27 ms·
Immanuel Kant – What can we know?
- 082349872349872 3y agoQ. What is the difference between skepticism and stoicism A. I don't know and I don't care
- mykowebhn 3y agoThis is a nice try, but there are a lot of parts that made me wince. 1. The essay starts off with "If you are interested in truth..." without ever defining what exactly they mean by "truth". 2. What is with this "inside" and "outside"? I don't think Kant ever used such philosophically imprecise terminology. They define rationalists as understanding the world "from the inside" and empiricists as understanding it "from the outside". By framing it in such terms, they have already put a metaphysical stake in the ground. And really, how do empiricists understand the world "from the outside"? Do they mean that the thinking is done from the outside, or that they receive sensory input from the outside and then understand it..."from the outside"? This is so ridiculous it makes me wince. Also, rationalists understand the world "from the inside" why? Because their sensory input comes from the inside? When they frame it this way--as inside versus outside--it really amounts to do the same thing, doesn't it? Kant is weeping in his grave. 3. It's too bad they didn't mention Kant's Copernican turn. Mentioning that would have been quite revealing. 4. This may have been too complex for such a short summary, but Kant's Synthetic Unity of Apperception is extremely important.
- woodruffw 3y agoI don't think this was meant to be a scholarly explanation, and the author hints as much at the end of the post. Kant was my main focus (now some time ago), and I thought this was a reasonable explainer for an audience that probably hasn't read much metaphysics.
- Merrill 3y agoDoes Kant focus this way on the individual's experience and reason? It seems to me that we only reach some provisional truth when communicating minds agree on their experiences and how they are reduced by reason to concepts. Only by formal processes for reaching agreement with past and candidate truths by multiple individuals do we avoid error, delusion and fantasy.
- woodruffw 3y agoIt’s been a while, but I don’t think Kant has much to say about individual experience vis a vis interpersonal consensus. But maybe there’s something I’m not remembering.
- Notatheist 3y agoYou want an article that takes 5 minutes to read to define "truth"? The author even says they're just trying to get you hyped and in my opinion I think they did a great job.
- Loq 3y agoIf you want to understand Kant in the language of (self-supervised) machine learning, I can highly recommend this rather astonishing PhD thesis: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~re14/Evans-R-2020-PhD-Thesis.pdf https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~re14/Evans-R-2020-PhD-Thesis.pdf
- julienmarie 3y agoJust started reading this thesis. I am absolutely blown away by the clarity and beauty of its writing. This is rare.
- WillAdams 3y agoWell, it was authored in TeX, so: https://xkcd.com/1301/ https://xkcd.com/1301/ applies
- shanusmagnus 3y agoThis is the most staggering kind of serendipity to discover that such a thing exists. Thank you :)
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago> "We note in particular that in the sequence induction IQ tasks, our system achieves human-level performance. This is notable because the Apperception Engine was not designed to solve these IQ tasks; it is not a bespoke hand-engineered solution to this particular domain. – Rather, it is a general purpose system that attempts to make sense of any sensory sequence, that just happens to be able to solve these IQ tasks “out of the box”. Worth repeating: > just happens to be able to solve these IQ tasks “out of the box”. Will read further...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HwyarkGnuor 3y agoHonest question; what could anyone get out of this? What is the point of interpreting kant if the interpreter of kant can't even perceive what humans perceive? Kant doesn't seem to have much value outside of the context of human perception.
- sovietswag 3y agoFinally, an opportunity to share a series from one of my favorite lecturers :). This is a set of lectures on the Critique from Robert Paul Wolff: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC5GAeBZerO-RuKBI1IqHZzB9tUuypkpK https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC5GAeBZerO-RuKBI1IqHZz... He jokes that he keeps a copy of the Critique on his nightstand and reads it before bed to relax lol. He also has series on Marx, Freud, and ideological critique.
- aidenn0 3y agoI read Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in my undergraduate ethics class, and that was tough to read 200 years after it was written. He takes it as axiomatic that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, which is something that seemed pretty well established as false by the time between when it was written and when I read it.
- woodruffw 3y ago> He takes it as axiomatic that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, which is something that seemed pretty well established as false by the time between when it was written and when I read it. I don't think this is true, at least with respect to the last ~80 years of the philosophy of science: the current "central dogma" of scientific inquiry is that all inferences must be falsifiable in order to be scientific. In other words: good science generates inductive and parsimonious explanations, not universal rules. To be universal would be to discharge falsifiability. Edit: For what it's worth, I think Kant's contemporaries also found him ponderous and difficult to read.
- cmehdy 3y agoScience doesn't determine the rules of the universe, it generates models with predictive power within a domain of validity
- wk_end 3y agoFor what it's worth, the distance of time isn't the only thing that makes Kant difficult to read. There's also the distance of language - translation is almost inevitably going to blur the original lines of the original (I've heard it said, not of Kant but of Heidegger, that it's easier to learn German and read Sein und Zeit than it is to read Being and Time). And to make matters worse, Kant has always been criticized as a notoriously poor writer, even by his contemporaries. (And there's the underlying complexity of his thought, of course.)
- shanusmagnus 3y agoHaving made the attempt at Being and Time in English, I find the assertion unironically plausible, even likely.
- vivekd 3y agoI 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.
- User23 3y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo
- DarkNova6 3y ago> 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.
- 3y ago
- jonmc12 3y ago"Our mind shapes the world".. Kant's psychology was foundational to the thought lineage of predictive processing. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00079/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.0007...
- hardlianotion 3y agoI had no interest in Kant’s philosophy at all until I came across a fictionalised version it as the main character in Adam Robert’s “The Thing Itself”. I am now very interested in the idea of the thing itself that I built using the story I read.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LucasOe 3y agoI like Kants work, but it has always bugged me, how he defined the 12 Kantian categories of a priori knowledge that just are. It feels inelegant. I'd much rather have a generalisation of all a priori knowledge instead of a defined list.
- jaza 3y agoEvery system has arbitrary hard-coded constants deep down in its bowels somewhere. Why should the foundation of all knowledge be any different?
- ganzuul 3y agoWhat if the hard-coded constants were a trinity? What if we called them the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? (I believe in Mythos, Logos and Ethos. Ask me about metamodernism.)
- ofslidingfeet 3y agoHe tried to be cutesy and show how an enumeration of the criteria for these categories form "judgments" which define the categories themselves, essentially suggesting that this is likely to work since the analytical domain fundamentally involves self-consistency.
- billfor 3y agoHerman Kahn but Immanuel Kant.
- globalnode 3y agothis reminds me of flatlanders: the poor 2d creatures living in a 3d universe that only see 3d as projections into their space. information is lost in the process and they can never truly know what caused it, only model it with guesses.
- mistermann 3y agoEven worse: it is not difficult at all to not even try (or have the idea cross one's mind) to model such things, but rather dismiss it as nonsense, pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, woo woo, etc. We might even live in a reality like this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- diego_sandoval 3y agoStupid question: What do you gain from reading philosophy instead of just thinking and coming to these conclusions by yourself?
- brrrrrm 3y agoPhilosophy is a good tool to find very poetic and often quite succinct descriptions of what you might otherwise come to on your own. It also provides a shared language among people, although often at the expense of inclusivity
- KingJulian 3y agoI don't think that's a stupid question. It's useful to read philosophy as we're exposed to the thought process of that specific author/philosopher. A lot of times, the conclusion you arrive at is influenced heavily by the lens through which you view the presuppositions. It's useful to be exposed to different viewpoints and conclusions. You often read something that gives you pause, and you think, "I never thought of it that way."
- kuhewa 3y agoLet's just grant you would come to the same conclusions eventually — people that specialised in thinking about metaphysics, ethics, epistemology etc. and spent years writing their arguments in (to a first approximation) well-reasoned prose, which was then subjected to the critiques of their colleagues that followed in subsequent generations who instead wrote their own arguments.. at the very least seems like a huge time saver.
- DiscourseFan 3y agoYou should try reading it, then, to see if it will be of any value to you.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xyzelement 3y agoWhy learn algorithms when you could eventually invent a hash table? I don't know if every brain can come to the realization that its inherently limited in what it can perceive of truth, especially since these limitations themselves are obscured from us. You think you could? Anyway, the work of others is a good way to get higher-level concepts into your head to toy around with.
- DiscourseFan 3y agoAnd if you're curious about how a philosophical system which claims that there are pure forms of intuition that structures our experience cannot escape still being entirely conceptually mediated, read Hegel!
- mongol 3y agoFor science, I see how one insight leads to another, and there is a progression which leads to deeper and deeper understanding. And if there never was a Newton, gravity would have been described by someone else not too long after. That seems somewhat inevitable to me. But I don't grok philosophy. Is that also a progression of insights in a similar way? Or is it completely arbitrary what philosophical ponderings become important during different human eras?
- kuhewa 3y agoI would think of it more like software development if hardware remained the same rather than science. Yes there are shifts in paradigms based on what the use cases of the day are (and what the perceived shortcomings of the previous paradigm were), and yes there are some things that will be widely agreed to be advancements, also dead ends.
- woodruffw 3y agoFlippantly: science accretes ideas, while philosophy sheds them. In other words: the progression you perceive in science (and mathematics, etc.) has historically occurred because of parallel progressions in philosophy. That has been less true of science for the past century, but it's still very true of mathematics. > Is that also a progression of insights in a similar way? Yes: Western philosophy is a "tradition" in the sense that it has a clear (branching and twisting) lineage from pre-Socratic thought to contemporary philosophy. There are lots of commonly recommended "history of philosophy" books that can provide that overview; Russel's "A History of Western Philosophy" is a commonly recommended one.
- keiferski 3y agoThere are more options than “progresses in linear orderly fashion” and “totally arbitrary.” And if you read someone like Kuhn [1] you may question the progressing narrative of science. I’d also be wary of separating scientific insights from philosophical/religious culture. Most famous scientists historically believed themselves to be looking for a divinely-organized system, and it’s unclear to me if they would have even looked in the first place without that underlying belief structure. You could go back even further and say all scientific inquiry basically rests on a conceptual distinction between Self and World, which is very much a trait of Monotheism. I think philosophical insights could roughly be described as a mix of human biological realities (which haven’t really changed, ever) interacting with historical and technological events - and progressing over time in response to those events. Kant, for example, is mostly talking about things that are essentially fundamental to the human experience, even if he was in dialogue with the ideas that were popular in his time. People have argued against Kant, but I don’t think we can really “surpass” the kind of problem he’s investigating in the way you might think we have surpassed an outdated theory of physics. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
- getwiththeprog 3y agoShame about the liks to Amazon, Here's Kant on Gutenberg, as it is rather out of copyright https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1426 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1426
- earthboundkid 3y agoLLMs are a good introduction of evidence to the rationalist vs empiricist argument. It does seem like Kantian thing where what the LLM “knows” is structured by its network layers but also by the data it gets.
- earthboundkid 3y ago“we don’t know whether space and time are properties of the outside world, but they sure are part of our mind.” In the Kantian paradigm (and this is taken from Descartes), space is external and time is internal. You can feel time without an external perception, and space can exist outside even if you’re not there.
- brudgers 3y agoFor Kant, space is the a priori condition of external experience. Time, the a priori condition of internal experience. Space and time are conditions of human experience and hence human knowledge is limited to only phenomena in time and space. And morals. We get a priori knowledge of morals. And that’s the important thing for Kant.
- earthboundkid 3y agoGood explanation.
- brudgers 3y agoThat's how Kirk Ludwig explained it to me thirty years ago. https://socrates.sitehost.iu.edu/ https://socrates.sitehost.iu.edu/
- ofslidingfeet 3y agoThis seems like a decent summary of Kant, though like Kant's own work, it involves a gross misreading of Hume. To paraphrase Chomsky: Hume and other so-called empiricists did not actually believe in tabula rasa because they were not imbeciles. Hume wrote an entire chapter on how humans have instincts which determine how we think, just like animals do, for instance. Kant actually said very little about epistemology that Hume didn't say better. They were both cool, but since everyone wants to hype the beef, Hume -- who never got a chance to defend himself against this "rationalist vs empiricist" false dichotomy -- was cooler. I would encourage anyone and everyone to read his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
- molly0 3y agoThis blog post was perfect, It reminded me of why I'm so fascinated about philosophy of mind - brings back memory's of reading about it in university, back when I had time for this sort of thinking.
- totorovirus 3y agothis is strikingly similar to the buddhist view of the perception. In one of the theory(唯識思想) in buddhism everybody in their mind has a kaleidoscope or window by which we perceive the world. This kaleidoscope is shaped by six emotions: sorrow, modesty, happiness, joy, anger and love. The important part is that the kaleidoscope also interacts with the world around you. If you want to change the world, you need to become the very person you want to see in the world. That is why buddhism says the change starts from disciplining and harnessing your emotions, hence "be the change you want to see"
- krzat 3y agoSimilar ideas can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion Except instead of kaleidoscope of 6 emotions, you have a circle of affect - how pleasant/unpleasant and how aroused/tranquil do you feel in the moment affects your perception of the world and what kind of thoughts do you think.
- mediumsmart 3y agoI have a theory that nothing can be proven but I can't prove it.
- kuhewa 3y agoPerhaps you should work on completing your incompleteness theorem.
- tremere 3y agoCall me naive, but I don't see why we need Kant's ideas of noumena and phenomena when we have Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Analogy of the Divided Line. In my limited experience, Plato's philosophical primitives prove more useful for thinking about whether LLMs possess intelligence and what reality really is. In my opinion the most groundbreaking contribution of Kant is adding in the a priori and a posteriori distinctions to how belief is constructed. Even so, nothing of Kant's work impresses me more than Plato's allegory.
- ganzuul 3y agoThink of a sparse mixture of experts generating a space of solutions. A different mixture of experts may generate the same space. That the space can be factorized in multiple ways grants you knowledge of reality.
- dvt 3y agoGreat write-up, though the expression is "whet your appetite," not "wet."
- anon23432343 3y agoWhy is this on the front page of HN? What happened to HN? you were used to find cool new tech stuff here... If I want to get depressed about live I will go on Reddit... ohhh I see.
- Apocryphon 3y agoThe oldest article about Kant on HN is from nearly sixteen years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96994
- iamsanteri 3y agoAre those images gifs, or? I‘m on my phone so cannot inspect myself.
- throw4847285 3y agoIn college I took a survey of Modern Philosophy as a requirement for my major. The class was taught by a pretty renowned Kant scholar. I don't remember as much as I would like from that class, but I do remember one thing the professor said, "David Hume explained complex ideas with simple language, while Kant explained simple ideas with complex language." It was reassuring that even the guy who wrote the translation of Critique o f Pure Reason that we were using in the class thought that Kant wrote in an incredibly obtuse way. What stuck with me even more is the idea that sometimes, "simple" ideas explored in such depth could be extremely valuable. I've been fascinated by Kant ever since, but lack the time or energy to read more of what he wrote. I would like to at some point.
- boldslogan 3y agoI leave you with an anecdote about him: once he was teaching a lecture and a student’s button was missing. He struggled to teach/cancelled the course and admitted the irritation was intense because of the button. My other philology friend told me. Strange and interesting, makes me humanize and think about him in a different context.
- pfdietz 3y agoAn alt history point I've wondered a bit about is: what if Kant had discovered natural selection? He was rooting around in the area and would, I think, have understood it and realized its importance if it had been explained to him.
- alienicecream 3y agoThe more salient question might be "how do we get rid of what we know". By the time one turns 40 you've accreted enough knowledge that basically your life is over, at least in the sense of seeing anything new. And wonder is gone long before then.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]