in order to do justice to the facts of observation in the most complete way that is logically possible. In actual fact, a glance at the development of physics shows that this axiomatic basis has met with radical changes from time to time.

https://d-meeus.be/physique/Maxwell-Einstein-en.html

It's a little disappointing that his best known quotation is the out-of-context "God does not play dice".

You know that how you experience the world is not the world as it is.

Your eyes move about constantly but you dont see it, and the brain removes things, and the brain adds things, you smell, you listen, you feel, you end up with a construct you perceive, that you know is inaccurate.

You will only ever know the inside of your own head, your own consciousness.

To the extent that everything could be all inside your head, everything.

Some people like to think about this world being a simulation being run by some sort of beings for fun. They could again be simulations, recursively, until perhaps there could be a non-simulation at the top.

and it might be that the "simulation" they are running is only calculating and modelling a single brain and they plant things inside of it.

From that perspective nothing that you will ever perceive is real.

This is not profound, it is only solipsism.

Things exist outside your experience. Things exist outside my experience. The only way to get to the perspective you describe is to discard or devalue the experience of everyone else.

If you encounter a large carnivore in the wild and it knocks you out, the animal doesn’t disappear.

To seriously hold that all of what you have known was created for your experience is an extreme exercise of narcissism that enables some fairly incredible behaviors. But it is not closer to truth.

I mean, saying firmly that other things exist doesn't make it true. Solipsism may be disliked but not disproven.

Solipsism is a concept insofar as we can define it, and even talk about it, in a way that is not obviously nonsensical, and is arguably useful in discussing epistemology, but it is not obvious that a rational person could be a solipsist in the sense of holding a justified belief that the (i.e. their) self is the only reality. I suspect that any such person attempting to justify that belief (to themselves, of course - who else?) would run into inconsistencies whenever they tried to define concepts such as the self, justification and reality in ways that are not tautological.

What inconsistencies would you encounter? It would seem that a solipsistic view is trivially consistent. Any phenomenon you experience has a simple explanation : that's how it was designed for you. Conversely, a non-solipsistic view demands explanations for an unimaginable plethora of phenomena. Everything you observe from the subatomic to the cosmological to people eating Tide Pods has aspects that are difficult to explain.

I'm not convinced that there are unavoidable inconsistencies, but I suggested it would be difficult for a rational solipsist to define concepts such as the self, justification and reality (all of which are concepts needed in order to take any position on solipsism), and I don't see how saying "it's just how it was designed for me" gets the job done; in fact, this introduces another concept, design, in need of definition. If you could present a more worked-out example of how a rational solipsist would define the concept of reality without, at any point, adopting a non-solipsist stance (such as using the concept of design), I might be more convinced.

Furthermore, a rational solipist does not avoid any of the questions faced by non-solipsists: wherever the latter asks "why is it that... and not something else?", the rational solipsist has the question "why does it seem that... and not something else?" Saying "it was designed that way" is no more of an explanation than "it is that way", and the rational solipsist will realize that this is so.

Perhaps you are thinking of brains-in-vats or simulations in their own simulated universe? If such an entity supposed that it was a brain-in-a-vat or a simulation, however, it would not be a rational solipsist, as these hypotheses presume a reality beyond their experiences (in any such case, of course, the non-solipsist brain-in-a-vat or simulation would be mistaken about what reality lies beyond its experiences, but nevertheless, there would be such a reality.)

There are different forms, but isn't the main one just that you can only prove the existence of your own mind? If there is a reality beyond your senses that you cannot interact with, does it matter to you?

A brain in a vat hallucinating a universe, is the same thing as just hallucinating a universe with no further reality, is the same thing as being in a particularly vivid dream, is the same a being a simulation.

The idea that a brain must exist somewhere in a vat to present this reality to you, came from your mind. If some of the rules of your reality are entirely disconnected with your senses, why not all?

When you say there are different forms, I think you mean different forms of solipsism. If that is what you meant, then I think this discussion is circling back to my original post, in this sense: you are demonstrating that one can have a rational discussion about it. What I am not so convinced about, however, is whether one could rationally be a solipsist - to really (that word again!) believe that (to pick one particular definition for concreteness) the self is the only reality.

In this regard, the inability to disprove solipsism is not sufficient to be a justification for believing it; if it were, the mirror argument would equally justify not-solipsism, and so a rational person should regard both arguments as inconclusive.

I only mentioned brains-in-vats and simulations because I wondered whether mypalmike had them in mind, and only to say that I don't think it matters whether or not the putative solipsist is either of these things.

Rather than continue in this vein, I will point you to an article which concludes with the section "The Incoherence of Solipsism":

One might even say, solipsism is necessarily foundationless, for to make an appeal to logical rules or empirical evidence the solipsist would implicitly have to affirm the very thing that he purportedly refuses to believe: the reality of intersubjectively valid criteria and a public, extra-mental world. There is a temptation to say that solipsism is a false philosophical theory, but this is not quite strong or accurate enough. As a theory, it is incoherent. What makes it incoherent, above all else, is that the solipsist requires a language (that is, a sign-system) to think or to affirm his solipsistic thoughts at all.

https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/

> It would seem that a solipsistic view is trivially consistent. Any phenomenon you experience has a simple explanation : that's how it was designed for you.

Designed for you by whom? And when? That is the problem.

If I find the remains of another person who has been killed and eaten by an animal, should I assume that this can never happen to me because this world was created for me and this person was only a simulation? Because if all that exists is what I know then that would be pretty logical. I’ve never been eaten by an animal and I am the only one in here.

That is the big question, isn't it? We don't know enough about time to say. It is as philosophically plausible as any other idea that any particular thread of consciousness wends on infinitely in its own personal timeline, watching everything else decay and disappear until it is the last thing left. It is so implausible that the universe even exists for our statistical impossibility of self to have happened, it would be a bit of a chuckle if there was a third impossibility in the future.

It seems a bit odd that we exist at all though, doesn't it? Surely the natural state, or the starting state, would be to have nothing, no time and no space. But then, how would anything ever happen?

But given that we exist, then perhaps things have always existed, before the apparent beginning of the universe that we can apparently observe? But if things have existed for so long, why are we in such a state of ignorance and imperfection? Surely given all this infinite time, something better would have been created by now?

But consciousness doesn't seem to be a "thing" with a physical presence in the real universe. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. Like a web browser running on a computer. Go to sleep and the web browser shuts down, wake up the next day and a new one is instantiated. Then there's no continuity of consciousness, it only lasts for a few hours, and we can return to wondering why I feel like I exist in a here and now, one moment in a possibly infinite timeline.

> It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way.

People need to be more careful about that word "useful". Saying something is useful, is always implying a who it is useful for. Saying it's useful, but it's not useful for anyone, is as meaningless as saying something is useful, but it's not useful for anything.

(This was, as I recall, one of Kant's "categories of reason").

So by saying the brain creates something for a purpose, you're already assuming that the brain is a thing, and it's a thing that wants things. I'm not saying that's wrong, but given how hard it seems to not make circular arguments with it, maybe it isn't actually an empirical question.

Useful from the point of view of helping an animal satisfy its needs, so allowed to survive by natural selection? Perhaps it's just a inevitable by-product of certain types of thought.

That's assuming an animal is a thing that wants things. Again, not unreasonable, but also not actually an empirical statement, when you look critically at it. You're just pushing the teleology up a level.

At some level it's just trying to survive because trying to survive is what helped all its ancestors to actually survive. It doesn't even need to be expressed as a "want", since plants are doing the same thing without a nervous system, going through a sequence of actions programmed in DNA and expressed in a chain of extremely complex biochemical reactions.

The way I am reading this comment chain — you will never be able to prove whether there is a reality outside of your own. The logic and whether solipsism is socially acceptable does not really matter in this context.

I don’t buy into that idea, but any question about consciousness that will never be answered during my lifetime is always something fun to dabble with.

Yes, you can in fact assume that you will never die, in a very narrow sense. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good assumption, but by the time you could have an empirical experience proving you wrong, well you wouldn't have that experience because you would be dead. This illustrates that this question - only in this very narrow sense - is not an empirical question.

It was in fact one of Kant's three "necessary postulates". He asserted that the question of subjective death was not empirical, and thus impossible to know or even gain confidence about one way or another, but he thought it was (for other reasons, related to his moral theory) necessary to assume that you would not subjectively die.

Whether it's possible for this body you currently seem to be experiencing the world through to be ripped apart by a wild animal, though, that IS a highly empirical question.

It’s only not an empirical question if you presume solipsism. If I presume we are all in here together then it is empirical, and then we can continue.

If empirical is defined as applying only to a thing an individual can assess then science cannot function.

It may be extremely narcissistic, but there is no way for you to prove nor disprove it. That is, in very broad strokes, also the point Kant makes.

Not everything that I can't disprove should be taken seriously.

Why so negative?

Why do you perceive that as negative? To me, it's freeing. Great, someone created some philosophical position that is not provably wrong. That doesn't mean that I have to take it seriously.

It was a joke. Your sentence was hard to read because it had 3 negatives in it:

> [Not] everything that I [can't] [disprove] should be taken seriously.

Ah, I see. Well, in that case, I was negative because I couldn't think how to phrase it better in the positive (or with only one negative).

I tried to come up with a good story, and was then going to say "you can't prove it wrong ;-)", but my imagination failed me...

It hasn’t been disproven. That doesn’t mean it can’t.

It's quite difficult to imagine an experiment that would disprove that the experimenter's experiences are intended solely for them.

It is difficult to imagine an experiment even providing evidence, let alone proof, either way. Language gives us the ability to ask questions which cannot be answered.

It seems it could be trivially disproven functionally. Putting aside ethics we could assign a population to go around behaving as though everything exists for their own experience and see how well that population propagates.

> To seriously hold that all of what you have known was created for your experience

I don't think there's a solpsistic component to the idea that we have our own subjective realities. For one thing, it's about as true as we seem to be able to tell. For another, accepting it doesn't mean we have to be self-centered. Even our experiences of other people aren't objective; someone giving a speech can give very different vibes depending on who's listening. I read what you wrote, but do I really understand what you mean? In this case I have a pretty good idea, but there's no way I can be certain that we're on the same page. Our consciousnesses, our intelligences, are separate. We aren't in some hive mind; we are self-contained agents that interact with each other and gain our own experiences.

You don’t seem to have taken the time to understand my comment. I acknowledged subjective realities earlier in my statement. You are arguing a strawman.

The solipsism is the second half of parent’s comment where they state that everything exists only within their reality. Subjectivities are subsets of our existence. Arguing that an entire universe exists for one human awareness is solipsism.

GP and I aren't talking about subjective realities merely on the level of "this is my perspective of this person and that thing". Insofar as you or I could be said to be conscious, to perceive the world and to think about it, that is the extent of our respective subjective realities. It's not that the universe exists for every single human. Rather, as humans, we each perceive the universe, and others, in the ways that we do. We could be in the Matrix right now. The nature of a subjective reality is that, in a sense, there is no difference to us whether we are "real" or in the Matrix. What we perceive is what we perceive. How useful this model is is a different matter, but it's not solipsistic.

I understand the conversation you’re having.

Here is the definition of solipsism: Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ ⓘ SOLL-ip-siz-əm; from Latin solus 'alone', and ipse 'self')[1] is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.

Ah, I guess I didn't have the right definition of solipsism in my head. I was thinking of the psychological meaning and not the epistemological one (which I forgot existed), although in my defense, my view isn't incompatible with your reasoning. I do align with the epistemological definition, but I don't see how that means I can't reason about what appear to be other beings. I can't know their true natures (certainly not their minds), but then, people act on incomplete information all the time.

I don’t understand how you can say you think everything is your own mind and yet you can’t know it. Why not?

One reason why not would be for some necessary avoidance of disclosure to you, which would have had to have been architected by something that is not you, otherwise you would have known about the thing you couldn’t disclose. If something exists that is not you, then solipsism fails.

> I don’t understand how you can say you think everything is your own mind and yet you can’t know it.

I'm not saying everything is made up in my mind like some sci-fi movie plot. I'm saying that we're confined to the limits of our perception and beliefs in a very real way. Maybe it's all in my mind, but that's somewhat different.

How about this: people's memories have been shown to be somewhat malleable. Framing a question with subtly different wording or prompting with an intentional nudge (police officers do this) can warp the witness' perception. There may well be some objective truth about the incident and maybe someone knows it, but for that witness, their world has diverged.

In the extreme case, someone who is very deluded can't process the truth that the rest of us can see. But do we really see the truth, or is it that we brand what we each see as the truth? Maybe the deluded person is right. Even assuming you are your own person entirely, I don't seem to be able to connect with your world with absolute clarity. Maybe technology can change that. If you are a figment of my imagination, well, I can't tell.

These are a few very different things you are relating.

As you’ve said, perception has been demonstrated to be subjective, even controllable by others. There are layers of this including individual (introspection and observation) and collective (cultural relativism, emic and etic perspectives), etc. I agree this is something that is very helpful to understand.

Truth, likewise, is a murkier concept than many people realize or want to think about, and the relative contexts literally determine what is true and not. I also agree this is helpful to understand.

Your last sentence is the only problematic bit. In a limited effort, it is easy to casually say that you can’t prove anything beyond your own perception. But this statement is much less likely to be functionally true (and things like evolution only act on function). This statement, taken seriously, and extended, unlike everything you’ve said prior, can be very damaging, because it presumes not only are we each different, but that you are the only real one, and thus your own perspective is literally the only one that matters. It isn’t hard to see why this is not a good perspective to hold in the large majority of cases.

> This statement, taken seriously, and extended, unlike everything you’ve said prior, can be very damaging, because it presumes not only are we each different, but that you are the only real one, and thus your own perspective is literally the only one that matters. It isn’t hard to see why this is not a good perspective to hold in the large majority of cases.

I don't believe only my perspective matters, and I don't think anyone should. I use the term "subjective reality" so heavily because it is scoped to each person and it is their reality. I can't truly know if everything is in my head. That also means that, for things I perceive as not in my head, they are functionally external to myself. The fact that I have these boundaries of whether I genuinely and completely think something is in my head prevents my subsumption of other perspectives as my own. In this HN thread, I have no choice but to engage you as one human to another, because if I've already thought out your responses and this is just a dream of sorts, I can't tell.

There is no difference between your reasoning and religiousness. You cannot prove it either. That “could” in parent comment is a very important part of what they said.

There is a difference. With reasoning, you can predict future, to a degree. If I see a brick falling on me, I know I will feel pain in a few moments. This helps me to live a long and healthy life by avoiding falling bricks.

Religion is, by design, unverifiable. It can't be used to predict the future. If it were, its predictions would be easy to check, which is not allowed. So all religious teachings evolved to avoid making any hard predictions about the future. The Messiah WILL come - but nobody will tell you the date. You WILL go to Heaven if you behave - but nobody came back to report.

That’s the thing - you can’t predict the future 100% of the time. What if we float into a dark matter cloud tomorrow and it reverses gravity and we all fly off into space, bricks and all? Reasoning is great but we shouldn’t forget the faith element of induction

The approach of the dark matter cloud would be seen in perturbations of orbits and its effects predicted long before they occur.

Consider --- if you use traditional physics to completely calculate the orbit of all the planets around the solar system, everything falls out pretty much perfectly --- except for the orbit of Mercury --- it is elliptical and gradually rotates around the sun:

- ~5,030 arc seconds of this rotation are from the gravity of the sun

- ~530 arc seconds from the other planets

- ~43 arc seconds cannot be accounted for by the classic laws of physics, but are perfectly explained by general relativity

> Religion is, by design, unverifiable. It can't be used to predict the future.

Chapter 1 of the Tao te Ching has a long track record of quite accurately (not the best word?) but very vaguely predicts future human behavior: constant ignorance of the truth contained within the scripture, the consequences of which we continue to suffer.

While you are right, there is a reason why I used the way more constrained “your reasoning”, than “reasoning”.

It might also be "idealism". Perhaps that is less narcissistic, but even so, an undesired trait in society cannot be a good argument against a metaphysical theory, don't you think?

If the society exists and persists and is incompatible with said metaphysical theory, I think it is a great argument against it.

> The only way to get to the perspective you describe is to discard or devalue the experience of everyone else.

Technically incorrect. Standard abstraction, decomposition, ontology, etc can achieve it as well, sometimes even without people getting their feelings hurt.

> To seriously hold that all of what you have known was created for your experience is an extreme exercise of narcissism that enables some fairly incredible behaviors. But it is not closer to truth.

As a self-diagnosed narcissist, this seems more like delusion or normative cognition (on your behalf).

Narcissism is very useful for certain forms of analysis though.

How is it technically incorrect to say that solipsism discards or devalues the perspectives of everyone else? You think your mind is capable of containing billions of identical sole-minds? Discarding is discarding. If that triggers affect for you or you read affect from me that’s down to your comprehension.

How do you explain forms of socially facilitated learning if your mind is the only thing that exists?

> How is it technically incorrect to say that solipsism discards or devalues the perspectives of everyone else?

The burden of proof is yours, not mine.

> How do you explain forms of socially facilitated learning if your mind is the only thing that exists?

I don't because I'm not a solipsist, but I see no reason why that couldn't be imagined. If anything, most people have a problem with not imagining reality.

> The burden of proof is yours , not mine.

That’s not how this works — you have to say that before you say it’s incorrect otherwise it becomes your burden. But I’ll answer anyway.

If I am the one mind, then how could anyone make an argument that any other mind (which must only be an apparent mind, created in some way to serve my experience) could be my equivalent?

The truth of my statement is inherent in the structure of solipsism.

You made a claim of fact, thus inheriting a burden of proof (or so "they" say).

> The truth of my statement is inherent in the structure of solipsism.

For efficiency: are you describing map or territory?

I don’t think I get a map and territory with solipsism. It is all my mind, or it isn’t.

If I introduce map and territory with any integrity to the terms now there must be an ontological truth that I can’t access but must have an idea of. If I have an idea of it then it means I am assessing something else. But we are talking about a monolithic reality. The map is the territory in solipsism.

Aren’t you contradicting yourself? “You know your brain adds things that are inaccurate” followed immediately by “you will only ever know the inside of your own head.”

Clearly we can use reason to learn things about the inaccuracies of our sensory perception.

How could we learn the inaccuracies of our sense perceptions without involving those very same (flawed) perceptions? I totally agree that it is our duty to identify and account for our biases and inaccuracies, but I don’t think we could ever reach any meaningful certainty about the topic.

We’re always using perception, of course, but we can learn about inaccuracies in one perception using a different perception (and reason). A very obvious example is optical illusions, but this is in fact the case with all observations. To make scientific conclusions from observations made using a telescope, you need to know how the telescope works. And the same is true of all observations from all instruments, including for example the human visual system.

> How could we learn the inaccuracies of our sense perceptions without involving those very same (flawed) perceptions?

By taking measurements from machines, who are devoid of such flaws.

> I totally agree that it is our duty to identify and account for our biases and inaccuracies, but I don’t think we could ever reach any meaningful certainty about the topic.

What in the world? That's literally what science has been attempting to do for over 1000 years. With varying degrees of success, true, but it's the best way we have so far to be able to approximate 'reality' without relying on our senses.

> By taking measurements from machines, who are devoid of such flaws.

Kinda. We still need to know how the machine works, which of course involves making observations of the machine which are themselves error-prone.

I think you've nailed what I'm trying to say, based on your incredulity; I too love science and think that the quest for certain beliefs is a massive boon to human happiness and purpose. I just think it's important to remember that perfect certainty can never be reached - kinda asymptotic in that way. It might seem pedantic, but I think it's an helpful core belief/perspective for any effective and creative scientist. A little humility never hurts!

Re:machines; machines might be better engineered and tested, but they're never perfect - they could be broken, or (much more commonly) they could be designed to measure the wrong thing, in other words using their measurements to justify invalid conclusions. That's what the writing above is getting at and I'm mangling it a bit, but I hope you see my perspective on why I would never say I'm "100%" certain that any scientific fact is true.

But the hidden assumption here is that somehow our perceptions don’t generalise to the actual goings on in the universe, when they clearly do. Our perceptions seem extremely well correlated with reality, and even when this isn’t the case for someone psychotic, the rest of us perceive that perfectly normally. I’m agnostic and obviously can’t make any statements about where things came from or why, but I’m entirely confident that I perceive my lot in life accurately enough that I don’t need any philosophical angst about it.

“ But the hidden assumption here is that somehow our perceptions don’t generalise to the actual goings on in the universe, when they clearly do.”

I think there are enough posts on this subject thread to make me think that this is not clear to everyone. It’s not clear to me either.

I feel bad for everyone who's regularly walking into invisible walls and waking up as a giant insect, I guess.

I suppose there is conceptual room in the gap between things that don't internally make consistent sense to a person, and the actual rules of the true universe.

With language this loose and ambiguous, is it even possible to "be" incorrect?

An amazing percentage of human conversation is like this, including discussions between genuine (on a relative basis, which is how our culture "measures" such things) rational and scientific people.

> You know that how you experience the world is not the world as it is. Your eyes move about constantly but you dont see it

This is a different kind of "the world as it is" vs. "the world as you experience it" difference, as I understand Kant: You can always make more sophisticated interpretations of your direct experiences that accounts for such things as visual or even temporal illusions, but there are things you can never know for sure - for instance, whether time is your consciousness moving through a series of immutable states, like frames on a film reel, or whether it's the reel that is moving.

We are constrained from the basic structure of our reasoning from finding answers to such questions. That is very different from illusions we can correct for through better physics theories.

> there is an underlying reality apart from that which we can never know.

I'm surprised this is so unsettling for many. I feel like this life beats intellectual humility into anyone smart enough to notice it pretty much nonstop from the age of reason.

> I think when [...] Newton make statements they are making statements about reality and not just sense impressions.

That's not what Newton thought. Hypothesis non fingo[1].

> Maybe time isn't real in the way we perceive it but I don't think the underlying nature of time is something undiscoverable.

Time is an extension through something, but through what?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo

> Maybe time isn't real in the way we perceive it but I don't think the underlying nature of time is something undiscoverable.

My take is: humans are just another living thing. Most (all?) living things don’t know everything about the underlaying “reality“ (e.g., my dog doesn’t know about electromagnetism). Hence, most likely, humans cannot be sure that what they know IS the underlaying reality (unless, of course, we think we are somehow special).

We seem to be special: we are the only (so far) known species having complex speech as well as ability to convey our thoughts to others, capability to build tools, and abstract thinking.

This is an interesting way of thinking about it, but I’ll note: Kant absolutely believes that humans are special. His moral philosophy is grounded in the concept of a self-legislating agent, which in turn is more or less coextensive with a human being. Self-legislating agents are, in Kant’s view, the only type of thing that moral “oughts” impinge on.

(That doesn’t mean he’s right, but I think it’s worthwhile to point out in an exegetical context.)

We have models that attempt to describe the basic components of reality.

So far, those models seem to work reasonably well, but we don't really know how far they are from actual reality.

We have become used to science explaining the universe in ever increasing detail. The expectation that it will continue to do so indefinitely, or that eventually we will reach some sort of "final answer", is more a wish than a certainty.

Maybe we will just arrive at a point where we can't go any further and a million questions remain forever unanswered.

The universe doesn't care about our narratives.

> humans cannot be sure that what they know IS the underlaying reality

We can define the 'underlying reality" as the intersection of all people's beliefs, and what weight we give to each such belief.

I don't know what it means to say something "is the underlying reality" or not. But we can give a definition to the term "underlying reality" and then talk about it.

Here is my thought that helped me intuit it.

Every image is taken from a specific point. Every image that you ever see, every image that will be, is all taken from a specific point. There is currently no image that is taken *not* from a specific point. Even 3d images.

The question of the thing in itself is like asking, "How would this pencil look like if not seen from a specific point? There should be some way to answer this, after all, why would a description of something needs something else in its specification?"

But then you start to realize how utterly impossible it is to imagine how something truly looks, when its not viewed from any specific point.

Cause we just never ever seen such an object ( a true image ).

> there is a sort of human perspective that shapes our understanding of reality and there is an underlying reality apart from that which we can never know.

This is quite the religious notion if you think about it.

Just because religion also says something doesn't make it a religious notion

I think they’re saying it’s religious in the sense that it’s definitionally unknowable.

We know that everything we ever experience is something generated by our own brain (approximately).

We assume that our brain is generating our experience based on some sort of external reality, but that thing we can only assume exists because we’ll never be able to step outside our brain to experience it.

Kant goes so extensively about this that it's not even funny to have to mention it on an HN thread. No the blogpost doesn't cover it in the same way it being like 3000% or more condensed than even a single one of his books and I don't think it's necessary considering metaphysics itself is "quite the religious notion".

Yeah think about it

Yes, Kant explicitly says "I found it necessary to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith." Maybe I'm mistaken here, or giving him too much credit, but I never quite took him at his literal word here, as if he were saying "I set out to defend faith and realized that to do so, I'd have to limit knowledge" -- rather I take the Critique of Pure Reason to be primarily a project of laying an epistemological groundwork for the kind of knowledge embodied in Newton's Principia (that and arguing with Hume).

> "there is an underlying reality apart from that which we can never know"

If you find this interesting, I'd very highly recommend reading Hegel. In my mind, he expands upon Kant to a new level. With Hegel, there isn't a world "out there, out of human reach". Rather, reality is always shaped by interactions of my impressions. There is no "real rock" that I am barred from experiencing in itself. There is no essence behind the form.

"Essence accordingly is not something beyond or behind appearance, but — just because it is the essence which exists — the existence is Appearance (Forth-shining). [...] Essence is the Concept as posited Concept. In Essence the determinations are only relational, not yet as reflected strictly within themselves; that is why the Concept is not yet for-itself. Essence– as Being that mediates itself with itself through its own negativity [relation to otherness]– is relation to itself only by being relation to another" https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/hegels-conce...

Since you bring up Einstein, it's worth noting that he felt like he had disproved Kant, yet he claimed to be hugely influenced by Hume, an alleged empiricist (whom Kant even explicitly called out), though Hume's "empiricism" is largely misunderstood. He overtly understood that we don't directly perceive the real world, for instance, as have many philosophers since and including Plato.

Maybe you would find it less unsettling - and I believe you would be better understanding Kant's ideas - if, instead of thinking about it as "an underlying reality ... which we can never know", you think of it as "something (or nothing!) underlying reality ... which we can never know". So, yes, Einstein and Newton made statements about reality. And, yes, all of reality is (theoretically) knowable to humans (including the nature of time). But maybe there's something beyond reality itself? (Or maybe not!) Newton proved that we can understand gravity. Einstein proved that we can understand electrodynamics. Kant proved that we cannot understand god(s) (including whether or not god(s) exist(s)), because god(s) is by definition beyond reality, beyond space / time, beyond the observable universe.

I don't mind this notion in the sense of 'our sensory instruments can never/we can never know if they truly reflect reality', but the platonic/neoplatonic version where there's an idealised real world everything we see is a poor imitation of always bugged me

Electrons, quarks, gluons and muons are more probability fields than they are objects. Their mass is more of a fluidic slurry storm than actual matter.

Our world may be knowable but only within sloppy boundaries.

I don’t just find it unsettling or just an idea I don’t like - I hate this idea.

Why? Because it actually renders everything, anywhere, ultimately arbitrary.

Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the anti-vaxxer?

Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the pedophile?

Can you say there isn’t an underlying truth in the perspective of the flat earther?

According to Kant… well, you can’t completely. The logical consequences of this, if fully realized, would annihilate society.

It would seem in Kant’s view that Nobody, ultimately, has any right to pronounce objective truths on anything. Not even basic ones like “you shouldn’t kill the innocent.” That’s just a reflection of your own personal reality that has no inherent value over someone else’s reality.

Anti-vaxxer is an extremely ill-defined label that you apply to people because you judge them.

Then you seem to think that everyone else should accept and agree with your judgement.

Because if people do not agree with your judgement, then everything is ultimately arbitrary and if fully realized, would annihilate society.

Now I can tell you that I do not care about how you judge a person. I will make up my own mind. So there you are, by your own definition society is annihilated.

Yet here we still are.

[You picked some bad examples on which to argue your point. You should though spend time to figure out good examples]

I’m picking examples that I believe will resonate with most people on this forum, simply because all of them tend to get the most vitriol. My personal views are a bit different.

My point remains though that if Kant is correct, the moral high ground most people here feel over these groups is quite thin.

Kant famously "derived from basic moral principles" that it's acceptable to kill unwanted newborns provided they are born out of wedlock. Make of that what you will...

Edit: Polemics aside, I looked it up and of course people don't agree if Kant really meant it that way. https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2021-0034

It's pretty clear he never said it was "acceptable." He waffles on whether it should be punishable by death and decides in the end that it must be, but, as one might say today, "that it's pretty fucked up."

The reason is that having an illegitimate child in the eighteenth century was a source of dishonor that would see you effectively rejected from society. So out-of-wedlock mothers were in an impossible situation: kill the child or have their own lives destroyed.

See this article https://www.jstor.org/stable/20484950, which quotes Frederick the Great, among others, who pointed out this same quandry:

> A girl, only too easily fooled by the presence of a seducer, does she not find herself compelled by the very force of circumstances to choose between the loss of her honor and the elimination of the unhappy fruit that she has conceived? Is it not the fault of the laws to place a girl in such a desperate situation?

Everything is arbitrary. What's even more arbitrary than descriptive truths are moral truths - like - don't kill the innocent. The sooner we reconcile our differences and realize that society is only possible through tethered connections biologically programmed into us, the better we will all be. The alternative is groups of people feuding over "moral truths" that are IMPOSSIBLE to reconcile because "moral truths" are inaccessible.

What an underdeveloped perspective. You would constrain humanity to the biology that birthed it. By your reasoning we ought to crawl back into our mothers because that is where we are meant to be.

First off, the logical conclusion of my statement is that we should procreate.

Second, calling biology constraining is a gross underestimation of our complex normative system which gives birth to the best and worst of humanity.

You opened with “everything is arbitrary” and now the only thing you’ve said isn’t is that we should procreate?

> The sooner we reconcile our differences and realize that society is only possible through tethered connections biologically programmed into us, the better we will all be. The alternative is groups of people feuding over "moral truths" that are IMPOSSIBLE to reconcile because "moral truths" are inaccessible.

Moral truths are not impossible to reconcile and they are not inaccessible. You just aren’t yet equipped with the discernment to distinguish between accurate ones and arbitrary ones.

Biology is constraining when you rely on it to dictate the path forward.

We will cease to be "humans" as we are now. It's weird to talk about consciousness as a being who is conscious but can't explain how, but the fact that I have the capacity and disposition for moral deliberation drives me to pursue morality. Perhaps it's because of an emergent biological state, or a supernatural soul, or something else, but regardless it's a core part of who I am. I recognize the moral relativism pitfall, but I don't think that means we should ignore morality either. I have beliefs on at least core moral principles that should be upheld, if nothing else. I couldn't tell you why I do, but I do. That's enough for me to keep going.

I think you can still have morals - I'm just saying that your morality is a product of you personally interacting with the world. There's no fountain of moral knowledge that we collectively drink from. So.. don't be surprised when your morals diverge from another person.

Oh, I think I understand what you mean. Still, I don't think we can reconcile our differences if we can't agree on and enact some morals as law. We agree that there's no objective morality we can discover, but acknowledging that doesn't solve the very real moral conflicts.

The biggest value for me is that it helped me breakdown my moral positions so I figured out what I truly cared about. I had previously held many culturally influenced moral positions which I found little to no grounding when seriously considered.

"Objective morals" are extremely religious, culty, hivemind-like because they are passed on as matter-of-fact truths that don't need to be examined, regardless of whether it comes from a region or your favorite insta influencer. They get repeated as mantras by many who cant back up their beliefs.

> hy? Because it actually renders everything, anywhere, ultimately arbitrary

They are arbitrary though. You don’t like it because it forces you to admit everything you consider objective about the universe is little more than your cultural meta narrative.

Are you alive and breathing right now?

It’s arbitrary, so I say you aren’t.

Whether I am breathing or not really is arbitrary to you, until our realities interact. Now that you're reading this you've suddenly lost the option of saying I'm not in the model of the world your brain has formed.

However exactly what I am in your own mind, that's not for me to say. At least, that's what your mind is saying.

I didn't read the article yet but I did make a valiant attempt through actual Kant on a trip through Uruguay and Argentina a few years ago...

My understanding is that Kant "simply" says that you cannot rely on yourself to know something objectively. That there's a limitation to perception and ... reason. Would you ask a cat what is right on the topics of vax, shape of earth, etc? No, because you know they are limited. Well, according to evolution we're just a bit more evolved but still have no claim to objectivity.

But that doesn't take away from morality. One way to look at religion is - it begins from the Kantian view that you can't just work out everything logically. That there's some great unknown and unknowable that is beyond you. And then enables you to engage with it in that world.

That's why religion anchors morality in "G-d said" because man certainly has no grounds to say "I've figured this out and it's right"

This interpretation is, roughly speaking, the polar opposite of Kant’s moral philosophy. He has very precise, concrete, views on right and wrong, views that he is able to persuasively substantiate because he starts from such a basic, skeptical position.

Put another way: Kant’s observation about the basic unknowability of things in themselves doesn’t somehow imply that we have to throw up our hands and accept moral relativity. The bulk of his moral philosophy is dedicated to explaining the necessary connection between our phenomenological existence and our moral duties.

The parent comment glosses Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena as between perceived reality and "underlying reality", and while that is a common way of putting it, I think it's not quite accurate, and leads to this kind of interpretation gone astray.

What Kant is saying is basically that categories like cause, and concepts like substance, are fundamentally bound up with the structure of our mind. We cannot "get outside" our own minds to know anything else, but there must be something beyond our perceptions, which Kant variously calls noumena, things-in-themselves, or transcendental object=X (there are minor differences between these notions that I cannot recall). Here IIRC his language kind of unfortunately but necessarily breaks down into metaphor. He can't quite say that the noumena are the source of phenomena since that would imply a causal relationship, and he's just argued that cause is a structure of the human mind.

Considering the "perspectives" you mention, e.g. that of the flat earther - a perspective is not a perception, nor is it a judgement, and it is these that Kant is primarily concerned with in the 1st critique. I'd say a perspective is more like an agglomeration of more or less (but not necessarily) coherent and self-reinforcing beliefs, attitudes and probably even non-propositional content like dispositions. Kant didn't have much to say specifically about that in any of his major writings that I can recall (maybe in the lectures on anthropology).

But his entire life work was devoted to how we can provide a solid foundation for claims of knowledge, morality, and aesthetics, so to say that "Nobody, ultimately, has any right to pronounce objective truths on anything" would quite a misinterpretation. You could argue "well but it isn't objective knowledge since the noumena are the real objects" but that would be begging the question against him, his whole argument is that concepts like "object" are part of the structure of our mind. Objective knowledge and the human mind go hand in hand.

I think you only hate the idea because you're misinterpreting it.

Statements like "the Earth is spherical" or "this vaccine has 90% effectivity" fall fully in the phenomenological realm, i.e., the things that we experience through our senses and we can know. Since we have consistent sensory experiences (also aided by technology) that point to the Earth being spherical, Kant would say that we can be confident that it is spherical as a phenomenon - which is what actually matters, and the same with vaccines: dying and getting sick are experiences that we can perceive as a phenomenon, so antivaxxers will find no excuse in Kant's philosophy.

In this example, some aspects of the noumenon (what we cannot know) are for example: OK, but what actually is dying from COVID? Maybe we reincarnate? Maybe we go to heaven? Maybe we are just bits in a simulation? Maybe dying is an illusion? We cannot know. But this doesn't affect the usefulness of taking the vaccine (someone could choose not to take it because they think death is an illusion or they will reincarnate or something like that, but then that's their beliefs' fault, not Kant's, and they would still have to admit that taking the vaccine makes sense for people who don't want to die because they don't share those beliefs).

I think it's hard to find these ideas unsettling, as they actually have become so ingrained to seem like common sense for most rational-minded people. The core idea is just separation between scientific knowledge and metaphysics/religion (but it's of course compatible with atheistic/materialistic views, because one doesn't need to assume that the noumenon contains anything of practical importance -like heaven, immortal souls or stuff like that-, it could be basically irrelevant for all practical purposes).

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