Kant’s Copernican revolution is well known: instead of asking how our minds conform to objects, he asked how objects conform to our minds. Space and time are not features of a mind-independent world; they are forms of our intuition.
Wolfgang Stegemann’s recent article “The Curtain That Was Never There: Kant, Perspective, and the Honest Logic” starts with:
“There is a stubborn intuition in philosophy, one that survives every attempted refutation: that behind what we perceive and think, there is a reality existing independently of us, a reality our knowledge approximates more or less adequately.”
Then Stegemann goes on another excellent excursion into the philosophical mind at work. This time, the theory of knowledge and how we imagine the world.
“Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi named it in 1787, with a sentence that has never quite been answered: “Without the presupposition [of the things-in-themselves] I cannot enter the system; with this presupposition I cannot stay within it.”
The problem is structural. Kant needs things-in-themselves as the cause of our sensory manifold, where else would the raw material of experience come from?” …
“Our sensory manifold” hit my ears like a transition in the Beatles’ A Day in the Life song, as my mind was sent reeling into the spell of my increasing cognitive dissonance with such philosophical musing upon consciousness and how we view the world.
Seriously, I wound up pulling up the song on YouTube, still an amazing piece of work, but I digress.
It is the constant deliberate exclusion of modern evolutionary biological reality that feels stunningly unreasonable to me.
Let me be clear, this is no review, or reflection, on Stegemann’s article, I appreciate that it is way beyond my pay grade.
I can’t understand its esoteric details, but I am struck by its glaring gaps, and those I do feel competent discussing. With a bibliography to support my contention at the end of this.
Truth be told, it’s not like I haven’t spent plenty of my life philosophizing, but it was the simple lived-experience kind. Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung provided early confirmation of my instincts, and gave me permission to follow through on my particular path, now here I am.
I’m a simple person, okay a tree hugger, who’s always loved collecting, digesting, and building my understanding upon scientific lessons and lived experience. Barefooted philosophy occupied with striving to figure out myself and the world around me with a simple mind.
My childhood existential questions, wondering if I was real, was the world real, or was it all my own imagination, were solved with a simple mind experiment.
How do I know the world is still here when I close my eyes and can’t sense anything??
If the world disappears when I’m not looking, then reappears as soon as I open my eyes? Does that mean I’m dreaming the world? After all, what proof do I have of the world when my eyes are shut?
But that would mean I had to be able to imagine all the things I saw out there.
That didn’t make any sense, considering the constant barrage of new experiences my parents exposed us to. Ergo, the world must be real and absolute, made out of itself.
And me? I was made out of my mom. As the decades passed, I learned more.
If the Earth around me is real, its very complexity demands that Earth had to possess a deep and real history, unfolding one day at a time. Receding way back into deep time.
Way before humans and even animals existed. One that proceeded down one specific track, with the future full of potential. Then comes the living moment of Now, then receding into the unchanging past. As life keeps rushing at us.
I was left with figuring out my own place in it, and understand it through clues scientists were unearthing and sharing.
From there, it’s an easy leap to appreciating that each evolving creature out there, is doing its own thing. Every one is the center of their own universe. Each perceives the same reality through their own specific body, needs, and circumstances.
That is why I identify as an Earth-centrist; the Earth and her story are the foundation of my perceptual reality. Through the lens of a keen respect for the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.
Therefore, the notion that our perception of reality impacts physical reality seems hubristic self-aggrandizement, as if we actually were the center of the universe. (Not to be mistaken with our physical actions impacting physical reality!)
Up-to-date evolution teaches us about Biology’s Big Bang. When Earth, geology, and chemistry invented the Krebs cycle, which basically harnessed electricity, thereby creating biology, and in short order Life. Very simple life, we’d call it scum.
Turns out vitalism is true after all. Though as usual nature wrapped it into a complex package beyond human imagining. Then came science. (See Dr. Nick Lane’s “Transformer” for a tour.)
After lots and lots of time. Unfolding one day at a time. Came the Ediacaran & Cambrian explosion over half a billion years ago. This event seeded our Earth with the bazillion different kinds of complex life forms that have learned to survive everywhere on this planet in a bewildering variety over the past half a billion years
Each living creature possesses a body that has survived these past half a billion years’ worth of incarnations and changes. Each lineage 100% successful over those untold generations, unfolding one day at a time. At least, so far.
Does it not seem self-evident that every creature would own a unique way of viewing the world? One that is dictated by its form and function. Half a billion years of nature’s research, development, and culling.
How could physical reality possibly adjust itself for a self-sanctified species? Why would it want to?
Every living creature represents a survivor lineage. All existing on one and the same planet experiencing one and the same Moment of NOW racing through our Earth and Solar System. Qualia is your body experiencing the sensation of the actual happening.
We are Earth’s most amazing animal ever. Still it took eons worth of time spent evolving our bodies. While the different layers of interwoven structures and communication pathways developed. (If you check, you’ll see the experts know a great deal that philosophy seemingly refuse to engage with. We need to do the homework to learn about it.).
Here’s one more shot at painting a mental impression.
Metaphorically, the generations within us are sort of like an old-fashioned hand-dipped candle — one generation building upon, and dependent upon, the previous, then offering itself to build the next generation upon.
That something we can’t quite touch within ourselves is our evolved interior biological reality. That experience of Qualia? That is the subjective feeling of the living moment of Now coursing through your body.
The many interwoven bio-chemo-electrical-cardiovascular-lymphatic-interstitium-and whatnot systems cascading through our body in real time, experiencing what the senses are relaying. It has got to feel like something!
Scientists, not philosophers, are the ones building windows to this understanding.
When will new scientific understanding in evolutionary biology and such start getting incorporated into the philosophical discourse?
At least in so far as helping people figure out who they are, and why they behave as they do, and looking for pathways to a more peaceful constructive relationship with one self.
Here’s an incomplete introductory science author’s list
Robert Hazen: — Mineral evolution on Earth, preparing the ground for biology
Nick Lane: Geology and chemistry harnesses electricity to create biology,
… the most excellent summary of “SELF”
Jack Szostak: The Early Earth and the Origins of Cellular Life
Michael Russell: On the Emergence of Life Through “Negative” Entropy Trapping
Arthur Reber: The “Cellular Basis of Consciousness” proposal — CBC
Michael Levin — Bioelectricity in development and regeneration, exploring cellular cognition.
Biology together with time, and chemistry and geology, that is Earth’s processes created creatures and environments and competition, in short, evolution.
Pageant of Earth’s Evolution, Index of noteworthy YouTube videos
Mark Solms — Regarding the Source of Consciousness
Antonio Damasio — Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
Robert Sapolsky — Behavioral Biology with a Primatology background
Honorable mention, author David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree of Life, a front and center history of the ‘70’s genetics revolution, that ushered in this golden age of biology.