Braininvat » Fri Jan 23, 2015 11:36 am wrote:Also instrumenalist - I touched on this way back there, in regard to the role of natural selection - brains that form useful models of the external world, that accurately map movement and events in the environment, tend to survive and pass along their genes. Go with what works - success, not absolute truth, is what matters in the marriage of phenomenon and noumenon. A successful appraisal of the relations between things, and the properties of those things - and that success measured by the agreement of all observers - is all the reality we are going to get.
There's a lot of steps that Kant (or anyone) would have to make to move from his transcendental idealism with categories of understanding and forms of intuition being considered a priori knowledge and an empirical understanding of the mind as it might have evolved in accordance with natural selection. However, assuming Kant would have taken these steps, he would want to distinguish brain from mind. A theory of mind would be quite different than a theory of the brain. To address the issue of humans, as opposed to other creatures, Kant would allow that there is a relationship between the mind and the brain, but would show reserve for it being the result for whatever works. The mind is a powerhouse of activity dealing with what and how we can know the world as well as how its possible for it to coexist with the moral laws within us. He might not deny that the brain is responsible for the mind (and all its mental activities), and that the mind's cognitive and perceptive and emotional capabilities are ultimately due to activities of the brain, but that he would say that descriptions of what our mind is doing are not directly comparable to descriptions of that same activity by the brain. (One can argue for an emergent property here, but at present we aren't able to produce an acceptable reduction. In any case, the descriptive differences would still be present.)
Braininvat wrote:What is the category of time?
Kant treats time as a form of intuition, kept separate from the intellectual portion of our mind that falls within the faculty of understanding. At least Kant does this in his development of what we might call perception. The understanding is capable of conceptual analysis apart from perception, which would be called cognition. The reason that space and time are not objects of experience, which is what the understanding creates using the categories of understanding during perception, is that neither time nor space can affect the senses, creating sensations, that are in turn subject to the categories of understanding in the way objects are alleged to do.
Braininvat wrote:Is it change and the relative rates of change in different processes and motions we observe in nature? Or is it only the organized and carefully paced movement of thought across the solid and static landscape of a Parmenidean block universe?
You seem to have leaped to what it means to observe something, which Kant prescribes that they are experienced in time. In order for Kant to move to an Einstein four-dimensional block-universe, Kant would have to come to terms with the developments of the 19th century in which Euclid's geometry has been swept away as the one and only geometry available to the world we experience. On the arrival of Einstein, this issue was specifically addressed. A distinction was made between what we perceive (experience, observe) and what our minds are capable of doing intellectually. To get at Einstein's block-model, our theoretical framework would have to take up the challenge absent observation. The advances in geometry allowed this possibility. Of course, such a theoretical construct is not confirmed to be case by observation, since we've removed its observation from consideration. To address this problem, there were a variety of theorists (Wyle, for one) who were able to come up with ways to reintroduce observation at the very local level and have it built up into a framework in which the global framework would cover all the locals. They had to do this in order to be able to confirm (or not disconfirm) the theory itself. (And I believe this became an issue the Logical Positivists were trying to address.)
Have to go now, but I think the historical steps getting from Kant to Einstein (which by the way, is in fact the trajectory -- not taking the empiricists route) is important in understanding how theory changes.