If you're a student of Rand's philosophy and Kant is intimidating material to grapple with, don't neglect this course. Peikoff provides a succinct understanding of Kantian material, making Rand's crucial response all the more clear. I may even look forward to assignments on Kant in the near future.
Note that this lesson and the playlist are out of sync with each other. This is lesson 42 but it is 41 in the playlist and number 50 in the playlist is actually lesson 41 so everything past this point is numbered incorrectly.
Where Kant is described here by Dr. Peikoff as switching from God to collective human consciousness, it struck me as the same as Jordan Peterson when he uses "mythical" narrative as a source of intrinsic revealed truth. JP is suggesting finding truth through a collective battle-of-stories, just like Kant is suggesting the same for a collective survey of subjective individuals.
Jordan Peterson does identify as a Pragmatist. Here we learn that the Pragmatist school stems out of Kant. I wish ARI releases the second volume of this course!
[9:40] Conclusion of Kant's general thesis * Our preconscious minds are complex processors/synthesizers. They synthesize the data we get from reality in many ways before it reaches consciousness. * The mind therefore doesn't discover the law and order in the world, it is the source of it. * In this regard, Kant agrees with the Rationalists. Experience isn't a sufficient foundation for human knowledge. Some significant contribution comes from the nature of the mind itself. * If we were born tabula rasa, then we could have no knowledge. * But he disagrees with them about what the mind contributes. The rationalists held that the mind contains innate knowledge/content. Kant held that the mind has innate structure/form. * Kant agrees with Empiricists in that all knowledge begins with experience. Apart from experience we have the "relating machinery", experience provides the stuff that it relates, providing knowledge. * All knowledge begins with experience, but it doesn't all come out of experience (since it also depends on the innate synthesizers) Kant proposes 14 different Categories of synthesizing activities performed by the mind. Causality synthesizer, entity synthesizer, spatial synthesizer, time synthesizer, existence synthesizer, quantity synthesizer, and so on. What it amounts to is all of the fundamental features of the world that we observe are contributions of our mind: Space, time, causality, etc. Given this, can we know anything about reality in itself? Kant's answer: No. We can only know things after they're processed by the synthesizers. You can only know the world as it appears to the human mind. And in this process the mind adds all these features that presumably may not apply to the things in themselves. There are therefore two completely different worlds. 1. Phenomenal world: The world of experience. The world as it appears to us. 2. Noumenal world: The world as it really is. About this we can't know anything whatsoever. This clarifies where Peikoff's analogy of the input pellets breaks down. They were supposed to represent reality in itself. But we can't think of them as spatial, temporal, entities, we can't think of them quantitatively. Then how can we imagine them? Kant's answer is: You cannot! The world provides the matter. The mind provides the form. But the world itself is completely unknowable. Could the Noumenal world be just as the Phenomenal world? The standard Kantian answer is: There's no use speculating, and it's completely irrelevant either way. All that's relevant to us is to understand what synthesizing activities the mind performs. We can be perfectly rational and scientific without regard to reality. This was the goal of the Critique of Pure Reason. [24:05] This, Kant says, is the only possible solution to the problem of Synthetic Necessary (a priori) Truths. A truth that's derived from Experience, and not necessary because of experience or logic, but because of the Categories/Structure of the Mind. The price of having Synthetic Necessary truths is ignorance of reality. The reason the world lives up to our expectations is because we create the kind of world that has to live up to our expectations. [29:17] Kant correctly claims that he entirely reversed the direction of Philosophy with this view. Prior to Kant, Philosophers were all realists in this sense: There's a reality out there and the function of our mind is to conform to that reality. Kant said, it's not the world that sets the terms and the human mind obeys, it's the human mind that sets the terms and the world obeys. Through our preconscious minds, we literally construct the world we live in! As Kant puts it, it is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. Kant called this the "Copernican Revolution" in Philosophy. Prior to Kant, rationalists and empiricists held that knowledge is the recognition of existence. Kant says no. Reality imposes no terms. Either we impose the terms or all is lost. Knowledge is not an activity of discovering existence, but of creating it. [32:06] Kant entrenched Subjectivism deeply into the fabric of all subsequent philosophy. The human mind controls, creates, and dictates the world - the Phenomenal world. [32:44] Does Kant say that your personal subjective wishes/hallucinations are true for you and somebody else's are true for him? No. Kant claimed to be a champion of objectivity, and said that he can make a perfectly clear distinction between the subjective and the objective. [33:13] For instance, take a hallucinatory pink rat. Kant would say this is subjective; It represents your own personal experience. [33:35] But the mental processing/synthesizing devices - space, time, causality, entity, etc., are not like the hallucinatory pink rat. They're automatic, inexorable, and universal to the species. Kant says this is what we have to call Objective. [34:15] "Objective" is anything that is derived from the universal, inexorable nature of human consciousness. Which means "objective", as he uses it, means a collective, universal, inexorable subjectivism. [34:53] This is a very influential approach today. You'll see it in Pragmatism. [35:27] Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged refers to this as "the switch from the objective to the collective", and it's inherent in Kant's approach. But collective subjectivism is still subjectivism. In this sense, Kant is an arch subjectivist. [35:52] Kant is what we call an advocate of the Primacy of Consciousness. Let's contrast this with the opposite approach - the Primacy of Existence. [36:08] Primacy of Existence is the Aristotelean and Objectivist viewpoint in Philosophy - the view that existence exists, it is what it is independent of consciousness, it sets the terms, and consciousness is metaphysically passive - meaning consciousness is not a faculty for creating reality. It's simply a faculty for perceiving reality. [37:33] The primacy of consciousness is the view that consciousness controls, creates, dictates, in some way shapes the world, shapes existence, that existence is a product of and dependent on consciousness. [37:50] This is the most fundamental issue in metaphysics - which of these has primacy. The primacy of consciousness is the most fundamental metaphysical inversion you can perpetrate in philosophy, and it is the most disastrous. [38:45] The medieval Christians held the earliest influential version of the primacy of consciousness - the supernatural version. God is the consciousness that created the world, the world emanated from His conscious activities. [39:25] You can see this mentality in people who say "who created the world? Who created existence?" Suppose you were to pursue that and say, "well, who created that consciousness?" so on to an infinite regress, many people can abstractly appreciate the argument but they're unaffected by it. [40:14] Many people think: "Well if you have to start somewhere, it's better to start with consciousness." To make consciousness a primary is graspable, and then existence is simply a derivative of it. But to make existence a primary, that seems inconceivable to them. [41:02] And many people believe in miracles, and a miracle is simply an example of the primacy of consciousness - the controlling supernatural consciousness periodically subjects existence to the whim of the moment and alters its functioning, and that's called a miracle. [41:33] What Kant did is simply substitute a new type of primacy of consciousness. He said, let us substitute the collective human consciousness for God's. Human consciousness is the secular stand-in for the Christian God. Kant took over the essential metaphysics of religion and then secularized it. [43:00] So we can then conclude Kant's basic approach: only if we are subjective in the deepest metaphysical sense - only if we grant that it's our mind which determines the laws of the world we experience - only then can we save mankind from Hume's skepticism. [43:34] It's recognizing the subjectivism of our knowledge which frees us from all impossible agreements and arbitrary siputes of people who claim their knowledge is objective. [43:54] We should be men of reason and science. But we can be so only if we recognize that reason and science are limited to teh surface world, the world of experience, the world we ourselves create. Reason is fine and valid, in its place. But the very conditions of its validity debar it from access to reality. Only if you're a skeptic can you live by reason. [44:45] Q & A (selected questions below) [44:47] How was Kant able to remove reason from the philosophy cscene even more than Hume did? [47:15] How does Kant know that Mind's synthesizing activities are necessary and unchanging? How does he know that the structure of the mind won't change tomorrow? [53:24] If the noumenal world is unknowable, how can Kant claim to know anything about it? [58:55] Is Kant's view that the noumenal world exists independently of the human mind an acceptance of the primacy of existence? [1:02:57] Would Kant say that the mind processes the same things-in-themselves in the same way, or is the synthesizing process arbitrary? [1:05:02] If we cannot know reality as it really is, how can Kant claim to know the actual structure of the human mind?
@@cas343 coming back to it after a year, I'm actually impressed with the effort I put in. Made it super quick to brush up on Kant's metaphysics/epistemology.
Imagine some transducer such as a thermocouple which generates a voltage proportional to the ambient temperature a refrigerated rear compartment of a truck. The driver in the cab has access to the numerical output of the transducer, but not the ambient environment of the rear compartment. He observes the measured value and makes decisions accordingly, but if we ask ourselves how he may KNOW FOR REALZ the ambient temperature, the answer is inescapably that he can't. If the device malfunctions and tells him the ambient temperature has risen to 100F, reason dictates he should pull over and check his cargo and cooling equipment. He has no way of distinguishing the (in this case spurious) voltage from the ambient temperature it is supposed to represent. This is precisely what happened at 3-mile Island. The idea that the voltage represents the temperature is an HYPOTHESIS. In Objectivism this is the premise "Existence exists".
This is truly revealing. I remember when I was reading Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" there was mentioned something about the "collective mind" of men aka the truly nature of God. Now I know the root of Brown's ideas.
Apparently, Dan Brown and his DaVinci Code books/films are Gnostic, which I think is suppose to be some kind of heretical Christianity. There's a video called "Gnosticism: Exposing the worldview of the Davinci Code | Dr. Michael Heiser" It's about 6 hours long. I haven't finished it. I'm not very knowledgeable about Gnosticism.
You can assign the all the empirical qualities of matter to consciousness, something we know exists. Then you no longer need matter as a separate thing and may dispose of it.
Yes of course you can! But then you're back in Hume's boat! Just a string of unrealated qualities that happen to go together today but who knows tomorrow, ie in a Universe with no entities, no cause and effect, no self no nothing. But a very simple refutation of your position from the objectivist perspective (obviously not going to take the time to give a positive theory here) is this, in asserting that the only thing that exist is consciousness, you're making a statement about reality, something which its proponents take it to mean a true proposition which is independent of anybody's awareness, ie it's a fact you did not create, it's a fact independent of your believing in it, but that's incoherent because you're very assertion implies that there's no facts which are independent of your consciousness, There's no way you could get ouside your mind and of your own thesis to see whether it is the case. your own thesis could also be a creation of your own mind, after all nothing could possible validate your conclusions since they're all part of your experience and you have no independent base on which to be determine them as true or false, for those who believe in realism for instance that would be true for them, after all their minds shape reality and If it seems like it's a pasive sate that also is no argument againts that since everything just might be made up. More importantly a consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms, before it could identify itself as a consciousness it had to be conscious of something, otherwise you have the following scenario: awareness is awerness of something of a thing, If not, then you got awareness of awareness of awareness of awareness ad infinitum, perceptually before you're self aware there must be an self to be aware of, before I could dinguish my own awareness as an awerness I had to be aware of something if not, you eliminate what makes possible to form the concept of awareness, because there would be nothing to be aware of in the firts place, and hence no process to be identify. A sensation, a perception is of something, an object, none perceives their own experiences, because the prior logical question would be experiences of what?? If you eliminate the contrast bewteen the images in your own mind and the object you perceive, then the concept images in your own mind becomes empty and meaningless, Since i could no longer know what is an image in my mind and the object(s) I form an image from or think of them, no such distintion would be possible or intelligible, the image just would be pure image without being a image of something, you in effect would be reproducing a World inside conciessness created outt of nothing it could in principle have created its own contents otta of nothing.
Hume: So Immanuel, how do you know the mind creates the laws of reality, and how do you know it shall continue to do so and always in the ways you say it will?
Because consciousness doesn't have to ve volitional. The way your mind procces the information trough your senses, the way it reacts are out of your control. It's in your Nature to be conscious, wheter it is voluntary wich we call consciousness, or not, wich we call unconsciousness. It is primacy of consciousness because the subject looking at the object creates the rules wich the universe obey.
I give you an example as I see it. Look on the web for the checkboard illusion. One square appears darker than the other even though they are identical. This is because our brains, via evolution, analyse wrongly the colours. In fact most optical illusions are brain illusions. However our minds, our rational minds, allow us to examine and discover the illusion and the reason why perhaps our brain fools us. We could even construct present-day instruments which would correct this illusion should it be necessary. The preconscious processing of our brain is great but not perfect. But we have a high degree of rational thinking, so we can correct errors. This is not in contradiction with an objective reality and the primacy of our senses if you include rational thinking as part of our senses.
this is a terrible interpretation of Kant. subjectivism? Kant? introducing scepticism into the heart of philosophy? what! one of his primary goals is to vindicate metaphysics against subjectivism and scepticism!
@@Damienn1776 everyone is skeptical to some extent. But he is not a skeptic in the philosophical meaning of the word. His philosophy was set up to counter philosophical skepticism which is why he created transcendental arguments
But isn't Kant's whole claim that the structure of the subject's own mind is what creates order from raw sensations of reality, independent of the order that is actually out there in reality? Doesn't he also claim that reality as such is unknowable as we can only know what our mind creates, not the real "noumenal" world? It sounds like both subjectivism and skepticism.
I think both views have truth to them, existence is primary, we perceive data from the world and then our mind creates our own subjective reality from that data and our cognition would also be using expectations gained from prior experieces/perceptions. That is to say during the cognition our mind throws predictions in along with the raw data. Evidence for this is in the Mcgurk effect, in which it demonstrates that visual data and previous experience is prioritized in what is presented to the consciousness over audio data alone. In the effect the audio is kept the same, a person saying "bah", but the visual data is changed to someone mouthing a different sound "far" and the consciousness receives what the visual data and prior experiece predicts "far", over the reality which is the audio data "bah".
If you're a student of Rand's philosophy and Kant is intimidating material to grapple with, don't neglect this course. Peikoff provides a succinct understanding of Kantian material, making Rand's crucial response all the more clear. I may even look forward to assignments on Kant in the near future.
Note that this lesson and the playlist are out of sync with each other. This is lesson 42 but it is 41 in the playlist and number 50 in the playlist is actually lesson 41 so everything past this point is numbered incorrectly.
Where Kant is described here by Dr. Peikoff as switching from God to collective human consciousness, it struck me as the same as Jordan Peterson when he uses "mythical" narrative as a source of intrinsic revealed truth. JP is suggesting finding truth through a collective battle-of-stories, just like Kant is suggesting the same for a collective survey of subjective individuals.
Jordan Peterson does identify as a Pragmatist. Here we learn that the Pragmatist school stems out of Kant.
I wish ARI releases the second volume of this course!
@@YashArya01Is there a second volume?? That would be awesome
@@cas343 yeah!
@@YashArya01where can I find it? Is this a book or what?
@@GarteBera In the 90s it was available on tape
[9:40] Conclusion of Kant's general thesis
* Our preconscious minds are complex processors/synthesizers. They synthesize the data we get from reality in many ways before it reaches consciousness.
* The mind therefore doesn't discover the law and order in the world, it is the source of it.
* In this regard, Kant agrees with the Rationalists. Experience isn't a sufficient foundation for human knowledge. Some significant contribution comes from the nature of the mind itself.
* If we were born tabula rasa, then we could have no knowledge.
* But he disagrees with them about what the mind contributes. The rationalists held that the mind contains innate knowledge/content. Kant held that the mind has innate structure/form.
* Kant agrees with Empiricists in that all knowledge begins with experience. Apart from experience we have the "relating machinery", experience provides the stuff that it relates, providing knowledge.
* All knowledge begins with experience, but it doesn't all come out of experience (since it also depends on the innate synthesizers)
Kant proposes 14 different Categories of synthesizing activities performed by the mind.
Causality synthesizer, entity synthesizer, spatial synthesizer, time synthesizer, existence synthesizer, quantity synthesizer, and so on.
What it amounts to is all of the fundamental features of the world that we observe are contributions of our mind: Space, time, causality, etc.
Given this, can we know anything about reality in itself?
Kant's answer: No. We can only know things after they're processed by the synthesizers. You can only know the world as it appears to the human mind. And in this process the mind adds all these features that presumably may not apply to the things in themselves.
There are therefore two completely different worlds.
1. Phenomenal world: The world of experience. The world as it appears to us.
2. Noumenal world: The world as it really is. About this we can't know anything whatsoever.
This clarifies where Peikoff's analogy of the input pellets breaks down. They were supposed to represent reality in itself. But we can't think of them as spatial, temporal, entities, we can't think of them quantitatively. Then how can we imagine them? Kant's answer is: You cannot!
The world provides the matter. The mind provides the form. But the world itself is completely unknowable. Could the Noumenal world be just as the Phenomenal world? The standard Kantian answer is: There's no use speculating, and it's completely irrelevant either way. All that's relevant to us is to understand what synthesizing activities the mind performs. We can be perfectly rational and scientific without regard to reality. This was the goal of the Critique of Pure Reason.
[24:05] This, Kant says, is the only possible solution to the problem of Synthetic Necessary (a priori) Truths. A truth that's derived from Experience, and not necessary because of experience or logic, but because of the Categories/Structure of the Mind.
The price of having Synthetic Necessary truths is ignorance of reality. The reason the world lives up to our expectations is because we create the kind of world that has to live up to our expectations.
[29:17] Kant correctly claims that he entirely reversed the direction of Philosophy with this view. Prior to Kant, Philosophers were all realists in this sense: There's a reality out there and the function of our mind is to conform to that reality. Kant said, it's not the world that sets the terms and the human mind obeys, it's the human mind that sets the terms and the world obeys. Through our preconscious minds, we literally construct the world we live in!
As Kant puts it, it is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. Kant called this the "Copernican Revolution" in Philosophy.
Prior to Kant, rationalists and empiricists held that knowledge is the recognition of existence. Kant says no. Reality imposes no terms. Either we impose the terms or all is lost. Knowledge is not an activity of discovering existence, but of creating it.
[32:06] Kant entrenched Subjectivism deeply into the fabric of all subsequent philosophy. The human mind controls, creates, and dictates the world - the Phenomenal world.
[32:44] Does Kant say that your personal subjective wishes/hallucinations are true for you and somebody else's are true for him? No.
Kant claimed to be a champion of objectivity, and said that he can make a perfectly clear distinction between the subjective and the objective.
[33:13] For instance, take a hallucinatory pink rat. Kant would say this is subjective; It represents your own personal experience.
[33:35] But the mental processing/synthesizing devices - space, time, causality, entity, etc., are not like the hallucinatory pink rat. They're automatic, inexorable, and universal to the species. Kant says this is what we have to call Objective.
[34:15] "Objective" is anything that is derived from the universal, inexorable nature of human consciousness. Which means "objective", as he uses it, means a collective, universal, inexorable subjectivism.
[34:53] This is a very influential approach today. You'll see it in Pragmatism.
[35:27] Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged refers to this as "the switch from the objective to the collective", and it's inherent in Kant's approach.
But collective subjectivism is still subjectivism. In this sense, Kant is an arch subjectivist.
[35:52] Kant is what we call an advocate of the Primacy of Consciousness. Let's contrast this with the opposite approach - the Primacy of Existence.
[36:08] Primacy of Existence is the Aristotelean and Objectivist viewpoint in Philosophy - the view that existence exists, it is what it is independent of consciousness, it sets the terms, and consciousness is metaphysically passive - meaning consciousness is not a faculty for creating reality. It's simply a faculty for perceiving reality.
[37:33] The primacy of consciousness is the view that consciousness controls, creates, dictates, in some way shapes the world, shapes existence, that existence is a product of and dependent on consciousness.
[37:50] This is the most fundamental issue in metaphysics - which of these has primacy. The primacy of consciousness is the most fundamental metaphysical inversion you can perpetrate in philosophy, and it is the most disastrous.
[38:45] The medieval Christians held the earliest influential version of the primacy of consciousness - the supernatural version.
God is the consciousness that created the world, the world emanated from His conscious activities.
[39:25] You can see this mentality in people who say "who created the world? Who created existence?"
Suppose you were to pursue that and say, "well, who created that consciousness?" so on to an infinite regress, many people can abstractly appreciate the argument but they're unaffected by it.
[40:14] Many people think: "Well if you have to start somewhere, it's better to start with consciousness." To make consciousness a primary is graspable, and then existence is simply a derivative of it. But to make existence a primary, that seems inconceivable to them.
[41:02] And many people believe in miracles, and a miracle is simply an example of the primacy of consciousness - the controlling supernatural consciousness periodically subjects existence to the whim of the moment and alters its functioning, and that's called a miracle.
[41:33] What Kant did is simply substitute a new type of primacy of consciousness. He said, let us substitute the collective human consciousness for God's. Human consciousness is the secular stand-in for the Christian God. Kant took over the essential metaphysics of religion and then secularized it.
[43:00] So we can then conclude Kant's basic approach: only if we are subjective in the deepest metaphysical sense - only if we grant that it's our mind which determines the laws of the world we experience - only then can we save mankind from Hume's skepticism.
[43:34] It's recognizing the subjectivism of our knowledge which frees us from all impossible agreements and arbitrary siputes of people who claim their knowledge is objective.
[43:54] We should be men of reason and science. But we can be so only if we recognize that reason and science are limited to teh surface world, the world of experience, the world we ourselves create. Reason is fine and valid, in its place. But the very conditions of its validity debar it from access to reality. Only if you're a skeptic can you live by reason.
[44:45] Q & A (selected questions below)
[44:47] How was Kant able to remove reason from the philosophy cscene even more than Hume did?
[47:15] How does Kant know that Mind's synthesizing activities are necessary and unchanging? How does he know that the structure of the mind won't change tomorrow?
[53:24] If the noumenal world is unknowable, how can Kant claim to know anything about it?
[58:55] Is Kant's view that the noumenal world exists independently of the human mind an acceptance of the primacy of existence?
[1:02:57] Would Kant say that the mind processes the same things-in-themselves in the same way, or is the synthesizing process arbitrary?
[1:05:02] If we cannot know reality as it really is, how can Kant claim to know the actual structure of the human mind?
The mad man actually did it
@@cas343 coming back to it after a year, I'm actually impressed with the effort I put in. Made it super quick to brush up on Kant's metaphysics/epistemology.
@@YashArya01your comment was very helpful I will be very grateful if you provide me some reading material on kant
Imagine some transducer such as a thermocouple which generates a voltage proportional to the ambient temperature a refrigerated rear compartment of a truck. The driver in the cab has access to the numerical output of the transducer, but not the ambient environment of the rear compartment. He observes the measured value and makes decisions accordingly, but if we ask ourselves how he may KNOW FOR REALZ the ambient temperature, the answer is inescapably that he can't. If the device malfunctions and tells him the ambient temperature has risen to 100F, reason dictates he should pull over and check his cargo and cooling equipment. He has no way of distinguishing the (in this case spurious) voltage from the ambient temperature it is supposed to represent. This is precisely what happened at 3-mile Island. The idea that the voltage represents the temperature is an HYPOTHESIS. In Objectivism this is the premise "Existence exists".
'Kant proposes 14 different Categories'
it's 12, though.
This is truly revealing. I remember when I was reading Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" there was mentioned something about the "collective mind" of men aka the truly nature of God. Now I know the root of Brown's ideas.
Apparently, Dan Brown and his DaVinci Code books/films are Gnostic, which I think is suppose to be some kind of heretical Christianity.
There's a video called "Gnosticism: Exposing the worldview of the Davinci Code | Dr. Michael Heiser"
It's about 6 hours long. I haven't finished it.
I'm not very knowledgeable about Gnosticism.
Crucıal ınformatıon for the benefıt of the world, and only 112 vıews!
Thanks!
You can assign the all the empirical qualities of matter to consciousness, something we know exists. Then you no longer need matter as a separate thing and may dispose of it.
Yes of course you can! But then you're back in Hume's boat! Just a string of unrealated qualities that happen to go together today but who knows tomorrow, ie in a Universe with no entities, no cause and effect, no self no nothing. But a very simple refutation of your position from the objectivist perspective (obviously not going to take the time to give a positive theory here) is this, in asserting that the only thing that exist is consciousness, you're making a statement about reality, something which its proponents take it to mean a true proposition which is independent of anybody's awareness, ie it's a fact you did not create, it's a fact independent of your believing in it, but that's incoherent because you're very assertion implies that there's no facts which are independent of your consciousness, There's no way you could get ouside your mind and of your own thesis to see whether it is the case. your own thesis could also be a creation of your own mind, after all nothing could possible validate your conclusions since they're all part of your experience and you have no independent base on which to be determine them as true or false, for those who believe in realism for instance that would be true for them, after all their minds shape reality and If it seems like it's a pasive sate that also is no argument againts that since everything just might be made up. More importantly a consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms, before it could identify itself as a consciousness it had to be conscious of something, otherwise you have the following scenario: awareness is awerness of something of a thing, If not, then you got awareness of awareness of awareness of awareness ad infinitum, perceptually before you're self aware there must be an self to be aware of, before I could dinguish my own awareness as an awerness I had to be aware of something if not, you eliminate what makes possible to form the concept of awareness, because there would be nothing to be aware of in the firts place, and hence no process to be identify. A sensation, a perception is of something, an object, none perceives their own experiences, because the prior logical question would be experiences of what?? If you eliminate the contrast bewteen the images in your own mind and the object you perceive, then the concept images in your own mind becomes empty and meaningless, Since i could no longer know what is an image in my mind and the object(s) I form an image from or think of them, no such distintion would be possible or intelligible, the image just would be pure image without being a image of something, you in effect would be reproducing a World inside conciessness created outt of nothing it could in principle have created its own contents otta of nothing.
Only one thing to say ..... thank you thank you 🙏 so much for this whole series & particularly for Kant's philosophy 🌼
Hume: So Immanuel, how do you know the mind creates the laws of reality, and how do you know it shall continue to do so and always in the ways you say it will?
Hegel: Hold mein Bier.
@@cas343 Schopenhauer: I spit in your bier!
Dare to know-phenomenal Kant
Reason becomes involved in darkness and contradictions-noumenal Kant
How is Kant a proponent of the primacy of consciousness if the synthesizing devices are preconscious (not subjective to our will or volition)?
Because consciousness doesn't have to ve volitional. The way your mind procces the information trough your senses, the way it reacts are out of your control. It's in your Nature to be conscious, wheter it is voluntary wich we call consciousness, or not, wich we call unconsciousness. It is primacy of consciousness because the subject looking at the object creates the rules wich the universe obey.
Or atleast this is what I understood. Maybe I'm wrong since I just started learning. Sorry if i misspelled something
Because all you ever encounter are mental synthesizing devices not reality.
I give you an example as I see it. Look on the web for the checkboard illusion. One square appears darker than the other even though they are identical. This is because our brains, via evolution, analyse wrongly the colours. In fact most optical illusions are brain illusions.
However our minds, our rational minds, allow us to examine and discover the illusion and the reason why perhaps our brain fools us. We could even construct present-day instruments which would correct this illusion should it be necessary.
The preconscious processing of our brain is great but not perfect. But we have a high degree of rational thinking, so we can correct errors. This is not in contradiction with an objective reality and the primacy of our senses if you include rational thinking as part of our senses.
Nothing of Kant actually is found in this video, who for example never discusses a 'noumenal world' in so many words.
Did you check the other videos in the playlist? Peikoff was pretty spot on.
this is a terrible interpretation of Kant. subjectivism? Kant? introducing scepticism into the heart of philosophy? what! one of his primary goals is to vindicate metaphysics against subjectivism and scepticism!
And yet he accepts alot of what Hume states
Kant isn't a complete skeptic like Hume but to deny that he isn't an skeptic at all is ridiculous
@@Damienn1776 everyone is skeptical to some extent. But he is not a skeptic in the philosophical meaning of the word. His philosophy was set up to counter philosophical skepticism which is why he created transcendental arguments
But isn't Kant's whole claim that the structure of the subject's own mind is what creates order from raw sensations of reality, independent of the order that is actually out there in reality? Doesn't he also claim that reality as such is unknowable as we can only know what our mind creates, not the real "noumenal" world? It sounds like both subjectivism and skepticism.
@@threeblindchickens "You can know the inside of your own mind." wow much reality.
@@threeblindchickens In the process conceding way too much to the sceptics.
I think both views have truth to them, existence is primary, we perceive data from the world and then our mind creates our own subjective reality from that data and our cognition would also be using expectations gained from prior experieces/perceptions. That is to say during the cognition our mind throws predictions in along with the raw data. Evidence for this is in the Mcgurk effect, in which it demonstrates that visual data and previous experience is prioritized in what is presented to the consciousness over audio data alone. In the effect the audio is kept the same, a person saying "bah", but the visual data is changed to someone mouthing a different sound "far" and the consciousness receives what the visual data and prior experiece predicts "far", over the reality which is the audio data "bah".