I think this is a good summary of Kant. For full context it's good to get a picture of the philosophical movement around him during his era which was attacking rationalism and promoting a sort of extereme form of empiricism.<p>(Ie science and the visible world being all that exist, and rational concepts like numbers or math is just an extrapolation from the material world.)<p>Kant sort of puts that idea to rest somewhat (although it remained popular well into the 20th century).<p>But the way he did so was unsettling. The conclusion we are left with after reading this is there is a sort of human perspective that shapes our understanding of reality and there is an underlying reality apart from that which we can never know.<p>I don't like it, I think when Einstein or Newton make statements they are making statements about reality and not just sense impressions. I don't like the idea that reality is something foreign and unknowable to humans.<p>Maybe time isn't real in the way we perceive it but I don't think the underlying nature of time is something undiscoverable.<p>What's my reasoning. I don't know I just don't like the idea I guess. Plus I don't think the attack on rationalism and reason was as warranted as it may have seemed to Kant in his time.
If you want to understand Kant in the language of (self-supervised) machine learning, I can highly recommend this rather astonishing PhD thesis:<p><a href="https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~re14/Evans-R-2020-PhD-Thesis.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~re14/Evans-R-2020-PhD-Thesis.pdf</a>
I read Kant's <i>Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals</i> in my undergraduate ethics class, and that was tough to read 200 years after it was written.<p>He takes it as axiomatic that we cannot use empiricism to determine universal rules, which is something that seemed pretty well established as false by the time between when it was written and when I read it.
I had no interest in Kant’s philosophy at all until I came across a fictionalised version it as the main character in Adam Robert’s “The Thing Itself”.<p>I am now very interested in the idea of the thing itself that I built using the story I read.
In college I took a survey of Modern Philosophy as a requirement for my major. The class was taught by a pretty renowned Kant scholar. I don't remember as much as I would like from that class, but I do remember one thing the professor said, "David Hume explained complex ideas with simple language, while Kant explained simple ideas with complex language."<p>It was reassuring that even the guy who wrote the translation of Critique o f Pure Reason that we were using in the class thought that Kant wrote in an incredibly obtuse way. What stuck with me even more is the idea that sometimes, "simple" ideas explored in such depth could be extremely valuable. I've been fascinated by Kant ever since, but lack the time or energy to read more of what he wrote. I would like to at some point.
"Our mind shapes the world".. Kant's psychology was foundational to the thought lineage of predictive processing. <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00079/full" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.0007...</a>
This seems like a decent summary of Kant, though like Kant's own work, it involves a gross misreading of Hume. To paraphrase Chomsky: Hume and other so-called empiricists did not actually believe in tabula rasa because they were not imbeciles. Hume wrote an entire chapter on how humans have instincts which determine how we think, just like animals do, for instance.<p>Kant actually said very little about epistemology that Hume didn't say better. They were both cool, but since everyone wants to hype the beef, Hume -- who never got a chance to defend himself against this "rationalist vs empiricist" false dichotomy -- was cooler. I would encourage anyone and everyone to read his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Shame about the liks to Amazon,
Here's Kant on Gutenberg, as it is rather out of copyright<p><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1426" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1426</a>
I like Kants work, but it has always bugged me, how he defined the 12 Kantian categories of a priori knowledge that just are. It feels inelegant. I'd much rather have a generalisation of all a priori knowledge instead of a defined list.
This blog post was perfect, It reminded me of why I'm so fascinated about philosophy of mind - brings back memory's of reading about it in university, back when I had time for this sort of thinking.
For science, I see how one insight leads to another, and there is a progression which leads to deeper and deeper understanding. And if there never was a Newton, gravity would have been described by someone else not too long after. That seems somewhat inevitable to me. But I don't grok philosophy. Is that also a progression of insights in a similar way? Or is it completely arbitrary what philosophical ponderings become important during different human eras?
Finally, an opportunity to share a series from one of my favorite lecturers :). This is a set of lectures on the Critique from Robert Paul Wolff: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC5GAeBZerO-RuKBI1IqHZzB9tUuypkpK">https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC5GAeBZerO-RuKBI1IqHZz...</a><p>He jokes that he keeps a copy of the Critique on his nightstand and reads it before bed to relax lol.<p>He also has series on Marx, Freud, and ideological critique.
“we don’t know whether space and time are properties of the outside world, but they sure are part of our mind.”<p>In the Kantian paradigm (and this is taken from Descartes), space is external and time is internal. You can feel time without an external perception, and space can exist outside even if you’re not there.
The more salient question might be "how do we get rid of what we know". By the time one turns 40 you've accreted enough knowledge that basically your life is over, at least in the sense of seeing anything new. And wonder is gone long before then.
An alt history point I've wondered a bit about is: what if Kant had discovered natural selection? He was rooting around in the area and would, I think, have understood it and realized its importance if it had been explained to him.
this is strikingly similar to the buddhist view of the perception. In one of the theory(唯識思想) in buddhism everybody in their mind has a kaleidoscope or window by which we perceive the world. This kaleidoscope is shaped by six emotions: sorrow, modesty, happiness, joy, anger and love. The important part is that the kaleidoscope also interacts with the world around you. If you want to change the world, you need to become the very person you want to see in the world. That is why buddhism says the change starts from disciplining and harnessing your emotions, hence "be the change you want to see"
This is a nice try, but there are a lot of parts that made me wince.<p>1. The essay starts off with "If you are interested in truth..." without ever defining what exactly they mean by "truth".<p>2. What is with this "inside" and "outside"? I don't think Kant ever used such philosophically imprecise terminology. They define rationalists as understanding the world "from the inside" and empiricists as understanding it "from the outside". By framing it in such terms, they have already put a metaphysical stake in the ground. And really, how do empiricists understand the world "from the outside"? Do they mean that the thinking is done from the outside, or that they receive sensory input from the outside and then understand it..."from the outside"? This is so ridiculous it makes me wince. Also, rationalists understand the world "from the inside" why? Because their sensory input comes from the inside? When they frame it this way--as inside versus outside--it really amounts to do the same thing, doesn't it? Kant is weeping in his grave.<p>3. It's too bad they didn't mention Kant's Copernican turn. Mentioning that would have been quite revealing.<p>4. This may have been too complex for such a short summary, but Kant's Synthetic Unity of Apperception is extremely important.
And if you're curious about how a philosophical system which claims that there are pure forms of intuition that structures our experience cannot escape still being entirely conceptually mediated, read Hegel!
LLMs are a good introduction of evidence to the rationalist vs empiricist argument. It does seem like Kantian thing where what the LLM “knows” is structured by its network layers but also by the data it gets.
Call me naive, but I don't see why we need Kant's ideas of noumena and phenomena when we have Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Analogy of the Divided Line. In my limited experience, Plato's philosophical primitives prove more useful for thinking about whether LLMs possess intelligence and what reality really is. In my opinion the most groundbreaking contribution of Kant is adding in the <i>a priori</i> and <i>a posteriori</i> distinctions to how belief is constructed. Even so, nothing of Kant's work impresses me more than Plato's allegory.
this reminds me of flatlanders: the poor 2d creatures living in a 3d universe that only see 3d as projections into their space. information is lost in the process and they can never truly know what caused it, only model it with guesses.
Why is this on the front page of HN?<p>What happened to HN?<p>you were used to find cool new tech stuff here...<p>If I want to get depressed about live I will go on Reddit... ohhh I see.