Will the 21st Century be a turning point in human history?

 The short answer, I believe, is Yes, but whether it will be positive or negative is up for conjecture. If history is any guide, I’d have to say things don’t look particularly promising. There have been a number of things I’ve read recently, and viewed on TV, from various sources that have made me reflect on this, and it’s hard to know where to start. 

Maybe I’ll start with something I wrote on Facebook recently, which was the seed for this rumination.

 

Humanity has always had both the capacity and inclination for self-destruction. It is our Achilles heel. One can't help but think that the 21st Century is our turning point, one way or the other.

 

There are lots of examples, the Roman Empire being one of the most cited, but also the ancient Egyptians and the Mayans, not to mention Easter Island. Curiously, I’ve just started watching Foundation, on Apple TV, based on Isaac Asimov’s famous books, which is premised on the fall of a future galactic empire founded and run by humanity.

 

But there is another TV series by the BBC called Capital, very contemporary, which I’ve also just started watching, and seems to encapsulate our current situation. I’ve only watched one episode, which centres on a single street in England, but is rendered as a microcosm of global politics and social dilemmas. 

There is the corporate middle manager whose ambition and greed is only outdone by his wife, who mentally spends his money before he’s even earned it. There is the refugee from Zimbabwe who is working illegally, therefore exploited by an ‘agent’, while she faces imminent deportation even though she fears death on arrival. Something that refugees in Australia can readily identify with. There is the Pakistani corner shopkeeper, who is a diligent neighbour, with 2 sons, one who has become religiously conservative and the other who has started, but not completed, 3 university degrees (I can identify with that). He’s the target of a stalker, covertly photographing him and his family. Like everyone else in the street, he’s receiving postcards with the ominous warning, We Want What You Have. In other words, there is an undercurrent of class envy which could fester into something more sinister. Another of the recipients is an elderly woman, whose son and daughter have all but abandoned her, and who is facing terminal illness, but she’s inherited the sin of living in a capitally inflated home.

 

Also, on TV recently, I watched a programme on (Australia’s) ABC 4 Corners, called The Pandora Papers, which is about tax havens for the ultra wealthy and powerful, and really identified an ‘alternative universe’, as one commentator described it, that the rest of us are largely unaware of. The programme showed how, in Australia, unidentified foreign investors are driving the price of homes beyond the reach of ordinary citizens who live here. There have been other programmes about corruption in the food industry in Europe, which goes beyond the borders of Europe.

 

I’ve read other stories in newspapers, and what they all have in common is inequality. Curiously, Philosophy Now (Issue 145 Aug/Sep 2021) had as its theme, existentialism, but included an article called The Stoic’s Lacuna by Alex Richardson, a History teacher at Croydon, UK. Its relevance to this topic was a reference to the Greek stoic, Epictetus, who said, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” In other words, accept one’s lot in life and stop whinging.

 

Richardson’s essay extends into the modern day by referencing Katherine Birbalsingh (given the sobriquet, Britain’s strictest headmistress), Dr Michael Sugrue and Jordan Peterson as ‘modern day stoics’, who all advocate in varying degrees, that inequality is the natural order of things. Birbalsingh may be the most liberal of them, when she says, “Of course the world is run by an old boys’ network, and of course it’s not fair.” I admit I know nothing about her outside Richardson’s essay, but he puts her in the same sentence, therefore category, as former Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, who effectively argues that a person’s day-to-day struggle with paying off a mortgage and generally making ends meet is completely disconnected from ‘political management of the economy’. 

 

Peterson is someone I’m more familiar with, who effectively argues that inequality is an evolutionary consequence of the survival of the fittest, not only in the natural world but in human affairs. People, especially males, get to the top of the heap, where they are especially attractive to females, who copulate and subsequently procreate with them to ensure the survival of both parties’ genes. As it happens, this exact scenario is played out by one of the families represented in the aforementioned TV show, Capital.

 

Richardson believes that Peterson is a ‘follower’ of the ‘Pareto Principle’, expressed in the Bible (both Mark and Matthew): “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as Richardson puts it, “wealth and power naturally accumulate in the hands of a few exceptional individuals at the top” (my emphasis).

 

But, according to Richardson, Dr Michael Sugrue is the most blunt and dispassionate, when he said in a popular lecture on Aurelius that ‘Stoicism teaches us that the social structure is “not our problem” and that, “if God, or nature, or whatever is controlling the world makes you a slave then be a good slave.”'

 

The common thread in all these admonitions, is that they are made by people who see themselves among the privileged elite, who would never contemplate that what they advocate for others could befall them.

 

I think inequality drives injustice, corruption and an upside down economy. To give an example, Italy. It’s well known that there is both social and wealth disparity between the north of Italy, which is the capital of supercars and high fashion, and the south of Italy, which is the home of agriculture and the country’s food bowl. But this dichotomy is worldwide. The production of food, which is essential, is one of the lowest paid occupations in the world.

 

Now, let’s add another factor, called climate change. I don’t find it altogether anomalous that climate change has a dichotomous effect on humanity. It’s the consequence of all the ‘progress’ we’ve made since the industrial revolution, and it’s a juggernaut that can’t be stopped. Yet it will affect the poorer nations first. As the Prime Minister of Samoa, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, recently said, ‘Pacific Islanders don’t want to be the canary in the coalmine for climate change’. If one looks at Italy again, one could argue that supercars have contributed to climate change and the agriculture sector will bear the consequences.

 

I recently did an online course provided by New Scientist, called Greener Living, which was ostensibly about climate change, its causes and its effects on future generations. According to the people running the course, it will require enormous changes to the way we live, including what we eat.

 

In the 25-26 September issue of the Weekend Australian Magazine (a Murdoch publication, btw) there was an interview with 33 year old Anika Molesworth, a scientist who also runs a farm near Broken Hill in NSW. She says that modelling for 2050 (based on nothing changing) would see 30% decrease in rainfall and 2 months of days above 40C, which would make the property effectively inoperable. But she also claims we have the means at our disposal to change this outcome, and she’s a founding director of Farmers for Climate Action. She’s frustrated by the missed opportunities in our country for renewable energy; we have a government that is stubbornly resistant to changes to the status quo.

 

I made an allusion before to the well known meme of evolution as the survival of the fittest, but much of evolution has occurred through symbiosis. Your body is an entire ecosystem to organisms that thrive in order for you to live, largely without your cognisance. I know from a working lifetime in engineering that successful projects are the result of people collaborating and working together. Environments, including our political environments, where people are antagonistic and work against each other, achieve little except blame and finger-pointing. A perfect example of that is the current political climate in America.

 

If we don’t want to self-destruct, we need to work together, punish corruption that erodes the wealth and agency of ordinary people, adopt sustainable economic models, not dependent on infinite consumerism and keeping people in debt for their entire productive lives. If we stick to the mantra that inequality is the ‘natural order’, we will fail and it will ultimately be catastrophic, worse than the Roman Empire, the Egyptian empire or the Mayan empire, because it will be global.

A philosophical exploration of Type A and Type B time

 This arose from a question referred to me on Quora. As part of my discussion, I wondered into philosophical territory originally posited over a century ago by a forgotten philosopher, J.M.E. McTaggart, thanks to A.C. Grayling (English philosophers seem to have a predilection for using initials). It seems to fit seamlessly into my own particular philosophy on the relationship between time and consciousness.

 

The original question on Quora, asked by Adriana Moraes (from Sao Paulo, Brazil):

 

How does the past, present, and future exist simultaneously?

 

I don’t believe they do. In fact, I contend that past, present and future are only meaningful concepts in some creature’s mind; which means that I don’t believe it’s a cognitive state unique to humanity.

 

We are only aware of the past because we have memories. In fact, without memory, you wouldn’t know you are conscious. Consciousness exists in a constant present, so time for us is always ‘now’. This, of course, applies to all sentient creatures. For all events that we witness or observe, ‘now’ is ephemeral – they become the past as soon as they happen - which is demonstrated every time someone takes a photo. We say it ‘freezes time’, when in fact, it records an event that would otherwise vanish.

 

Past, present and future require a reference point, and consciousness provides that reference point. We imagine futures, and curiously, the same part of the brain that imagines what might happen, conjures up memories of what has happened. This makes sense when one realises that we attempt to predict the future based on what we have experienced in the past. 

 

Raymond Tallis, who has a background in neuroscience and writes books as well as a regular column in Philosophy Now, makes the observation that our ability to ‘imagine’ future ‘possibilities’, and select one to make ‘actual’, is the very definition of free will, only he calls it 'agency'.

 

In 1908, an Oxford philosopher, J.M.E. McTaggart published a paper titled, On the Unreality of Time in the journal, Mind (ref: A.C. Grayling, The History of Philosophy, 2019). McTaggart argued that there are 2 types of time: Type A, which is based on using the ‘present’ as a reference point for ‘past-present-future’; and Type B, which is just the ordering of events into ‘earlier than/later than’. He contended, in effect, that because ‘now’ is constantly changing, you get contradictions with Type A and Type B (which is perceivably 'fixed'). I’ve over-simplified his argument for brevity, and given it my own interpretation, which is that you can’t have both Type A and Type B. However, I contend that Type B time is just Type A time without consciousness, which resolves that particular paradox.

 

Most physicists, if not all, believe that the past, present and future are all fixed, because, according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, ‘now’ is totally subjective. This is the so-called ‘block universe’, which is a logical consequence of treating time as a spatial dimension, giving us space-time.

 

You can observe time as a dimension by looking at the night sky and seeing stars hundreds, if not thousands of years, in the past. This means that hypothetical observers in different parts of the Universe see a different ‘now’ and will observe events occurring in different sequences. This is a logical consequence of the finite speed of light. However, causally related events must happen in an objective sequence, irrespective of observers. This is Type B time, as defined by McTaggart. We are able to deduce causality of events that have happened in our past, which gives us theories of cosmology and evolution. This has to be compatible with Type A time, which is dependent on the fact that we all live in the present all of the time. 

 

Whether our present is different to someone else’s present (somewhere else in the Universe) just means that their Type A experience of time is different to ours, but Type B time occurs regardless of conscious observers.

What is scientism?

 I’m currently reading a book (almost finished, actually) by Hugh Mackay, The Inner Self; The joy of discovering who we really are. Mackay is a psychologist but he writes very philosophically, and the only other book of his I’ve read is Right & Wrong: How to decide for yourself, which I’d recommend. In particular, I liked his chapter titled, The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

You may wonder what this has to do with the topic, but I need to provide context. In The Inner Self, Mackay describes 20 ‘hiding places’ (his term) where we hide from our ‘true selves’. It’s all about living a more ‘authentic’ life, which I’d endorse. To give a flavour, hiding places include work, perfectionism, projection, narcissism, victimhood – you get the picture. Another term one could use is ‘obsession’. I recently watched a panel of elite athletes (all Australian) answering a series of public-sourced questions (for an ABC series called, You Can’t Ask That), and one of the take-home messages was that to excel in any field, internationally, you have to be obsessed to the point of self-sacrifice. But this also applies to other fields, like performing arts and scientific research. I’d even say that writing a novel requires an element of obsession. So, obsession is often a necessity for success.

 

With that caveat, I found Mackay’s book very insightful and thought-provoking – It will make you examine yourself, which is no bad thing. I didn’t find any of it terribly contentious until I reached his third-last ‘hiding place’, which was Religion and Science. The fact that he would put them together, in the same category, immediately evoked my dissent. In fact, his elaboration on the topic bordered on relativism, which has led me to write this post in response.

 

Many years ago (over 2 decades) when I studied philosophy, I took a unit that literally taught relativism, though that term was never used. I’m talking epistemological relativism as opposed to moral relativism. It’s effectively the view that no particular discipline or system of knowledge has a privileged or superior position. Yes, that viewpoint can be found in academia (at least, back then).

 

Mackay’s chapter on the topic has the same flavour, which allows him to include ‘scientism’ as effectively a religion. He starts off by pointing out that science has been used to commit atrocities the same as religion has, which is true. Science, at base, is all about knowledge, and knowledge can be used for good or evil, as we all know. But the ethics involved has more to do with politicians, lawmakers and board appointees. There are, of course, ethical arguments about GM foods, vaccinations and the use of animals in research. Regarding the last one, I couldn’t personally do research involving the harming of animals, not that I’ve ever done any form of research.

 

But this isn’t my main contention. He makes an offhand reference at one point about the ‘incompatibility’ of science and religion, as if it’s a pejorative remark that reflects an unjustified prejudice on the part of someone who’d make that comment. Well, to the extent that many religions are mythologically based, including religious texts (like the Bible), I’d say the prejudice is justified. It’s what the evolution versus creation debate is all about in the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in the world.

 

I’ve long argued that science is neutral on whether God exists or not. So let me talk about God before I talk about science. I contend that there are 2 different ideas of God that are commonly conflated. One is God as demiurge, and on that I’m an atheist. By which I mean, I don’t believe there is an anthropomorphic super-being who created a universe just for us. So I’m not even agnostic on that, though I’m agnostic about an after-life, because we simply don’t know.

 

The other idea of God is a personal subjective experience which is individually unique, and most likely a projection of an ‘ideal self’, yet feels external. This is very common, across cultures, and on this, I’m a theist. The best example I can think of is the famous mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who believed that all his mathematical insights and discoveries came directly from the Hindu Goddess, Namagiri Thayar. Ramanujan (pronounced rama-nu-jan) was both a genius and a mystic. His famous ‘notebooks’ are still providing fertile material 100 years later. He traversed cultures in a way that probably wouldn’t happen today.

 

Speaking of mathematics, I wrote a post called Mathematics as religion, based on John Barrow’s book, Pi in the Sky. According to Marcus du Sautoy, Barrow is Christian, though you wouldn’t know it from his popular science books. Einstein claimed he was religious, ‘but not in the conventional sense’. Schrodinger studied the Hindu Upanishads, which he revealed in his short tome, Mind and Matter (compiled with What is Life?).

 

Many scientists have religious beliefs, but the pursuit of science is atheistic by necessity. Once you bring God into science as an explanation for something, you are effectively saying, we can’t explain this and we’ve come to the end of science. It’s commonly called the God-of-the-gaps, but I call it the God of ignorance, because that’s exactly what it represents.

 

I have 2 equations tattooed on my arms, which I describe in detail elsewhere, but they effectively encapsulate my 3 worlds philosophy: the physical, the mental and the mathematical. Mackay doesn’t talk about mathematics specifically, which is not surprising, but it has a special place in epistemology. He does compare science to religion in that scientific theories incorporate ‘beliefs', and religious beliefs are 'the religious equivalent of theories'. However, you can’t compare scientific beliefs with religious faith, because one is contingent on future discoveries and the other is dogma. All scientists worthy of the name know how ignorant we are, but the same can’t be said for religious fundamentalists.

 

However, he's right that scientific theories are regularly superseded, though not in the way he infers. All scientific theories have epistemological limits, and new theories, like quantum mechanics and relativity (as examples), extend old theories, like Newtonian mechanics, into new fields without proving them wrong in the fields they already described. And that’s a major difference to just superseding them outright.

 

But mathematics is different. As Freeman Dyson once pointed out, a mathematical theorem is true for all time. New mathematical discoveries don’t prove old mathematical discoveries untrue. Mathematics has a special place in our system of knowledge.

 

So what is scientism? It’s a pejorative term that trivialises and diminishes science as an epistemological success story.

Does imagination separate us from AI?

 I think this is a very good question, but it depends on how one defines ‘imagination’. I remember having a conversation (via email) with Peter Watson, who wrote an excellent book, A Terrible Beauty (about the minds and ideas of the 20^th Century) which covered the arts and sciences with equal erudition, and very little of the politics and conflicts that we tend to associate with that century. In reference to the topic, he argued that imagination was a word past its use-by date, just like introspection and any other term that referred to an inner world. Effectively, he argued that because our inner world is completely dependent on our outer world, it’s misleading to use terms that suggest otherwise.

It’s an interesting perspective, not without merit, when you consider that we all speak and think in a language that is totally dependent on an external environment from our earliest years. 

 

But memory for us is not at all like memory in a computer, which provides a literal record of whatever it stores, including images, words and sounds. On the contrary, our memories of events are ‘reconstructions’, which tend to become less reliable over time. Curiously, the imagination apparently uses the same part of the brain as memory. I’m talking semantic memory, not muscle memory, which is completely different, physiologically. So the imagination, from the brain’s perspective is like a memory of the future. In other words, it’s a projection into the future of something we might desire or fear or just expect to happen. I believe that many animals have this same facility, which they demonstrate when they hunt or, alternatively, evade being hunted.

 

Raymond Tallis, who has a background in neuroscience and writes books as well as a regular column in Philosophy Now, had this to say, when talking about free will:

 

Free agents, then, are free because they select between imagined possibilities, and use actualities to bring about one rather than another.

 

I find a correspondence here with Richard Feynman’s ‘sum over histories’ interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM). There are, in fact, an infinite number of possible paths in the future, but only one is ‘actualised’ in the past.

 

But the key here is imagination. It is because we can imagine a future that we attempt to bring it about - that's free will. And what we imagine is affected by our past, our emotions and our intellectual considerations, but that doesn't make it predetermined.

 

Now, recent advances in AI would appear to do something similar in the form of making predictions based on recordings of past events. So what’s the difference? Well, if we’re playing a game of chess, there might not be a lot of difference, and AI has reached the stage where it can do it even better than humans. There are even computer programmes available now that try and predict what I’m going to write next, based on what I’ve already written. How do you know this hasn’t been written by a machine?

 

Computers use data – lots of it – and use it mindlessly, which means the computer really doesn’t know what it means in the same way we do. A computer can win a game of chess, but it requires a human watching the game to appreciate what it actually did. In the same way that a computer can distinguish one colour from another, including different shades of a single colour, but without ever ‘seeing’ a colour the way we do.

 

So, when we ‘imagine’, we fabricate a mindscape that affects us emotionally. The most obvious examples are in art, including music and stories. We now have computers also creating works of art, including music and stories. But here’s the thing: the computer cannot respond to these works of art the way we do.

 

Imagination is one of the fundamental attributes that makes us humans. An AI can and will (in the future) generate scenarios and select the one that produces the best outcome, given specific criteria. But, even in these situations, it is a tool that a human will use to analyse enormous amounts of data that would be beyond our capabilities. But I wouldn’t call it imagination any more than I would say an AI could see colour.

Social norms determine morality

 The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 140, Oct/Nov 2020) has Hegel as its theme. I confess that really the only thing I knew about Hegel was his ‘dialectic’ and that he influenced Marx, though, from memory, Marx claimed to have turned Hegel’s dialectic ‘on its head’. Hegel’s dialectic has relevance to politics and history, because, basically, he claimed that if someone proposes a ‘thesis’ someone else will propose its ‘antithesis’ and we end up with a ‘synthesis’ of the two. Some people claim that this is how history has progressed, but I’m not so sure. 

 

However, I do agree that if someone promotes an ideology or a social agenda, you will invariably get opposition to it, and the stronger the promotion, the stronger the opposition. We see this in politics a lot, but a good example is religion. Militant atheism only tends to occur in societies where you have militant fundamentalist religion, which is usually Christian, but could be Muslim. In societies where no one really cares about religion, no one cares too much about atheism either. 

 

I know this, because I live in a culture where no one cares and I’ve visited one where people do, which is America (at the dawn of the 21^st Century). Mind you, I grew up in 1950s Australia when there was a division between Catholic and protestant that even affected the small rural town where I lived and was educated in. That division evaporated in the 1960s pretty much, with a zeitgeist that swept the Western world. It was largely driven by post war liberalism, the introduction of the contraceptive pill and a cultural phenomenon called rock and roll. But what I remember growing up in the 60’s, leaving school, going to university and entering the workforce in a major city, was that we males grew our hair long and everyone, including women, questioned everything. We were rebellious: there were marches against our involvement in the Vietnam war and an Australian academic by the name of Germaine Greer published a book called The Female Eunuch.

 

And all of this is relevant to the theme of my thesis, which is that morality is really about social norms, which is why morality evolves, and whether it evolves for the better or worse is dependent on a lot of factors, not least political forces and individuals’ perceptions of their own worth and sense of security within a social context.

 

But getting back to Hegel, many saw the rebellious attitude in the 1960s as a backlash against conservative forces, especially religious based ones, that had arisen in the 1950s. And this in turn, was a reaction to the forces of fascism that had ignited the most widespread and devastating conflict in the whole of human history. There was almost no one who had not been affected by that in Europe or Asia or North America. Even, in far-flung Australia and New Zealand, it seemed that every family had a member or knew someone who had been directly involved in that war. My family was no exception, as I’ve written about elsewhere.

 

In the same issue of Philosophy Now, there is an article by Terrence Thomson (a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in Kingston University, London) titled, Kant, Conflict & Universal History. I’ve written about Kant elsewhere, but not in this context. He’s more famously known for his epistemology, discussed in some detail in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which was the subject of my essay. But, according to Thomson, 3 years later (1784), he published an article in a ‘prominent intellectual newspaper, titled: Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective.’ Without going into too much detail, Kant coined a term, ‘unsociable sociability’, which he contended is ‘a feature of human social interaction’, and which he defined as the human “tendency to enter into society, a tendency that continually threatens to break up this society”. Quoting Thomson (interpreting Kant): ‘...it is a natural human inclination to connect with people and to be part of a larger whole; yet it is also part of our natural inclination to destroy these social bonds through isolationism and divisiveness.’ One has to look no further than the just-held, US presidential election and its immediate aftermath to see this in action. But one could also see this as an example of Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ in action.

 

As I explained in my introduction, Hegel argued that a ‘synthesis’ arises out of an opposition between a ‘thesis’ and its ‘antithesis’, but then the synthesis becomes a new ‘thesis’, which creates a new ‘antithesis’, and so the dialectic never stops. This could also be seen as similar to, if not the same as, the dynamic that Thomson attributes to Kant: the human inclination to ‘belong’ followed by an opposing inclination to ‘break those social bonds’.

 

I take a much simpler view, which is that humans are inherently tribal. And tribalism is a double-edged sword. It creates the division that Kant alludes to in his ‘unsociable sociability’, and it creates the antithesis of Hegel’s dialectic. We see this in the division created by religion throughout history, and not just the petty example I witnessed in my childhood. And now, in the current age, we have a new tribalism in the form of political parties, exemplified by the deep divisions in the US, even before Donald Trump exploited them to the full in his recently eclipsed, 4 year term.

 

And this brings me back, by a very convoluted route, to the subject of this essay: morality and social norms. Trump did his best to change social norms, and, by so doing, change his society’s moral landscape, whether intentionally or not. He made it socially acceptable to be disrespectful to ‘others’, which included women, ‘grab them by the pussy’, immigrants, Muslims, the former President, anyone in the Democratic party, anyone in the GOP who didn’t support him and his own Intelligence community and Defence personnel. He also made white supremacy and fringe conspiracy theorist groups feel legitimised. But, most significantly, beyond everything else, he propagated a social norm whereby you could dismiss any report by any authority whatsoever that didn’t fit in with your worldview – you could simply create your own ‘facts’.

 

In most societies, especially Western democratic societies, we expect social norms to evolve that make people feel more inclusive and that constructively build collaborative relationships, because we know from experience, that that is how we get things done. As a retired naval admiral and self-ascribed conservative (in a TV interview prior to the election) pointed out, Trump did the exact opposite, both at home and abroad: he broke off relations and fomented division wherever and whenever he could. I’ve argued in previous posts that leaders bring out the best in the people they lead, which is how they are ultimately judged; contrarily, Trump brought out the worst in people.

 

In one of my better posts, I discussed at length how a young woman, raped and fatally tortured on a bus in India, exposed the generational divide in social norms in that country at that time, and how it directly affected one’s perception of the morality of that specific incident. 

 

From a Western perspective, especially given the recent ‘me-too’ movement, this is perverse. However, in the late 60s, early 70s, when I was entering adulthood, there was a double-standard when it came to sexual behaviour. It was okay for men to have sex with as many partners as they could find, but it was not alright for women to indulge in the same activity. This led to men behaving more predatory and it was considered normal for women to be ‘seduced’, even if it was against their better-intentions. The double-standard of the day really didn’t encourage much alternative. The introduction of the contraceptive pill, I believe, was the game-changer. Because, theoretically, women could have the same sexual freedom as men without the constant fear of becoming pregnant, which was still a stigma at that time. Now, some of my generation may have a different rear-vision view of this, but I give it as an example of changing social norms occurring concordantly with changing moral perceptions.

 

I write science fiction, as a hobby or pastime, rather than professionally. But what attracted me to sci-fi as a genre, was not so much the futuristic technologies one could conjure up, but the what-if societies that might exist on worlds isolated by astronomical distances. In a recent work, I explored a society that included clones (genetically engineered humans, so not copies per se). In this society, female clones are exploited because they have no family. Instead, they have guardianships that can be sold onto someone else, and this becomes a social norm that’s tacitly accepted. Logically, this leads to sexual exploitation. I admit to being influenced by Blade Runner 2049, though I go in a completely different direction, and my story is more of a psychological thriller than an action thriller. There is sexual exploitation on both sides: I have a man in authority having a sexual relationship with a character by blackmail; and I have a woman sexually exploiting a character so she can manipulate him into committing a crime. Neither of these scenarios were part of my original plot; they evolved in the way that stories do, and became core elements. In fact, it could be argued that the woman is even more evil than the man.

 

Both characters come undone in the end, but, more importantly to me was that the characters should be realistic and not paper cut-outs. I asked someone who’d read it what they thought of the man in power, and they said, ‘Oh, people like him exist, even now.’ 

Does history progress? If so, to what?

This is another Question of the Month from Philosophy Now. The last two I submitted weren’t published, but I really don’t mind as the answers they did publish were generally better than mine. Normally, with a question like this, you know what you want to say before you start. In other words, you know what your conclusion is. But, in this case, I had no idea.

 

At first, I wasn’t going to answer, because I thought the question was a bit obtuse. However, I couldn’t help myself. I started by analysing the question and then just followed the logic.

 

 

I found a dissonance to this question, because ‘history’, by definition, is about the past and ‘progress’ infers projection into the future. In fact, a dictionary definition of history tells us it’s “the study of past events, particularly in human affairs”. And a dictionary definition of progress is “forward or onward movement to a destination”. If one puts the two together, there is an inference that history has a ‘destination’, which is also implicit in the question.

 

I’ve never studied history per se, but if one studies the evolution of ideas in any field, be it science, philosophy, arts, literature or music, one can’t fail to confront the history of human ideas, in all their scope and diversity, and all the richness that has arisen out of that, imbued in culture as well as the material and social consequences of civilisations.

 

There are two questions, one dependent on the other, so we need to address the first one first. If one uses metrics like health, wealth, living conditions, peace, then there appears to be progress over the long term. But if one looks closer, this progress is uneven, even unequal, and one wonders if the future will be even more unequal than the present, as technologies become more available and affordable to some societies than others.

 

Progress infers change, and the 20^th Century saw more change than in the entire previous history of humankind. I expect the 21^st Century will see more change still, which, like the 20^th Century, will be largely unpredictable. This leads to the second question, which I’ll rephrase to make more germane to my discussion: what is the ‘destination’ and do we have control over it?

 

Humans, both as individuals and collectives, like to believe that they control their destiny. I would argue that, collectively, we are currently at a cross roads, which is evidenced by the political polarisation we see everywhere in the Western world.

 

But this cross roads has social and material consequences for the future. It’s epitomised by the debate over climate change, which is a litmus test for whether we control our destiny or not. It not only requires political will, but the consensus of a global community, and not just the scientific community. If we do nothing, it will paradoxically have a bigger impact than taking action. But there is hope: the emerging generation appears more predisposed than the current one.

Road safety starts with the driver, not the vehicle

There was recently (pre-COVID-19) a road-safety ad on some cinemas in Australia (and possibly TV) for motorcyclists. We have video of a motorcyclist on a winding road, which I guess is the other side of Healesville, and there is a voiceover of his thoughts. He sees a branch on the road to avoid, he sees a curve coming up, he consciously thinks through changing gears, including clutch manipulation, he sees a van ahead which he overtakes. The point is that there is this continuous internal dialogue based on what he observes while he’s riding. 

What I find intriguing is that this ad is obviously targeted at motorcyclists, yet I fail to see why it doesn’t equally apply to car drivers. I learned to drive (decades ago) from riding motorcycles, not only on winding roads but in city and suburban traffic. I used to do a daily commute along one of the busiest arterial roads from East Sydney to Western Sydney and back, which I’d still claim to be the most dangerous stretch of driving I ever did in my life. 

I had at least one close call and one accident when a panel van turned left into a side road from the middle lane while I was in the left lane (vehicles travel on the left side, a la Britain, in Australia). I not only went over the top of my bike but the van started to drag the bike over me while I was trapped in the gutter, and then he stopped. I was very young and unhurt and he was older and managed to convince me that it was my fault. My biggest concern was not whether I had sustained injuries (I hadn’t) but that the bike was unrideable.

Watching the ad on the screen, which is clearly aimed at a younger version of myself, I thought that’s how I drive all the time, and I learned that from riding bikes, even though I haven’t ridden a bike in more than 3 decades. It occurred to me that most people probably don’t – they put their cars on cruise-control, now ‘adaptive’, and think about something else entirely, possibly having a conversation with someone who is not even in the vehicle.

In Australia, speed limits get lower and lower every year, so that drivers don’t have to think about what they’re doing. The biggest cause of accidents now, I understand, are distractions to the driver. We are transitioning (for want of a better word) to fully autonomous vehicles. In the interim, it seems that since we don’t have automaton cars, we need automaton drivers. Humans actually don’t make good robots. The road-safety ad aimed at motorcyclists is the exact opposite of this thinking.

I’m anomalous in that I still drive a manual and actually enjoy it. I’ve found others of my generation, including women, who feel that driving a manual forces them to think about what they’re doing in a way that an auto doesn’t. In a manual, you are constantly anticipating what gear you need, whether it be for traffic or for a corner, to slow down or to speed up (just like the rider in the ad). It becomes an integral part of driving. I have a 6 speed which is the same as I had on my first 2 motorbikes, and I use the gears in exactly the same way. We are taught to get into top gear as quickly as possible and stay there. But, riding a bike, you soon learn that this is nonsense. In my car, you ideally need to be doing 100km/hr (60 mph) to change into top gear. 

We have cars that do their best to take the driving out of driving, and I’m not convinced that makes us safer, though most people seem to think it does.

Addendum: I acknowledge I’m a fossil like the car I drive. I do drive autos, and it doesn’t change the way I drive, but I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the experience. I accept that, in the future, cars probably won’t be enjoyable to drive at all, because they will have no 'feeling'. The Tesla represents the future of motoring, whether autonomous or not.

Is liberalism under siege?

Like most so-called liberal-minded individuals, I read liberal-minded media, like The New Yorker, but I also acquire The Weekend Australian, religiously, every weekend (a Murdoch broadsheet newspaper). Like most weekend tabloids, it has ‘sections’ and pull-out segments, including a Weekend Australian Magazine and Weekend Australian Review. These pull-out segments often include profiles of people from all walks of life, coverage of arts and culture, as well as commentaries on topical issues.

There is a curious dichotomy in that the main body of the paper has opinion pieces that are predominantly and overtly conservative, whereas the ‘pull-out’ sections (mentioned above) have far more liberal content. Having said that, this weekend, there was virtually a full-page article called Voice, Treaty, Truth: Heart, which was an extract from a book called Treaty by George Williams and Harry Hobbs (who are, respectively, Dean and lecturer in the faculty of law at the University of NSW). It gives a potted history of the treaty process in Australia for indigenous people, with well written arguments on why it’s a necessary process for all Australians. The idea has long been opposed by conservative voices in Australia, so it says a lot that it finds expression in a conservative newspaper.

I only reference the article to give contrast to other feature articles dealing with the current ‘black lives matter’ crisis occurring in the US and spilling over into Australia on the same weekend. In particular, 3 opinion pieces by Paul Kelly (Editor at Large), Greg Sheridan (Foreign Editor) and Chris Kenny (Associate Editor) that provide different yet distinctly conservative views on the divisive issue. None of them are apologists for Trump, yet Sheridan and Kenny, in particular, are critical, to the point of ridicule, of the backlash against Trump, and downplay the racial schism that has become a running sore over the past week.

But I wish to focus on Paul Kelly’s commentary, The Uncivil War Killing Liberalism, because his arguments are more measured and he takes a much wider view. Kelly has been critical of Trump in the past – in particular, his incompetent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic right from the outset.

Kelly effectively argues that liberalism is under attack from both sides, with the political desertion of the ‘centre’ all over the Western world. I’ve made the same point myself, but, even though I’d guess we’re of a similar vintage, we have different perspectives and biases.

Kelly provides a broad definition, which I’ll quote out of context:

...liberalism means equality before the law regardless of race, equal access to health care and education on the principle of universalism.

This is an ideal that is far from fulfilled in virtually every democracy in the modern world, and is manifest in faultlines, particularly in the US, which is the main focus of Kelly’s essay. He more or less says as much in the next paragraph:

Yet the US today is engulfed in a series of social crises, with life expectancy falling for three successive years since 2015.

Kelly sees Trump as a symptom, or a ‘product’ of a ‘decline into cultural decadence’ (quoting conservative New York Times journalist, Ross Douthat, from his book, The Decadent Society). Kelly clearly agrees with Douthat when he quotes him: Trump exploits the decline of liberalism while being an agent of that decline.

But, like many conservative commentators, Kelly lays at least part of the blame with what he and others call ‘the Elites’. He quotes another American author, Christopher Lasch, from his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites:

The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes and complacent, dull and dowdy.

There is a social dynamic occurring here that I have seen before, and so I believe has Kelly. I’m thinking of the 1960s when there was a revolt against postwar conservative values that was arguably augmented by the introduction of oral contraception. It included a rejection of the dominance of the Church in both legislative and family politics, as well as shifts in feminist politics, the effects of which are still being experienced a couple of generations later. Were the ‘radicals’ advocating those ideals the ‘elites’ of their generation?

One of the major differences between American and Australian cultures is obvious to Australians and a surprise to many Americans. In Australia, religious belief is rarely an issue, and certainly not in politics. This wasn’t always the case. When I was growing up there was a divide between protestants and Catholics that even affected the small country town where I lived and was educated. The dissolution of that division was one of the more providential casualties of the 1960s. These days, most Australians are apathetic about religion, which renders it mostly a non-issue.

The reason I raise this is because militant atheism is most aggressive in countries where fundamentalist religion is most political (like the US). In other words, when you get extreme views becoming mainstream, you will get a reaction from the polar opposite extreme. And this is what is happening in politics pretty well worldwide.

So Kelly is right when he contends that Trump is the manifestation of a reaction to left wing ideologies, but he leaves a lot out. If one goes back to the ‘definition’ of liberalism, scribed by Kelly himself, the word ‘equality’ tends to stick in one’s craw. Inequality is arguably the biggest issue in the US which has been exacerbated by recent events. Even in the pandemic, which one assumes is indiscriminate, Black deaths have outnumbered Whites, which suggests that health care is not equitable.

It would seem that people (well, conservative political commentators at least) have already forgotten both the cause and the consequences of the GFC. The GFC hit middle America hard and it is their hardship that Trump exploited. So, the so-called ‘decadence of liberalism’ is a straw man that hides the discontent caused by the sheer greed of the people whom Trump and his ‘Tea Party’ allies really represent.

Kelly argues that ‘aggressive progressivism’ is one, if not ‘the’ cause of the ‘assault on liberalism’, to use his own words. He doesn’t say, but one assumes by ‘aggressive progressivism’, he’s talking about the strong push for renewable energy sources in response to what he calls ‘climate change alarmists’. Curiously, it’s been reported in the last week that industry leaders (you know, the ones who vote for conservative governments) are pushing for more investment in renewable resources. So we have industry groups attempting to lead the (conservative) Australian government, following the paralysis of the last decade by consecutive governments on both sides.

Kelly also argues that ‘individualism’ is one of the factors, along with ‘multiculturalism’, which he denigrates. In Australia, I’ve witnessed at least 3 waves of immigration, all of which have brought out the best and the worst in people. But generally people have got along fine because we tend to live and let live. As long as people from all backgrounds have the same access to health care and education and job opportunities, then there is very little societal dislocation that the xenophobes warn us about. There is inequality, especially among indigenous Australians, and I think that is why the recent protests in America have resonated here. Equality, I believe, starts with education. There is an elitism around education here and it is a political minefield. But the ideals of liberalism, expressed so succinctly by Kelly, surely start with education.

If one takes a broad historical perspective, it’s generally the ideas and ideals of people on the Left of politics that develop into social norms, even for conservatives of later generations. This is arguably how liberalism has evolved and will continue to evolve. Importantly, it’s dynamic, not static.

How do we understand each other?

This is the latest Question of the Month from Philosophy Now (Issue 137 April/May 2020), so answers will appear in Issue 139 (Aug/Sep 2020). It just occurred to me that I may have misread the question and the question I've answered is: How CAN we understand each other? Whatever, it's still worthy of a post, and below is what I wrote: definitely philosophical with psychological underpinnings and political overtones. There’s a thinly veiled reference to my not-so-recent post on Plato, and the conclusion was unexpected.

This is possibly the most difficult question I’ve encountered on Question of the Month, and I’m not sure I have the answer. If there is one characteristic that defines humans, it’s that we are tribal to the extent that it can define us. In almost every facet of our lives we create ingroups and outgroups, and it starts in childhood. If one watches the so-called debates that occur in parliament (at least in Australia) it can remind one of their childhood experiences at school. In current political discourse, if someone proposes an action or a policy, it is reflexively countered by the opposition, irrespective of its merit.

But I’ve also observed this is in the workplace, working on complex engineering projects, where contractual relationships can create similar divisions; where differences of opinion and perspective can escalate to irrational opposition that invariably leads to paralysis.

We’ve observed worldwide (at least in the West) divisions becoming stronger, reinforced by social media that is increasingly being used as a political weapon. We have situations where groups holding extreme yet strongly opposing views will both resist and subvert a compromise position proposed by the middle, which logically results in stalemate.

Staying with Australia (where I’ve lived since birth), we observed this stalemate in energy policy for over a decade. Every time a compromise was about to be reached, either someone from the left side or someone from the right side would scuttle it, because they would not accept a compromise on principle.

But recently, two events occurred in Australia that changed the physical, social and political landscape. In the summer of 2019/2020, we witnessed the worst bushfire season, not only in my lifetime, but in recorded history since European settlement. And although there was some political sniping and blame-calling, all the governments, both Federal and States, deferred to the experts in wildfire and forestry management. What’s more, the whole community came together and helped out irrespective of political and cultural differences. And then, the same thing happened with the COVID-19 crisis. There was broad bipartisan agreement on formulating a response, and the medical experts were not only allowed to do their job but to dictate policy.

Plato was critical of democracies and argued for a ‘philosopher-king’. We don’t have philosopher-kings, but we have non-ideological institutions with diverse scientific and technical expertise. I would contend that ‘understanding each other’ starts with acknowledging one’s own ignorance. 

Is Kant relevant to the modern world?

I recently wrote a comment on Quora that addresses this very question, but I need to backtrack a couple of decades. When I studied philosophy, I wrote an essay on Kant, around the same time I wrote my essay on Christianity and Buddhism. 

Not so long ago (over Christmas) I read AC Grayling’s The History of Philosophy, which, at 580+ pages is pretty extensive and even includes brief discussions on Hindu, Chinese, Islamic and sub-Saharan African philosophy. Any treatise you read on the history of Western philosophy will include Kant as one of the giants of the discipline. Grayling’s book, in particular, provides both historical and contextual perspectives. According to Grayling, Kant brought together the two ‘opposing’ branches of analytical philosophy of his time: empiricism and idealism.

I’ve read Critique of Pure Reason (in English, obviously) and it’s as obscure in places as Kant’s reputation presumes. Someone once claimed that Kant’s lectures were very popular and a lot less intimidating than his texts. If that is true, then one regrets that he didn’t live in the age of YouTube. But his texts, and subsequent commentaries on them, are all we have, including this one you’re about to read. I will include the original bibliography, as I did with my other ‘academic’ essay.

The essay was titled: What is transcendental idealism?

Kant, I believe, made two major contributions to philosophy: that there is a limit to what we can know; and that there is a difference between what we perceive and ‘things-in-themselves’. These two ideas are naturally related but they are not synonymous. Transcendental idealism arose out of Kant’s attempt to incorporate these ideas into an overall philosophy of knowledge or epistemology. Kant is extremely difficult to follow and this is not helped when many of the essays written on Kant are just as obtuse and difficult to understand as Kant himself. However there are parts of Kant’s Critique that are relatively plain and easy to follow. It is my intention to start with these aspects and work towards an exposition on transcendental idealism.

I think it is important to note that our understanding in science and psychology has increased considerably since Kant’s time, and this must influence any modern analysis of his epistemology. For example, in Kant’s time, it was Newton’s physics that provided the paradigm for empirical knowledge and therefore a deterministic universe seemed inevitable. With the discovery of quantum mechanics and Chaos theory, this is no longer the case, and Kant’s third 'antimony' on ‘freedom’ does not have the same relevance as it did in his time. A contemporary analogy to this might be materialism as the current paradigm for consciousness, because current theories are based on our knowledge of genetics, biochemistry and neuroscience, and the limitations of that knowledge. It is quite possible that future developments may overturn materialism as a paradigm because our knowledge of consciousness today is arguably no greater than our knowledge of physics was during Newton’s time.

In view of what we’ve learnt since Kant’s time, it seems to me that he had a remarkable, indeed almost prophetic insight, yet I cannot help but also believe that his philosophy contains a fundamental flaw. The fundamental flaw is his insistence that space and time are purely psychological phenomena, or in Kant’s own terms, that space and time are apriori ‘forms’ of the mind. ‘But this space and this time, and with them all appearances, are not in themselves things; they are nothing but representations and cannot exist outside our minds.’ One of my objectives, therefore, is to provide a resolution of this flaw with aspects of his philosophy that I find sound. Ironically, I believe that time and space give us the best insight into understanding Kant’s transcendental idealism, though not in a manner that he could have foreseen.

A philosophy of knowledge naturally includes knowledge acquisition, and for Kant, this required an analysis of human cognitive abilities. I believe this is a good place to start in understanding Kant. Kant realised that there are two aspects of knowledge acquisition in humans: what we gain directly through our senses or ‘sensibilities’ and what we ‘synthesise’ into concepts through ‘pure understanding’. Kant realised that this synthesis is in effect consciousness. Kant explains how concepts can go beyond experience, which is what he calls pure understanding. This in effect is transcendental idealism, which is speculative as opposed to empirical realism which is based on experience. Another perspective to this is that most animals, we assume, can synthesise knowledge at the sensibility level, otherwise they would not be able to interact with their environment, whereas humans can synthesise knowledge at another level altogether which I believe is Kant’s transcendental level. Note that Kant is not talking about metaphysical knowledge in his reference to the transcendental, but knowledge of the object-in-itself, a concept I will return to later.

Whether Kant realised it or not, this synthesis of concepts is also the way in which we remember things in the long term - that is through association of concepts. I’m talking about knowledge type memory rather than physiological type memory which allows us to remember how to do tasks, like driving a car or playing a musical instrument. These are different types of memory which are dependent on different physiological mechanisms within the brain. The point is that this synthesising of concepts is a memory function as well as a means of understanding. It is virtually impossible to remember new knowledge unless we synthesise it into existing knowledge.

Both in the Study Guide and in Allison’s essay on The Thing in Itself, perception of colour is used as an example of knowledge gained through the senses, and in the Study Guide is contrasted with space and time, which according to Kant are apriori knowledge, and therefore independent of experience. This leads to the problem I have with Kant, because space and time are also sensed by us, despite Kant’s objections that space and time are not entities. It should be pointed out that colour is purely a psychological phenomenon. In other words, colour, unlike space and time, does not exist outside the mind. In fact colour is probably the best example for explaining the difference between what we perceive (our ‘representations’) and ‘things-in-themselves’. Colour as it is-in-itself is a wavelength of light, and so is radar and radio waves and cosmic rays. It is believed that some animals can see in ultraviolet light so that for them ultraviolet light is a colour. Colour best explains Kant’s philosophical point that appearances or representations are not the same as the phenomenon as it exists-in-itself.

So colour only exists in the mind as the result of sensory perception, as Kant himself explained. It is not that appearances or representations of objects as perceived are different entities to what exists in the real world, but that we are only aware or can only sense specific attributes of these objects. This is an important point that is not often delineated.

So in what respects are space and time different? Space and time are different because they are the manifold in which the universe exists - without space and time there would be no universe, no physical universe anyway; no universe that we could perceive in an empirical sense, therefore no empirical realism. According to Kant however, space and time are apriori ‘forms’ that we impose on the universe. There are many aspects to this issue so let’s start with sensory perception. In regard to space, we have a sense in addition to the five known ones called proprioception, discovered by Sherrington in the 1890s. This is a sense that tells us where every part of our body is in space. Oliver Sacks in his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, describes a case he called ‘The Disembodied Lady’, of a woman who lost this sense completely overnight. She was literally like a rag doll and had to learn to do even the most simple motor tasks, like sitting, anew. But of course we also sense space with our eyes, and all animals that depend on their dynamic abilities, from insects to birds, to mammals, have this ability. Bats and dolphins of course sense space with echo-location.

As for time, we have two means of sensing time. The most obvious is memory. Again Sacks describes the case of a man suffering retrograde amnesia, which in his book he called ‘The Lost Mariner’. Sacks met the man in 1975, but although he displayed above average intelligence, the man could create no new memories. In fact he was permanently stuck in 1945 when he had left the US Navy after the War. This is like being colour blind or deaf beyond a certain frequency. The other sense of time is through our eyes which capture images at a very specific rate. Without this ability we would not be able to detect motion. All photographs, to use an analogy, need time, no matter how small an increment, in order to be realised at all. Again different animals capture these images at different rates so they quite literally live at different speeds. Birds and many insects see the world in slow motion compared to us, whereas other animals like snails and sloths see it much faster. Sometimes in the event of trauma, like a car accident or an explosion, our internal clock changes its rate momentarily and we see things as if we are watching a slow motion film.

We sense space and time the same way we sense colours, sounds and smells. In fact our ability to sense space and time is a matter of life and death - just take a drive in traffic. The idea that we impose space and time on the universe is absurd unless one believes in solipsism which apparently Kant did not. For Kant time and space are apriori knowledge that is ‘given’. Our mind has an inbuilt sense of time and space, yes, but it is a necessary sense no different to our other senses so that we can interact with a world that exists in time and space. This is the distinction I make with Kant. The reason we have a sense of space and time is so the world inside our heads can match the world outside our heads, otherwise we could not do anything - we could not even walk outside our front doors. To argue otherwise, in my opinion, is disingenuous.

This contention on my part has consequences for Kant’s philosophy. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution of philosophy’ is: ‘...the assumption not that man’s knowledge must conform to objects but that objects must conform to man’s apparatus of knowing.’  I would turn this argument on its head because it is my belief that the human mind is a mirror of the physical world and not the other way round. Michio Kaku and Jennifer Thompson in their book, Beyond Einstein, describe the hypothetical experience of meeting someone from a higher dimensional universe. They explain that whilst we can perceive things in 2 dimensions of space, if we lived in a 2 dimensional space, 3 dimensions would be incomprehensible to us. If we lived in a higher dimensional universe we would think in those higher dimensions. This is why we can’t create a higher dimensional universe in our imaginations but we can express it mathematically. This I believe also gives us an insight into transcendental idealism, but I will return to this point later.

In terms of our sensibilities, Kant is correct: our ability to perceive is limited by the cognitive powers of the human mind. We cannot see colours outside a certain range of wavelength of light or hear sounds outside a specific range of frequencies. But Kant goes further than this: he realised that our cognitive reasoning ability to understand the things-in-themselves is also limited. Kant quite correctly realised that there is a trap or an illusion, that we often perceive concepts which we synthesise through our reasoning ability as being derived from experience when they are not. We have these ideas in our head which we believe to match reality, but in truth we only think we understand reality and the thing-in-itself escapes us. This is the kernel in the midst of Kant’s philosophy which is worth preserving. Our knowledge acquisition is in fact an interaction between experience (the empirical) and theory (the transcendental). Kant himself showed an insight into this interaction in A95 when he refers to the synthesis of ‘sense, imagination and apperception’. 

‘All these faculties have a transcendental (as well as an empirical) employment which concerns the form alone, and is possible apriori.’  By ‘apriori’ and ‘form’, Kant of course is referring to space and time, but he is also referring to mathematical forms, as he explains on the next page in B128. There is then, this relationship between transcendental idealism and empirical realism; a relationship that is mediated principally through mathematics.

But there is another aspect of our knowledge acquisition that Kant never touched on and relates to the thing-in-itself. We have discovered that nature takes on completely different realities at different levels which means that the thing-in-itself is almost indefinable as a single entity. To describe something we have to conceptually isolate it in our minds. For example the human body is a single entity made up of millions of other entities called cells. It is virtually impossible to conceptualise these two levels of entities simultaneously. But the human mind has a very unique ability. We can create concepts within concepts, like words within sentences, or formulas within mathematical equations, or notes within music, and realise that on different levels all these things take on different meanings. So the human mind is uniquely placed to understand the universe in which we live, because it also takes on different meanings at different levels.

This is even true regarding the number of dimensions of the universe. Michio Kaku, whom I referred to earlier, informs us that according to M theory, the universe may very well exist at one level in 11 dimensions, but at our level of everyday existence, we can only perceive the 3 dimensions of space and the 1 dimension of time. This for me is the irony of Kant’s philosophy. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics suggest that space and time are not how we perceive them to be, which makes Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself quite a prophetic insight. However Kant would never have conceived that space and time could exist as things-in-themselves at all, because for Kant, space and time are not entities. He is right in that they are not entities in the same way that objects are, but they are the absolutely essential components for the universe to exist at all.

Some people would argue that space and time are no more than mathematical entities, because that is the only way we can express space and time, as opposed to how we experience it. From this argument it could be suggested that by using mathematics we are imposing our sense of space and time on the universe, irrespective of all the arguments I have already made concerning how we are able to sense it. But what I find significant is that mathematical laws are not man made and that nature obeys them even if we weren’t here to express them. So I would argue that transcendental idealism is mathematics, even though I’m not at all sure if Kant would concur. I think Pythagoras showed remarkable insight when he claimed that all things are numbers, even though he was talking from a religious perspective. But metaphysics aside, Pythagoras was one of the first philosophers to understand that mathematics gives us a rare and unique insight into the natural world. What would he think today? What’s more I think Pythagoras would be quite agreeable in thinking that Kant’s transcendental idealism was indeed the world of mathematics.

Bibliography

Kaku M., Hyperspace, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Kaku M. & Thompson J., Beyond Einstein, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Kant I., Smith N. (trans.), Critique of Pure Reason, Macmillan, London, 1929.

Philosophy, The History of Western, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.25, Edition 15, 1989, pp.742-69.

Reason And Experience, Theories of Knowledge B, Reader, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, 1989.

Reason And Experience, Theories of Knowledge B, Study Guide, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, 1989.

Ross K., Immanuel Kant, web page http://www.friesian.com/kant.htm

Sacks, O., The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Picador, London, 1986.

Sternberg R., In Search of the Human Mind, Yale University, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995.