About me

My name is Kevin McKee. I’m a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University studying statistical modeling for psychiatric and behavioral genetics. I’m also a surrealist painter, with past exhibits in Virginia and Maryland. The gallery for my artwork can be found here. I have also produced an app for android devices which provides a general tool for recording and analyzing longitudinal data, which can be found here.

I have long been fascinated with human perception and reality. Early on, I learned about meditation and lucid dreaming, which in practice lent me an inventory of anomalous memories and changes of perspective.  My interest in painting soon followed. I initially studied Fine Arts as an undergraduate but switched to Psychology when I realized I was more interested in talking about the perceptions behind art than in routinely producing it. My personal experiences with art, meditation, and dreaming have served to exemplify many of the central problems in philosophy and cognitive science, such as the basis of individual agency, the mechanisms of creativity, self-perception, the unconscious mind, and so on.

I am currently searching through the research programs of different universities in the US to decide what appeals to me the most. In the meantime, I want to continue educating myself in subjects which might contribute to these interests. I’ve decided that to reinforce my dedication to this task it would be best to log it publicly and invite commentary and criticism. Hopefully I can also help others who are interested in doing the same.

I’ll be linking to all the resources I use on the sidebar to the right. All posts found in the categories at the top of the sidebar are summaries written by me as I work through different subjects. For posts on certain topics like Kant where a specific terminology is used, I’ve summarized it using the terms in context, then italicized a simpler rewording and separated the two with a line. In some cases I’ve just written my own personal thoughts in italics.

Plan for this section

For this section, I will be organizing and documenting a systematic attempt to survey many different time series methods and method categories. I will cite and summarize papers dealing with various kinds of regressions, data transformations, structural equation models, and so forth. I should be able to summarize how each model works, and how it might be used, before moving on to the next.

Each post should summarize how a model works, an application, and its limitations. I’ll also conclude with a plan for the next document to work on, making this effectively a task by task to-do list.

I’ll start by reviewing Autoregressive Moving Average, and subsequent models, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average, Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average, and Vector Autoregression on Friday 8/3.

Main Transcendental Question, Third Part (V)

§59
Kant refers to the boundary of reason because a boundary suggests that one area is contained within another. In the case of reason, things like noumena or a supreme being are used in concept to help delineate the boundary of experience and reason, without necessitating knowledge or undue assumption about them as they may be in themselves.

§60
Now that we have a well defined metaphysics, it may be of interest to determine the natural purpose of our predisposition to these transcendent concepts. This is an anthropological question rather than a metaphysical one. Kant believes that the transcendental ideals serve to demonstrate that reason is limited and that our attention can be brought to the concepts necessary for metaphysics which are not themselves objects of experience.

“Here I now find that the psychological idea, as little as I may gain insight through it into the pure nature of the human soul elevated beyond all concepts of experience, nonetheless at least reveals clearly enough the inadequacy of those concepts of experience, and thereby leads me away from materialism as a psychological concept that is unsuited to any explanation of nature and that, moreover, constricts reason with respect to the practical.”

The idea of the mind itself shows that we do not know the material world but only as it’s constructed through our minds.

“Similarly, the cosmological ideas, through the evident inadequacy of all possible cognition of nature to satisfy reason in its rightful demands, serve to keep us from naturalism, which wants to put forward nature as sufficient unto itself.”

If we take our construct of nature as we study and know it as totally comprehensive of reality, then we are faced with the contradictions of the transcendental ideals concerning space and time. They should be taken as a sign that nature is only a possibility for what we can know, and not the world beyond such.

Thirdly, the theological idea frees us from fatalism by asking for the cause of causation itself; some first principle attributable to freedom and a highest intelligence.

The transcendental ideals therefore negate materialism, naturalism, and fatalism, such that reason is allowed moral ideas as well. A speculative moral system would be outside the boundaries of this science of metaphysics, but within philosophy and should be informed by metaphysics.

 

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Transcendental ideals may be invalid about things-in-themselves but the fact that they are a natural illusion to us through our reason is helpful in revealing the limits of reason. They are essentially the cracks in our shell of knowledge that let us know that it’s just a shell. There are many problems that arise when materialism, naturalism, and fatalism are taken for granted. I’ve always been interested in the antinomies but at present Kant’s argument supports my suspicions about qualia and consciousness as well. If our knowledge of the world is restricted to what is possible through the universal laws of nature, and those laws are themselves bounded and incomplete representations of the world, then how are we going to account empirically for the presence of transcendental subjects like qualia or the unified field in and by which they are observed?

Main Transcendental Question, Third Part (IV)

§55
III. Theological idea (Critique, pp. 571 ff.)

The third transcendental idea, the Ideal, is not extrapolated from conditions in given experience but instead fabricated as though it is itself a condition for experience. Kant directs us to the Critique for more about this.

§56
General note to the transcendental ideas

Natural law leads us to further questions which cannot be solved, such as how pieces of matter attract each other. If we leave the realm of experience and nature by following transcendental ideas, we aren’t concerned with these unanswerable questions because we are no longer dealing with objects in experience, nor nature. Rather, we’re then concerned with concepts that arise from reason, and through reason we can resolve them.
The psychological, cosmological, and theological ideas do not arise from experience then but from the maxims of reason itself, for the sake of its own completion. They are based on principles that are otherwise used to bring harmony and order to the connections of the understanding in totality. Totality of experience is not possible but conceptual totality is necessary for creating systems in knowledge.
By mistaking the regulative role of reason in our understanding for that of a constitutive role, as in the transcendental ideals, one mistakes the purpose of reason and leads it into contradiction with itself.

§57
Conclusion
On determining the boundary of pure reason

Given the stated proofs, it is absurd to try to know things-in-themselves beyond experience. It is contradictory and untenable that space and time, the concepts of the understanding, the laws of nature, and our ideas of reason would be necessary to noumena, rather than as merely the forms and means by which we have, and are capable of having, experience. To stray at all from this restriction leads to illusions and contradiction, and destroys their use in determining objects for us.

It would also be absurd to believe there is nothing beyond experience at all, that our experience is the only kind of cognition possible, and that our own discursive understanding is the archetype of any possible understanding. These would all assume that the conditions for our experience are universal to things-in-themselves.

Without a critique of reason, the unchecked ideals of reason gradually discredited metaphysics and even the principles of experience.

“Who can bear being brought, as regards the nature of our soul, both to the point of a clear consciousness of the subject and to the conviction that the appearances of that subject cannot be explained materialistically, without asking what then the soul really is, and, if no concept of experience suffices thereto, without perchance adopting a concept of reason (that of a simple immaterial being) just for this purpose, although we can by no means prove the objective reality of that concept? Who can satisfy themselves with mere cognition through experience in all the cosmological questions, of the duration and size of the world, of freedom or natural necessity, since, wherever we may begin, any answer  given according to principles of experience always begets a new question which also requires an answer, and for that reason clearly proves the inadequacy of all physical modes of explanation for the satisfaction of reason? Finally, who cannot see, from the thoroughgoing contingency and dependency of everything that they might think or assume according to principles of experience, the impossibility of stopping with these, and who does not feel compelled, regardless of all prohibition against losing oneself in transcendent ideas, nevertheless to look for peace and satisfaction beyond all concepts that one can justify through experience, in the concept of a being the idea of which indeed cannot in itself be understood as regards possibility – though it cannot be refuted either, because it pertains to a mere being of the understanding – an idea without which, however, reason would always have to remain unsatisfied?”

Homogeneous subjects of reason can never have determinate boundaries. Math and natural science do not necessarily have determinate boundaries in that they can continue indefinitely, but reason does recognize limits. There are certain subjects into which it can not hope to extend itself successfully. Math and science can not inform our metaphysics or morals, and should never rely on immaterial beings (or any transcendental ideals) as sources of explanation.

“But metaphysics, in the dialectical endeavors of pure reason ( which are not initiated arbitrarily or wantonly, but toward which the nature of reason itself drives), leads us to the boundaries; and the transcendental ideas, just because they cannot be avoided and yet will never be realized, serve not only actually to show us the boundaries of reason’s pure use, but also to show us the way to determine such boundaries; and that is the purpose and benefit of this natural predisposition of our reason, which bore metaphysics as its favorite child, whose procreation (as with any other in the world) is to be ascribed not to chance accident but to an original seed that is wisely organized toward great ends. For metaphysics, perhaps more than any other science, is, as regards its fundamentals, placed in us by nature itself, and cannot at all be seen as the product of an arbitrary choice, or as an accidental extension from the progression of experiences (ti wholly separates itself from those experiences).”

Metaphysics is inherently within us and serves to show the boundaries of reason and our knowledge. While reason is adequate for empirical knowledge, it does not have a way through experience to know itself to completion, though the transcendental ideals arise when it tries anyways.

Boundaries divide a homogeneous subject but are nonetheless themselves subjects, whereas a limit is just a negation.

“How does our reason relate to the connection of that with which we are acquainted to that with which we are not acquainted, and never will be? Here is a real connection of the known to the wholly unknown (which it will always remain), and if the unknown should not become the least bit better known – as in fact is not to be hoped – the concept of this connection must still be able to be determined and brought to clarity.”

Kant says, we should think of a noumenal world because the appearances we can know presuppose the influence of it, even if we can know nothing about it. We can not mistakenly think of noumena using pure concepts of the understanding, because then it would only be a possible object of experience, i.e., an appearance.

Any concept of a noumenal being would itself be contradictory because to cognize it I could only use the pure concepts and other kinds of representation which it is, by definition, intended to exist beyond.

There arises then an apparent contradiction between our need to presuppose (by concept of course) some noumena and our restrictions on the transcendent use of reason, which might be what we inevitably turn to in order to give meaning to the concept of noumena. The use of conceptual language to describe noumena should only be taken as symbolic and only concerned with language, and not as literally representative of the thing-in-itself.

§58
We can think of the world as though it is the product of a supreme being, but only by knowing the relations between things and not presuming to know those things in themselves. We can think of it this way through analogy.

 

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I’m aware I’m missing possibly vital details but I’ll paraphrase my understanding so far. I also intend to come back after a break from Prolegomena and completely re-read the third section, fixing and adding to these as I go.

The theological idea is not like the transcendental ideals because it begins with the concept of completeness and dictates the structure of experience from that.

Reason is a tool for developing agreement within our knowledge (the opposite of which is known in psychology as “cognitive dissonance”). It applies to the totality of empirical experience as is possible for us. However, the conditions reason uses to establish this order in our understanding are themselves a seemingly independent drive. The understanding itself is only concerned with constructing the experiences we have and discerning consistently between them. Reason’s drive to ensure consistency and agreement between those constructions overshoots not just experience, but all possible experience, trying to satisfy itself, through nothing more than itself. The transcendental ideals like infinity of time and space, free will, original cause, etc. are mistakes whereby we think a mere principle for the construction of our experience is actually a principle for things as they truly are, beyond experience. Kant refers to this in his words as us mistaking its regulative role for a constitutive one.

We refer to the boundary of pure reason and not the limit of pure reason because we are compelled to suppose there really is something beyond our experience. We’re even capable of continuously pushing our knowledge of the empirical world and of our own intuitions (in math) indefinitely forward. Along the way though, we cannot acquire knowledge of things as they are beyond the conditions of our kind of experience. The boundaries of our knowledge are then exemplified by the transcendental ideals, whereby we have to refer to the fact of noumena, but as justified by the Critique, not in any way that attempts to know them. In order to discuss appearances and the whole limit of experience and knowledge in general, we have to treat noumena as a concept. The problem is that the concept must remain completely empty in all ways except for that general relation it has to our senses and selves. It is necessary to speak of noumena as having an “effect” upon us such that we are only really referring to the effect. Cause, in the empirical sense, is not even assumed even though we call our senses “affected.” This way when we describe noumena we are only describing them in terms of the limitations of our knowledge. They effect us, but it is not a causal effect like we know, in a sense of time like we possess. 

Main Transcendental Question, Third Part (III)

§50
II. Cosmological ideas (Critique, pp. 405 ff.)

“The Cosmological Idea” as in, the idea of the grand totality of existence, does not require assuming the existence of any more than objects as possible in experience. On the contrary, the self is assumed to be an object though it is not present through experience, and so can not be proved. The cosmological idea is the unwitting extrapolation of the conditions of objects beyond possible experience.

§51
Even if there were no proof of the existence of the categories, the proof is established for the necessity of their existence in pure reason and so it can be inferred from that. There are four transcendental ideas, each referring to an total completeness of some condition. There are also four kinds of dialectical assertions of pure reason; dialectical because there are two equally plausible sides of each argument. The solutions require examining the sources of pure reason itself. The antinomy has four theses and antitheses:

1. Thesis: The world has, as to time and space, a beginning (a boundary).
   Antithesis: The world is, as to time and space, infinite.
2. Thesis: Everything in the world is constituted out of the simple.
   Antithesis: There is nothing simple, but everything is composite.
3. Thesis: There exist in the world causes through freedom.
   Antithesis: There is no freedom, but everything is nature.
4. Thesis: In the series of causes in the world there is a necessary being.
   Antithesis: There is nothing necessary in this series, but in it everything is contingent.

§52
If we take objects of experience to be the true things-in-themselves, that is, the universal laws of nature as being universally true of things as they exist outside of our experience, then paradoxes arise where both thesis and antithesis can be incontestably proved. As a result, reason itself appears inconsistent.

§52b
It’s possible to develop a proposition that is consistent logically within itself though based on false presuppositions i.e. the transcendental ideas. No experience, no matter how extensive and deep, could give you proof of these transcendental ideas, and so it will never be a means of proving one side or the other. Reason reveals its “secret dialectic” only when one universally established principle produces an assertion in direct contradiction to an assertion from a different universally established principle. To resolve these contradictions, we must determine that both propositions rest upon a contradictory concept.

§52c
As we know time and space and the objects therein, we do not know them as they actually exist but only as appearances. It is contradictory to say that a mode of representation exists outside of representation. It is not possible to experience either an infinite space or eternity of time, nor a boundary of space or a preceding absence of time. The same goes for division of a substance into parts. Division only goes as far as representation, otherwise one believes that an object exists with all of its representations outside of, and before entering into, experience.

§53
The first two antinomies concern how the homogeneous is divided, and are mathematical. In them, contradictory principles are mistaken to be unified under one concept, i.e. that appearances (of space and time) are actually things-in-themselves. The principles themselves are false.

The second class of antinomies is dynamical, and something that can be unified is mistakenly presented as contradictory. In this case, both assertions are true but mistaken to be contradictory. In math, the subjects being combined must be homogeneous (monoids) whereas in a dynamical connections can be between different kinds of subjects. In math, the parts which make up a whole must be all of the same type, whereas for a causal connection, this homogeneity is possible but not necessary.

While we normally mistake appearances as noumena, freedom may refer to something noumenal which we mistake as possible in appearance. The latter case would be no less contradictory than the former, given that the necessity of natural law makes freedom an incompatible exception for objects of experience. We might suppose freedom is noumenal without being able to know anything about it.

While in experience, cause is necessary as one object succeeds another in sequence and through a necessary connection, i.e. an effect, we are compelled to ask what causes (or caused) the sequence of cause itself. However, if this cause of all causes were possible to our experience, it would then necessitate the question of what further causes that as well. On the other hand, to take this cause of all causes to be possible only as noumena, then it is not bound by our form of representation, time, and thus we are not speaking of a sequential kind of cause but a spontaneous kind, which conforms to the idea of freedom. In this way the antinomy regarding freedom vs nature is resolved, by confining nature to the realm of possible experience, and freedom to unknowable influences beyond experience.

“We have in us a faculty that not only stands in connection with its subjectively determining grounds, which are the natural causes of its actions – and thus far is the faculty of a being which itself belongs to appearances – but that also is related to objective grounds that are mere ideas, insofar as these ideas can determine this faculty, a connection that is expressed by ought. This faculty is called reason, and insofar as we are considering a being ( the human being) solely as regards this objectively determinable reason, this cannot be considered as a being of the senses; rather, the aforesaid property is the property of a thing in itself, and the possibility of that property – namely, how the ought, which has never yet happened, can determine the activity of this being and can be the cause of actions whose effect is an appearance in the sensible world – we cannot comprehend at all.”

There are two aspects to a human action: the cause of that action within the sequence of natural causes, and the cause as determined by ideas of reason. A being acts as a thing-in-itself when it acts purely as a result of reason’s ideas, which cannot in just any circumstance be derived from the natural sequence of events. Kant says (again, in one breath, the subjects of which I have color coated and split) of determining the agreement of that subjective freedom with objective nature:

“For, as regards transcendental freedom,
any beginning of an action of a being
out of objective causes is always,
with respect to these determining grounds,
is a first beginning, although the same action is,
in the series of appearances,
only a subalternate beginning, prior to which
a state of the cause must precede which determines that cause and which is itself determined in the same way by an immediately preceding cause:
so that in rational beings
(or in general in any beings, provided that their causality is determined in them as things in themselves)
one can conceive of a faculty for beginning a series of states spontaneously without falling into contradiction with the laws of nature.”

 So what he means is that objective actions do not incorporate first beginnings because it is always necessary that one objective event follows from another, but as actions based on pure reason come from noumenal causes which we can not know and are not necessarily constrained to the conditions of time, any action which a being carries out based on reason is itself a first beginning of a series of states.

As regards a supreme being, Kant argues that the whole subjective existence of appearances and perceptions necessitate a being which is a thing-in-itself, not found within the world of appearances.

§54
Kant challenges the readers to arrive at these conclusions ourselves and concludes that the antinomies only arise when the world of appearances is taken as things-in-themselves.

 

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Kant starts with the cosmological idea: the idea of everything. He says it can be derived simply from experience but is not itself possible to experience, and creates illusions. Following that, the four antinomies arise when reason takes appearances (of space, time, cause, etc.) as necessary of things-in-themselves. These antinomies turn our attention to reason itself as both theses and their corresponding antitheses follow valid logical inferences yet contradict one another. This means that the concepts from which both sides draw inferences are invalid. The first two antinomies make false statements, trying to describe magnitudes in space and time as things-in-themselves beyond all experience. The second two antinomies make what Kant considers true statements, though presents them in a way that they contradict each other. The reason they contradict each other is that the subjects common to both, freedom vs natural law, are taken to apply to the wrong things. Natural law can not be assumed of noumena, only appearances. Freedom can’t be assumed of objective appearances because causality is a necessary and universal law of nature from which that experience is constructed.

His solution is that freedom is only the unknowable kind of influence that noumena have upon appearances, while those appearances will, among themselves, always connect by causes. For example, that there is a cause for the fact of cause itself would rely upon this meta-cause falling outside the sequence of time and instead being always present. In beings such as ourselves, we have free will because we can act according to reason, which itself can not be found in or connected by objective events but occurs to us timelessly. The noumena responsible then for our inner experience, including reason itself, is then unknowable but responsible for the spontaneity and timeless influence of reason’s principles upon our objective actions.

Admittedly I don’t follow this at all. I don’t think I even see his last two antinomies as being all that important or inherent to our extrapolations of reason. It has always seemed to me that both God and free will are just deliberate absences of definition and to propose them as explanatory is just a masked (perhaps even to the proposer) attempt to terminate the discussion. And indeed, if they refer to noumena, they cannot gain definition from that either. I don’t understand how he resolves the contradiction between spontaneity in noumena and causal integration in experience.

I think I’m going to have to put this one aside for a while and come back to it.

Main Transcendental Question, Third Part (II)

§45
Preliminary remark to the Dialectic of Pure Reason

Reason impels us to look for objects beyond experience so as to satisfy its need for completeness. It conceives of the pure concepts of the understanding as objects of their own and is tempted to look for knowledge about nature from them in themselves, rather than simply through their use. They are however not valid objects of experience and so all that is concluded about them as such is illusory.

§46
I. Psychological ideas (Critique, pp. 341 ff.)

Our reason also impels us to find a subject for any given predicate, and yet see any found subject to be a further predicate itself, and so on. We should assume then that knowledge never gives us a final subject, and so “substance” never finds an absolute basis.
Inner sense always refers to the subject, I. The self, I, cannot be thought as the predicate of some other subject. This makes it appear that the absolute subject is given in experience, but this is also illusory. The I is not a concept; it’s just the way thoughts refer to themselves as being inner sense.

“Nevertheless, through a wholly natural misunderstanding, this idea (which, as a regulative principle, serves perfectly well to destroy  completely all materialistic explanations of the inner appearances of our soul), gives rise to a seemingly plausible argument for inferring the nature of our thinking being from this presumed cognition of the substantial in that being, insofar as knowledge of its nature falls completely outside the sum total  of experience.”

§47
Persistence, the key characteristic of substance, can not be proven for the absolute subject, I, and can not be proved to be itself an object. Persistence can only be proven of objects of experience. Kant challenges us to prove that a subject which is not itself a predicate of something else must persist as substance. However proving persistence is only valid for objects of experience.

§48
We can only infer that the soul persists if we are talking about possible experience, and not the soul as it might exist beyond our perception. The persistence of substance in principle is only applicable to the possibility of experience. It doesn’t make sense to speak of persistence or substance outside of possible experience and since life is the possibility of experience, after death we have no way to prove the persistence of a soul.

§49
Objects beyond experience can not be known and are nothing to us- only objects that appear to us in space are of interest. As the connection of objects in outer sense under laws of experience proves their objectivity, so does the connection of appearances in inner sense across time prove the reality of the soul. My soul is then only known to me by the appearances in my inner sense, but not as it truly is in itself. It is only an appearance in time, but not space. Something which does not appear in time and space is nothing to us.

Cartesian idealism only regards outer space and whether or not we have a criteria to discern the actual existence of objects from illusions. Our criteria is the universal laws of experience, which we regularly confirm by investigation. Since objects of experience always occur to us as inner appearances, it is guaranteed that to experience them, I exist as the subject having the experience, but the subject, I, also can not be said to exist in time beyond my perception.

Transcendental idealism then negates Cartesian idealism because the self I perceive is just as real as the forms of space and time which enable my perception. It is only the universal laws which determine if objects represented in space are empirically true.

 

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Kant says that the immediate self, I, is only “that to which all thinking stands in relation.” I’m finding this passage difficult because this relation remains somewhat undefined. It is however, not a concept and not a substance. He is responding to old beliefs about the soul which I don’t sympathize with at this point, so it’s hard to follow in both re-learning the error and then his correction of it.

I think that put simply, the point is that substance is only a matter for possible objective experience, whereas there’s nothing objective about the perceived “I.” Therefore it can’t be known that the “I” persists in some way. It does however appear to me as the subject of all inner thought, or rather, referenced by every inner thought. I would say that the concept or perception of I is a product of appearances as basically appearing, and the universal law of nature which would mistakenly hold them as objects so as to ask, to what other (mistaken) object do they appear? In the end though we can not see the self as an object, nor the pure perceptions which imply it. Furthermore, this predicate that something “appears” in this context of the word could not have any meaning between empirical objects.

Main Transcendental Question, Third Part (I)

§40 – §60 will be broken up into 4 posts of 5 sections each.

How is metaphysics in general possible?

§40
Metaphysics is concerned with the concepts of pure reason never found in experience alone. All of the rest up until this point served mainly as a means upon which reason should establish its authority.

“The third question, now put before us, therefore concerns, as it were, the core and the characteristic feature of metaphysics, namely, the preoccupation of reason with itself, and that acquaintance with objects which is presumed to arise immediately from reason’s brooding over its own concepts without its either needing mediating from experience for such an acquaintance, or being able to achieve such an acquaintance through experience at all. “

 Reason is transcendent because it extends beyond application to objects of experience to the possibility of objects of experience, and thus to the entirety of cognition. Reason is also the basis for ideas, which Kant defines as concepts whose objects cannot be objects of experience. These ideas are as inherent to reason as concepts are to the understanding.

“Since all illusion consists in taking the subjective basis for a judgment to be objective, pure reason’s knowledge of itself in its transcendent (overreaching) use will be the only prevention against the errors into which reason falls if it misconstrues its vocation and, in a transcendent manner, refers to the object in itself that which concerns only its own subject and the guidance of that subject in every use that is immanent.”

We have to reason about reason itself to determine the boundaries between possible knowledge and illusion.

§41
Metaphysics depends on a distinction between ideas of reason and categories of understanding though both may be considered pure concepts.

§42
Unlike the pure concepts of the understanding, the transcendental ideas of reason can not be confirmed through experience. Reason must subjectively investigate itself to avoid illusions.

§43
Kant looks for the pure concepts of reason in the three functions of syllogisms (inferences of reason). The syllogisms divide into categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive. The first concept of reason is that of a complete, substantial subject; the second is the idea of a complete series of causes; the third, the idea of the sum total of all that is possible. Each creates its own dialectic: the paralogism, the antinomy, and the ideal of pure reason. All kinds of reason are represented by these, as these constitute reason.

§44
These ideas of reason are not like the pure concepts of understanding in the cognition of nature, but rather, they are destructive to the coherence of nature. They do not refer to objects of possible experience, but rather the completion of principles which unify judgments in the understanding.

The soul, or self, can not be made into an intelligible sensory object (substance) or regarded objectively by the understanding so it is an empty concept and useless for explanation. Likewise, ideas about the beginning of the universe versus the eternity of the universe do not aid our knowledge of events in the world that appears to us. Thirdly, any notion of a supreme being is a termination of philosophy rather than a subject to be dealt with through it.
The errors arise when reason conceives of the pure concepts as themselves determinate objects, to which their own rules apply. To avoid these illusions, reason must examine its own subjects, and determine where it has overreached its boundaries.

 

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If I have this correct, this section introduces two new concepts: pure reason and ideas. Pure reason consists in principles for the regulation of the understanding, providing a standard of connection between concepts. Ideas of pure reason are like extrapolations from the pure concepts of the understanding into noumena, and trying to reason about them as objects of experience. The syllogisms, or logical inferences, have 3 forms which make up part 3 in the logical table of judgments.

Categorical refers to substance, by which we maintain the identity of objects despite how they change in our basic sensory perception.
Hypothetical refers to cause, by which we construct if/then judgments which link substances together in sequence across time.
Disjunctive refers to community, which follows from the prior two. As substances provide objects with identity in space, and hypothetical synthesizes identities in time, then disjunctive is the community of relationships between a whole and its parts.
Reason runs into illusions by trying to reason about these 3 concepts as objects in themselves: the substance of experience itself, the supreme cause of all causes or otherwise infinite causal chain, and the totality of all that exists. Each one forms a dialectic, the first being called a paralogism, the second being called an antinomy, and the third, the ideal. The paralogism is just a basically invalid use of reason. The antinomy is an apparent paradox of equally true laws. The ideal is the presumed end goal of knowledge which may or may not be reachable, but its proposal alone is illusory. 

Main Transcendental Question, Second Part (V)

§34
Two investigations were necessary: the first showing that the pure concepts are not supplied by the senses but are rather schemata, and the second showing that nothing can be thought outside of the field of possible experience governed by these pure concepts. 

§35
Kant warns that it is not enough to dissuade dogmatic metaphysical thinking by pointing out the difficulty, arguing for the limits of reason, or by reducing assertions to conjectures. People will stop trying to solve metaphysical problems only when it’s clear that the problems are certain to be impossible.

§36

How is nature itself possible?

This question is the highest aspiration of transcendental philosophy. It can be broken into two questions:

First: How is nature possible in general in the material sense, namely, according to intuition, as the sum total of appearances; how are space, time, and that which fills them both, the object of sensation, possible in general?

The answer is given through the solution to the first main transcendental question: it  is possible by the constitution of our subjective sensations.

 Second: How is nature possible in the formal sense, as the sum total of the rules to which  all appearances must be subject if they are to be thought as connected in an experience?

The answer to this is given by the second main transcendental question: it is possible by the constitution of our understanding and its function of subsuming sensations under rules and structure, which we may then use to think things as natural.

An important paragraph follows:

But how this characteristic property of our sensibility itself may be possible, or that our understanding and of the necessary apperception that underlies it and all thinking, cannot be further solved and answered, because we always have need of them for all answering and for all thinking of objects.

Continuing: The principles of the possibility of experience are the universal laws of nature. Either we derive our laws of nature from experience, or we construct experience from the laws in us a priori.

Also, the universal laws of nature are not the same as the empirical laws of nature. The latter refers to particular instances of objects, while the former is for the construction of the experience of nature.

§37
Kant prefaces an example of how this is true.

§38
The first example is that rectangles formed by the parts of two chords cut into a circle intersecting one another will have equal area. It is not just in the appearance of the circle or the lines alone that the judgment of equal volume is found. It is only found via the constructs supplied by the understanding.

The second example is that the laws and geometry of gravitation can not be observed just from space itself, but as a result of how the understanding synthesizes objects in space and time.

§39

Appendix to pure natural science
On the system of categories

The table of pure concepts was decided by separating the pure forms of understanding (categories) from sensibility (space and time). In order to find a principle that would give him a table of all the pure concepts, Kant applied all the functions of judgments to objects in general, or the conditions for objective judgment.

 

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Nature itself is only understood to be possible by defining nature first as the possibility of all objective experience. Experience is objective when it is constructed with pure concepts of the understanding which necessarily are only one way, and so provide a subjective but common experience for all observers. Nature is possible because we have these pure concepts in us a priori. They are the first step toward cognizing anything at all. The two options Kant focuses specifically on are whether universal laws of nature like cause either come from experience, or are a priori necessary to have an experience, to begin with. The first proposition is contradictory because for example, a billiard ball knocking into another and causing it to move- one could not observe cause itself as connecting the two. One could not even observe that there was a sequence of events, or that the balls themselves are real, or that in one moment a ball is the same object as it was a moment before. The capacity to begin with such knowledge must be a priori, and only upon that basis can one synthesize judgments from experience such as that one ball causes the other to move.

To find the pure concepts of the understanding, Kant abstracted all kinds of judgment away from all specific objects or instances of its use. Objects in general means that for any statement, like “the red ball hits the blue ball, causing the blue ball to move.” would abstract to “the first object interacts with a second object, causing the second object to act” and so on, until judgment is broken down into just the aforementioned list of functions.

The paragraph quoted in section 36 is important to me because it appears to be speaking directly to questions I have of how pure qualities of sensation can exist at all, specifically with regard to physics. I could rephrase the point this way: Qualia can not be known objectively because they are only components of the objects of knowledge, alone insufficient to comprise such objects. I suppose in Kant’s terms, we want to relate perceptions to objective knowledge using relations which are only valid for objective knowledge.

I think some of the next section on “How is metaphysics itself possible?” may address the problem somewhat. It seems like we can apply forms of judgment to qualia but indeed we only get judgments of perception and not judgments of experience. Still, do judgments of perception lend us anything of objective use?

3. The Perennial Problem of the Reductive Explainability of Phenomenal Consciousness: C.D. Broad on the Explanatory Gap

I’m just doing a quick stream of thought post on this part.

This section has two main parts: First, a long explanation of emergence, in reference to a liquid state of matter versus the individual atoms of that liquid. Second, the first section is used as an analogy for the emergence of pure qualities from organic mechanisms. 

You can look up C.D.Broad’s emergentism as I’m not keen on summarizing this chapter. I’d rather respond directly to the concept:

I think this idea of emergence is only relevant as far as the concepts we form. There are no parts that truly exist in isolation, so this definition of parts, which fully described cannot yield knowledge of the whole, only refers to a limit we ourselves face in conceptually modeling objects. It seems self-evident too; of course an atom defined as isolated will not yield information about liquid states. An emergent property does not exist as material. It is just consistent patterns of interactions among multiple (often material) particulars. In principle, those patterns of interaction can be broken up into the functions of individual parts even though it may not be practical in cases like that of billions of molecules of H2O. I may be missing the point, but nowhere do I see the profundity of this idea.

Even further so, I don’t see how it can pertain to “pure qualities” aka qualia. Broad uses the emergent properties of elements as an analogy for how studying consciousness on a microbiological scale may be misguided. I can’t help object to analogies being drawn between the interactions of material particulars and our own abstractions of their collective behavior, versus pure qualities of experience. Qualities are not themselves abstractions nor objects, because they are the means by which abstractions and objects are cognized. To treat them as objects through analogies and judgments of material experience and abstraction will lead to a reductio ad absurdum. 

What I am thinking about the most lately: would it even possible for us to conceptualize the actual isomorphism from physics to qualia? We can’t do it solely by concepts from physics. Is that just a problem with our completeness of physics, or our capacity to form concepts in the first place?

Main Transcendental Question, Second Part (IV)

§29
The concept of cause belongs to the mere form of experience. The logical form of hypothetical judgments, if p, then q, is found a priori, and necessary for objects to become objects of experience.
The concept of cause is not attached to objects but to experience, and pertains to sequences of events that can be connected by that logical form.

§30
The pure concepts of the understanding would have no meaning if they concerned things in themselves (noumena). They are the necessary framework for constructing experience from perceptions, and are necessarily a priori. Were they not a priori, objects could not hold the definitions or distinctions required to experience their relations in a whole, in a sequence, or of their own identities.
Hume’s objections that cause can not be found in experience then can be resolved by the contrary: that experience is created from cause. Synthetic a priori principles are the requisites of possible experience, and concern only appearances but never things-in-themselves. This limit includes pure mathematics and pure natural science.

§31
The point of this section is that those who claim it is common sense that reason can never reach beyond experience are still overlooking their own use of synthetic judgments a priori.
It ends with another sort of tirade which I want to quote here for fun:

“Many a naturalist of pure reason (by which I mean he who trusts himself, without any science, to decide in matters of metaphysics) would like to pretend that already long ago, through the prophetic spirit of his sound common sense, he had not merely suspected, but had known and understood that which is here presented with so much preparation, or, if he prefers, with long-winded pedantic pomp: “namely that with all of our reason we can never get beyond the field of experiences.” But since, if someone gradually questions him on his rational principles, he must indeed admit that among them there are many that he has not drawn from experience, which are therefore independent of it and are valid a priori – how and on what grounds will he then hold within limits the dogmatist (and himself), who makes use of these concepts and principles beyond all possible experience for the very reason that they are cognized independently of experience. And even he, this adept of sound common sense, is not so steadfast that, despite all of his presumed and cheaply gained wisdom, he will not stumble unaware out beyond the objects of experience into the field of chimeras. Ordinarily, he is deep enough entangled therein, although he cloaks his ill-founded claims through a popular style, since he gives everything out as a mere probability, reasonable conjecture, or analogy.”

I guess I feel a little better about hesitating to blog my wacky metaphysical ideas.

§32
By regarding our experience as that of appearances, we’re implying there is indeed a thing-in-itself beyond it. Our principles of experience and the aesthetic of appearances neither can be claimed to encompass all things, nor permit knowing anything beyond their own representation.

§33
The pure concepts lend themselves to the mistaken judgment that they apply beyond experience because they do not, in themselves, have representative objects. They are also more definite than experience ever matches. i.e. Ideals are often resultant from the pure concepts. Perfect circles can not be known of things-in-themselves, but only in our abstract conceptions of geometry. A causal chain of events is never perfect and complete when further investigation of experience is undertaken.

 

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To summarize these sections: Experience is constructed from the pure concepts of the understanding and intuition (space and time). If we suppose that we are knowing or can know things-themselves (noumena) then experience becomes contradictory. There is no other conceivable way that experience of objects should occur to us than through the subjective construction of those objects from qualities and binding principles in space and time. Furthermore, the use of these binding concepts is so inherent to experience that it is easily mistaken for being universal beyond anyone’s experience. 

Main Transcendental Question, Second Part (III)

The next sections refer to the 3 previous tables:

§24
Axioms of intuition refers to conceptualization of space and time as quantities. (Section 1 in the table of the pure concepts of the understanding)
Anticipations of perception refers to the amplitude or intensity of sensed qualities in perception. (Section 2)

§25
Kant defines the relations of appearances as dynamical rather than mathematical. He relates Analogies of Experience to the pure concepts of the understanding according to relation:
Substance is the concept of a thing-in-itself and gives us a sense that certain objects exist.
Cause is the relation of appearances as events or sequences connected by effect.
Community is the relation of interactions and coexistence.

The 4th principle of natural science, postulates of empirical thinking, is for the relation of appearances to experience in general.
Possibility is the agreement with the formal conditions of the understanding.
Existence is the connection with the senses and perception.
Necessity is both possibility and existence united in one concept.

§26
Kant clarifies that this method produces a perfect framework to account for all judgments of experience, and that the pure concepts should not be mistaken as applying to objects-in-themselves, but only the form (and thus, possibility) of appearances.

§27
Responding to David Hume’s doubts that causality can be found anywhere in experience or through reasoning alone: the same can be said of subsistence (that an object exists in itself) and community (that objects effect one another). However, while they can not be found in experience, they are found a priori as the foundation for objective judgment.

§28
Experience is then defined by these three principles, and everything which is objectively valid will be defined as substance, causal, and communal.

 

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In the third table, “Pure physiological table of universal principles of natural science”, physiological refers in an older sense of the word: the physical, materialist nature of objects. This table is concerned with how we construct objective experience. The principles guiding that construction are taken to be the principles of nature, thus ensuring their shared validity.
Axioms of intuition refers to the quantities in space and time.
Anticipations of perception refers to the magnitude of qualitative sensations, in a range from unconscious to fully conscious.
Analogies of experience refers to the relations between particular objects of intuition which grant them the status of being real objects, which we might mistakenly believe to be objects as they truly exist. Causation, material substance, and part/whole relations are all necessary qualifiers for objective experience. This gives us the ability to construct a unified worldview with our knowledge and to ask questions about the hypothetical parts or the whole.
Postulates of empirical thinking lists the relations appearances have to the whole of experience in general. Possibility concerns whether something abides by nature, even if imagined / proposed. Existence refers to something being actually present before our senses. Necessity refers to something both appearing to us and abiding by the natural principles.