"It is simulacra all the way down—except, of course, for the scientific knowledge we have of the validity of this particular formal model."
Exactly.
I've been working on a post about the fairly common notion that we can have knowledge of the objective world as 'mind-independent', which is sometimes taken to be unknowable Kantian noumena and at other times to be knowable.
Curious to hear if you've heard/read any recent discussions about primary/secondary properties and access to the objective world? I get the sense people still buy into the idea that primary qualities tell us about the world "in itself", but there seems to be very little direct discussion of this topic (or I'm just missing out.)
Interesting article! Of course I contend that Kant's epistemological scope has more to offer (for contemporary science) than you seem to suggest. That's not to say there can't be valid criticism of Kant of course and my knowledge of Whitehead and the likes is very limited!
But I will point out a common misconception in that New-Yorker quote about the innateness of the categories:
Kant's categories of thought are explicitly NOT innate but acquired. I find this important to point out because in my view Kant is often portrayed as a bit of a mystifier while I see him as even more de-mystifying than most of contemporary empiricist views.
"For, if they are placed in the pure understanding it is only by this deduction that we can be prevented from taking them, with Plato, to be innate and basing on them extravagant pretensions and theories of the supersensible to which we can see no end, thereby making theology a magic lantern of chimeras; but if they are taken to be acquired, this deduction prevents us from restricting, with Epicurus, all and every use of them, even for practical purposes, merely to objects and determining grounds of the senses."
(Immanuel Kant: Critique of Practical Reason 5:141)
Zahavi (in Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy) provides an excellent argument against neuro-representationalism (i.e. Predictive Processing, Active Inference etc.). The following is my own summary of that argument (from https://tmfow.substack.com/p/world-model-and-mind):
"Neuro-representationalism starts out as a materialist realism: there is an independent material brain which generates experience and the world we see, based on sensory data from an inaccessible external reality. But this representation of things must also be embedded in this model, because the model of a brain generating experience enclosed in a world is a representation that on this view results from just such a model. But how can we then ever go beyond our model? How can we even posit that a brain is responsible for experience, if we are led to the brain also being just a representation in our model? If we are enclosed to a model, what justification is there for positing an external world? We have gone in a strange circle and arrived at some form of idealism, not materialist realism where we started. We also see here an example of how the hermeneutic circle is unavoidable: we are immersed in reality, and once we try to explain this immersion a leap must be made, some background must be assumed, for otherwise we have no ground to stand on at all."
Thanks as always for this presentation. The precision of terminology needed to sail on this sea is huge, and I’m afraid it’s going to get even more Byzantine 🤷🏼♀️. I get the sense of many true minds striving to extrapolate from abstractions. A drop of “direct spiritual experience” subjected to sensetive evaluation makes the terminology much more descriptive in nature. As I’m sure you know. Thanks again.
Great post!
"It is simulacra all the way down—except, of course, for the scientific knowledge we have of the validity of this particular formal model."
Exactly.
I've been working on a post about the fairly common notion that we can have knowledge of the objective world as 'mind-independent', which is sometimes taken to be unknowable Kantian noumena and at other times to be knowable.
Curious to hear if you've heard/read any recent discussions about primary/secondary properties and access to the objective world? I get the sense people still buy into the idea that primary qualities tell us about the world "in itself", but there seems to be very little direct discussion of this topic (or I'm just missing out.)
Interesting article! Of course I contend that Kant's epistemological scope has more to offer (for contemporary science) than you seem to suggest. That's not to say there can't be valid criticism of Kant of course and my knowledge of Whitehead and the likes is very limited!
But I will point out a common misconception in that New-Yorker quote about the innateness of the categories:
Kant's categories of thought are explicitly NOT innate but acquired. I find this important to point out because in my view Kant is often portrayed as a bit of a mystifier while I see him as even more de-mystifying than most of contemporary empiricist views.
"For, if they are placed in the pure understanding it is only by this deduction that we can be prevented from taking them, with Plato, to be innate and basing on them extravagant pretensions and theories of the supersensible to which we can see no end, thereby making theology a magic lantern of chimeras; but if they are taken to be acquired, this deduction prevents us from restricting, with Epicurus, all and every use of them, even for practical purposes, merely to objects and determining grounds of the senses."
(Immanuel Kant: Critique of Practical Reason 5:141)
Zahavi (in Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy) provides an excellent argument against neuro-representationalism (i.e. Predictive Processing, Active Inference etc.). The following is my own summary of that argument (from https://tmfow.substack.com/p/world-model-and-mind):
"Neuro-representationalism starts out as a materialist realism: there is an independent material brain which generates experience and the world we see, based on sensory data from an inaccessible external reality. But this representation of things must also be embedded in this model, because the model of a brain generating experience enclosed in a world is a representation that on this view results from just such a model. But how can we then ever go beyond our model? How can we even posit that a brain is responsible for experience, if we are led to the brain also being just a representation in our model? If we are enclosed to a model, what justification is there for positing an external world? We have gone in a strange circle and arrived at some form of idealism, not materialist realism where we started. We also see here an example of how the hermeneutic circle is unavoidable: we are immersed in reality, and once we try to explain this immersion a leap must be made, some background must be assumed, for otherwise we have no ground to stand on at all."
Thanks as always for this presentation. The precision of terminology needed to sail on this sea is huge, and I’m afraid it’s going to get even more Byzantine 🤷🏼♀️. I get the sense of many true minds striving to extrapolate from abstractions. A drop of “direct spiritual experience” subjected to sensetive evaluation makes the terminology much more descriptive in nature. As I’m sure you know. Thanks again.
Bryn