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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

• 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.
  • arrow7000 3y ago
    Just because religion also says something doesn't make it a religious notion
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      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.
  • pvarangot 3y ago
    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
  • lukeasrodgers 3y ago
    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).
• deleted 3y ago
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• gjsman-1000 3y ago
  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.
  • ThinkBeat 3y ago
    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]
    • gjsman-1000 3y ago
      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.
      • staunton 3y ago
        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 https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2021-0034
• superb-owl 3y ago
  > 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-mind/ https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/church-of-reality-ernst-mach-...
  • mannykannot 3y ago
    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/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/
  • n4r9 3y ago
    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 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".
• ThinkBeat 3y ago
  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.
  • svnt 3y ago
    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.
    • whelp_24 3y ago
      I mean, saying firmly that other things exist doesn't make it true. Solipsism may be disliked but not disproven.
      • mannykannot 3y ago
        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.
• dakiol 3y ago
  > 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).
  • ivlad 3y ago
    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.
  • woodruffw 3y ago
    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.)
  • felipeerias 3y ago
    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.
  • galaxyLogic 3y ago
    > 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.
• justanotherjoe 3y ago
  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 ).
• jaza 3y ago
  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.
• kuhewa 3y ago
  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
• imchillyb 3y ago
  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.
• ofslidingfeet 3y ago
  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.
• jadbox 3y ago
  > "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-conception-of-essence/ https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/hegels-conce...