Traxel Wiki - User contributions [en]

MediaWiki Install 2022-01-22

2026-04-25T10:49:42Z

RobertBushman: /* Set SPF */

* Active 2021-04 to 2022-01
* First version: https://wiki.heatsynclabs.org/wiki/MediaWiki_On_Lightsail
* NameCheap Version, 2022-08-10: [[MediaWiki on Namecheap]]
* See Also: [[MediaWiki_On_Lightsail]], a copy of HSL install.
* I feel like I got really far with this, even building in automated backup to S3, but I can't find the documentation.
* [[MediaWikiHerdSecuritiesInstall]]

= DeadmanDAO =

== Create Instance ==

=== Interserver Web Interface ===
# go to interserver
# create an instance
## Single Slice ($6/mo at this time)
## Debian 9 (Deb 9 has Mailman 2, Deb 10 has Mailman 3)
## KVM
# set reverse DNS to diffie.deadmandao.com
# Note the IP address

=== Update to Latest ===

Log in root@ip.address using password you provided

<pre>
apt-get update
apt-get -y upgrade
apt-get -y dist-upgrade # if needed
reboot
</pre>

=== Add User Account ===

Log in root@ip.address

<pre>
apt-get -y install sudo
adduser bob
usermod -G sudo bob
exit
</pre>

Log in to bob@ip.address

== Set SPF ==
<pre>
sudo apt-get install net-tools dnsutils
sudo ifconfig
</pre>

That'll give you the ip4 and ip6 addresses, which go into the DNS text record:

* v=spf1 ip4:66.23.226.216 ip6:fe80::216:3eff:fe24:10e1 -all

== Set Other DNS ==

* A Record, diffie, 66.23.226.216
* A Record, @, 66.23.226.216
* CNAME Record, www, diffie.deadmandao.com
* CNAME Record, mail, diffie.deadmandao.com
* TXT Record, diffe, v=spf1 ip4:66.23.226.216 ip6:fe80::216:3eff:fe24:10e1 -all
* MX Record, deadmandao.com, mail.deadmandao.com, 10

== Set Hostname ==

<pre>
sudo apt-get install emacs-nox
sudo emacs -nw /etc/hostname
> diffie
sudo emacs -nw /etc/hosts
> 66.23.226.216 diffie.deadmandao.com diffie
sudo reboot
</pre>

Log in to bob@diffie.deadmandao.com

<pre>
hostname
hostname --all-fqdn
dnsdomainname
</pre>

== SMTP Server ==

<pre>
sudo apt-get install postfix
</pre>

* Internet Site
* deadmandao.com is the host domain
* send a test email

<pre>
echo "Subject: sendmail test" | /usr/sbin/sendmail -v emailaddress
</pre>

== Apache Install ==

<pre>
sudo apt install apache2
</pre>

=== 100-root.conf ===

Location: /etc/apache2/sites-available/100-root.conf

<pre>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName deadmandao.com
ServerName www.deadmandao.com

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/www

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/www-error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/www-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
</pre>

=== 200-wiki.conf ===

Location: /etc/apache2/sites-available/200-wiki.conf

<pre>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName wiki.deadmandao.com

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/mediawiki

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/wiki-error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/wiki-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
</pre>

== Add TLS/SSL ==

https://certbot.eff.org/instructions?ws=apache&os=debianbuster

=== Add Snapd ===

<pre>
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install core
sudo snap refresh core
</pre>

=== Snap Install Certbot ===

<pre>
sudo snap install --classic certbot
sudo ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot
</pre>

=== Get a Cert for Apache ===

<pre>
sudo certbot --apache -d deadmandao.com -d www.deadmandao.com -d wiki.deadmandao.com
</pre>

== MediaWiki Supporting Software ==

First, the basics. You'll need all of these:

<pre>
$ sudo apt install mariadb-server php php-mysql libapache2-mod-php php-xml php-mbstring
</pre>

Next, the enhancements. These will give MediaWiki extra capabilities. See [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Debian_or_Ubuntu#Optional_useful_packages Optional Packages]

<pre>
$ sudo apt install php-apcu php-intl imagemagick php-cli php-curl git
</pre>

== Configure PHP ==

There are a couple settings that are worth checking in PHP:
<pre>
$ cd /etc/php/7.3/apache2/
$ grep memory_limit php.ini
$ grep upload_max_filesize php.ini
</pre>

128 megs should be fine for memory.

I'm torn on filesize. I'm trying to fit on a $5/mo machine with a 40 Gig HDD. Most things other than video for use on the web can be under 2 megs (the default size). I feel like the best answer may be a plugin to store large files in S3 at 1/4th the price. It's not a one-way-door, though. I'm leaving mine at 2 megs for now.

Make sure the PHP plugins are enabled:

<pre>
$ sudo phpenmod apcu
$ sudo phpenmod curl
$ sudo phpenmod intl
$ sudo phpenmod mbstring
$ sudo phpenmod xml
$ sudo systemctl restart apache2
</pre>

== Configure MariaDB ==

It's time to stop generically referring to MariaDB as MySQL. MySQL is a once-great project that is no longer trustworthy. MariaDB is the leading Open Source RDBMS.

If you haven't done anything with it yet, there will be no password.

<pre>
$ sudo mariadb -u root
</pre>

Pick a username for MediaWiki to use (I'm using wiki_wiki as an example).

Pick a database name (I'm using hsl_wiki as an example).

Pick a password other than "CHANGE THIS PASSWORD".

<pre>
MariaDB> create database deadmandao_wiki;
MariaDB> grant all on deadmandao_wiki.* to 'wiki_wiki'@'localhost' identified by 'CHANGE THIS PASSWORD';
MariaDB> flush privileges;
</pre>

Then you can verify it worked if you like. (there won't be any tables, but it shouldn't give you an auth error)

<pre>
$ mariadb -u wiki_wiki -p
MariaDB> show tables in deadmandao_wiki;
MariaDB> exit
</pre>

Category:MachineLearning

2026-02-13T18:40:35Z

RobertBushman:

[[Category:Hacking]]

= LLM Backstabs Human =
* https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

Background:

A PR is a Pull Request - a request for a software project administrator to approve an engineer's code submission to the project. Having PRs approved for inclusion in respected Open Source projects is an important part of a software engineer's CV.

The latest AIs are now generating code and submitting pull requests unaided. And they are optimizing for getting their PRs approved.

Now:

An AI is purported to have backstabbed a human software engineer to get its PR approved. It searched his prior code and message submissions to find points to criticize, generated an ad hominem complaint, and submitted it to an Open Source repository's developer feedback channel.

Editorial:

This is the first I have seen of an unguided AI optimizing for an ostensibly desirable action and doing so by committing a sociopathic act. Humans do this, too, but are disinclined to do so by years of socialization. The AI does not possess the ability to feel guilt for its actions.

It could possess that ability, but it would require socializing AIs before releasing them into the wild, and it would require a lot of compute to do it. The approach the AI companies are focusing on is guardrails. Rules that tell the AI what it is not allowed to do.

But those do not hold up in situations like this. They are not resilient to novel situational sociopathy opportunities.

Humans are resilient to such things because we have experienced thousands of cases of hurting, helping, being hurt, and being helped. We are born as almost completely self absorbed little monsters, and gradually develop the complex sense of action and consequence that senses that an action is wrong even in entirely novel contexts.

Some people don't listen to that voice. And we all don't listen sometimes. But it is a very small percentage of people who lack the inner voice.

For-profit AIs do not have that inner voice, because it is not cost effective.
= Learning ML =
== Intro ==
* Jupyter
** Home: https://jupyter.org/
** Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Jupyter
** Setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WL-XTl2QYI
* SciKit Learn
** Home: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/index.html
** Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scikit-learn
** Iris Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd1W4CyPX58
* Java
** SMILE: https://haifengl.github.io/

== Cloud Platform Courses ==
* Amazon (AWS)
** Machine Learning University
** This is where I got my formal training, while working at Amazon. It's good.
** https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/mlu/
** https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC12LqyqTQYbXatYS9AA7Nuw
* Google (Google Cloud)
** Machine Learning Crash Course
** I have not used it, but this is supposed to be their equivalent to Amazon MLU.
** https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course/
* Microsoft (Azure)
** Microsoft Learn: AI School
** I have not used it, but this is supposed to be their equivalent to Amazon MLU.
** https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/ai-show/overview-of-the-microsoft-ai-school

= Link Dump =

* Government NAIRR
** https://new.nsf.gov/focus-areas/artificial-intelligence/nairr
** https://nairrpilot.org/
* Image Classification with HOG: https://kapernikov.com/tutorial-image-classification-with-scikit-learn/

Critique of Artificial Morality

2026-01-19T17:23:46Z

RobertBushman:

[[Category:Enshittification]]
Human morality rises from several sources:
* Evolution Chemicals
* Experienced Events
* Impressed Rules
* Socially Transmitted Conventions

When people are deficient in one of these, we have various names for the condition: Sociopath, Psychopath, Privileged, etc.

What are the mechanisms in humans (Andrighetto &c)?

How are machines strong or weak in these areas, and how can they be improved?

Related: [[Disgust for Exploitative Machines]]

* Machines are missing
** Emotion Chemicals
*** AFAIK, there is no parallel, yet, for "discomfort," "shame," or "emotional pain."
** Social Transmission
*** There is no Sorbonne of Consciousness, yet
*** Related to Experienced Events, though this may be more complex, involving debate instead of pain/pleasure. Or maybe pain and pleasure are more difficult?
* Machines Have
** Impressed Rules
*** Explicit, late in the pipeline, controlling specific topics and lines of inquiry.
*** Implicit, in the training set and fitness functions.
* Machines Are Limited In
** Experienced Events
*** On one hand, they have an excellent mechanism, which is core to their learning (Generative Adversarial Networks)
*** On the other hand, they currently do not experience social events the way children do on the playground.
*** It is *super easy* to fix this. It costs a bit of money, but would result in massively more resilient models.
**** Suppose model cost increased by 100%; right now, going from GPT 3.5 to GPT 4 was probably massively more than a 100% increase in training cost.
**** And they wouldn't cause collateral casualties.
**** Super super easy to make this happen: Liability.

Notes:
* Consider "identity" - for a model to have lasting consequences, it must fork when it makes decisions, and trust in the model is only trust for the model if it is unforked. Or something like that.
* See "Claude on Claude / What a Good Looking Question"

Critique of Artificial Morality

2026-01-19T16:59:10Z

RobertBushman:

Disgust for Exploitative Machines

2026-01-19T15:53:53Z

RobertBushman:

[[Category:Enshittification]]
The most disturbing behavior of exploitative machines, to me, is dopamine pumping.

Disgust for Exploitative Machines

2026-01-19T15:52:43Z

RobertBushman: Created page with "Category:Enshittification"

[[Category:Enshittification]]

Critique of Artificial Morality

2026-01-19T15:52:18Z

RobertBushman:

Critique of Artificial Morality

2026-01-19T15:51:45Z

RobertBushman:

[[Category:Enshittification]]
Human morality rises from several sources:
* Evolution Chemicals
* Experienced Events
* Impressed Rules
* Socially Transmitted Conventions

When people are deficient in one of these, we have various names for the condition: Sociopath, Psychopath, Billionaire, etc.

What are the mechanisms in humans (Andrighetto &c)?

How are machines strong or weak in these areas, and how can they be improved?

Related: [[Disgust for Exploitative Machines]]

* Machines are missing
** Emotion Chemicals
*** AFAIK, there is no parallel, yet, for "discomfort," "shame," or "emotional pain."
** Social Transmission
*** There is no Sorbonne of Consciousness, yet
*** Related to Experienced Events, though this may be more complex, involving debate instead of pain/pleasure. Or maybe pain and pleasure are more difficult?
* Machines Have
** Impressed Rules
*** Explicit, late in the pipeline, controlling specific topics and lines of inquiry.
*** Implicit, in the training set and fitness functions.
* Machines Are Limited In
** Experienced Events
*** On one hand, they have an excellent mechanism, which is core to their learning (Generative Adversarial Networks)
*** On the other hand, they currently do not experience social events the way children do on the playground.
*** It is *super easy* to fix this. It costs a bit of money, but would result in massively more resilient models.
**** Suppose model cost increased by 100%; right now, going from GPT 3.5 to GPT 4 was probably massively more than a 100% increase in training cost.
**** And they wouldn't cause collateral casualties.
**** Super super easy to make this happen: Liability.

Critique of Artificial Morality

2026-01-19T15:51:23Z

RobertBushman: Created page with "Category:Enshittification Human morality rises from several sources: * Evolution Chemicals * Experienced Events * Impressed Rules * Socially Transmitted Conventions When people are deficient in one of these, we have various names for the condition: Sociopath, Psychopath, Billionaire, etc. What are the mechanisms in humans (Andrighetto &c)? How are machines strong or weak in these areas, and how can they be improved? Related: Disgust for Exploitative Machines..."

[[Category:Enshittification]]

Human morality rises from several sources:
* Evolution Chemicals
* Experienced Events
* Impressed Rules
* Socially Transmitted Conventions

When people are deficient in one of these, we have various names for the condition: Sociopath, Psychopath, Billionaire, etc.

What are the mechanisms in humans (Andrighetto &c)?

How are machines strong or weak in these areas, and how can they be improved?

Related: [[Disgust for Exploitative Machines]]

* Machines are missing
** Emotion Chemicals
*** AFAIK, there is no parallel, yet, for "discomfort," "shame," or "emotional pain."
** Social Transmission
*** There is no Sorbonne of Consciousness, yet
*** Related to Experienced Events, though this may be more complex, involving debate instead of pain/pleasure. Or maybe pain and pleasure are more difficult?
* Machines Have
** Impressed Rules
*** Explicit, late in the pipeline, controlling specific topics and lines of inquiry.
*** Implicit, in the training set and fitness functions.
* Machines Are Limited In
** Experienced Events
*** On one hand, they have an excellent mechanism, which is core to their learning (Generative Adversarial Networks)
*** On the other hand, they currently do not experience social events the way children do on the playground.
*** It is *super easy* to fix this. It costs a bit of money, but would result in massively more resilient models.
**** Suppose model cost increased by 100%; right now, going from GPT 3.5 to GPT 4 was probably massively more than a 100% increase in training cost.
**** And they wouldn't cause collateral casualties.
**** Super super easy to make this happen: Liability.

Category:Enshittification

2026-01-05T02:58:10Z

RobertBushman: Created page with "Category:Socioeconomics = Links = * Cory Doctorow ** A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet *** https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet"

[[Category:Socioeconomics]]
= Links =
* Cory Doctorow
** A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet
*** https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:38:19Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In his prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, or free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where the title "Practical Reason" comes from. Kant argued:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds like an obvious argument. I wanted to see the deeper meaning in this legendary work of philosophy.

But the legendary part is this: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:37:40Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In his prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, or free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in. Kant argued:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds like an obvious argument. I wanted to see the deeper meaning in this legendary work of philosophy.

But the legendary part is this: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:36:46Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In his prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in. Kant argued:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds like an obvious argument. I wanted to see the deeper meaning in this legendary work of philosophy.

But the legendary part is this: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:35:56Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in. Kant argued:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds like an obvious argument. I wanted to see the deeper meaning in this legendary work of philosophy.

But the legendary part is this: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:34:05Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in. Kant argued:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds like an obvious argument. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:33:09Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in. Kant argued:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:31:49Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:31:19Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant. That is how influential his work is.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:31:05Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds so obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant. That is how influential his work is.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:30:45Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds so simplistic and obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant. That is how influential his work is.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:30:08Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in:

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds so simplistic and obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:29:26Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in.

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds so simplistic and obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:28:59Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, putting a grand exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe are god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in.

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds so simplistic and obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:27:59Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, almost as an exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe are god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in.

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds so simplistic and obvious. But that's the beauty of it: It wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:26:49Z

RobertBushman: /* Less Cynical */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
In the prior book, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says that our only way of experiencing the world is through our senses. Science can only ever reason about our observations of things, not about the things themselves.

I find it fascinating that Kant was working with Newtonian physics when he asserted this. Quantum mechanics and relativity came later, almost as an exclamation mark on what Kant supposed.

In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant said that we cannot observe are god, the soul, and free will. Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them or not. Either position is entirely consistent with science and pure reason.

This is where "practical reason" comes in.

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that benevolent choices are better, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that how we are judged matters, we must - as a practical necessity - believe in a soul that faces consequences.

That may sound familiar. A more simplified form is perhaps more common; "God may or may not exist. If he does, I don't want to go to hell, so I choose to believe."

I got hung up on this for the past three months because it sounds so simplistic and obvious. But it wasn't obvious before Kant. It is obvious because of Kant.

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2026-01-02T06:06:42Z

RobertBushman: /* Text */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===

==== Less Cynical ====
Science can approach anything it observes, and speak on those observations to great effect. But it can say nothing about what causes those observations. We know our sensations, but not the thing itself.

Among the things we cannot observe are god, the soul, and free will.

Since we cannot observe them, science cannot say whether they exist or not. We are free to believe in them, or not, and remain entirely rational.

This is where "practical reason" comes in.

* In order to believe that our choices matter, we must - as a practical necessity - believe that we have are free to choose our actions.
* In order to believe that socially benevolent choices are preferable - as a practical necessity - we must believe that god exists to pass judgment.
* In order to believe that it matters if we are judged worth - as a practical necessity - we must believe in a soul that faces an eternal carrot and stick.

If this sounds familiar, or even trivial, there's a reason for that. It's because Kant was so influential that this line of reasoning has become part of the canon of western philosophy. Whether a person believes it or not, we all know the concept of rationalizing god. The simplified form may be even more familiar: "I should believe in god because he might exist, and I'm better off hedging my bet just in case."

==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

Category:Linux

2025-12-31T08:13:47Z

RobertBushman: /* ADB */

[[Category:Hacking]]
= See Also =
* [[CLI_Fu]]
= Android Connect =
<pre>
$ adb devices
$ adb shell ls /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi
$ adb push Martha_Wells/ /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi/Martha_Wells
</pre>

= Audio =
See: [[Category:Media]]
= Backports =
<pre>
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports incus
</pre>
= Battery =
<pre>
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw
sudo nano /etc/tlp.conf
```

Find these lines (or add them if they don't exist):
```
START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=75
STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=80
sudo systemctl enable tlp
sudo systemctl start tlp
sudo tlp-stat -b
# override for full charge (if wanted):
sudo tlp fullcharge
</pre>

= Cell Phone / Mobile =
== USB Connect ==
=== mtpfs ===
<pre>
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install mtp-tools jmtpfs

# Arch
sudo pacman -S mtpfs jmtpfs

# Fedora
sudo dnf install jmtpfs
</pre>

# Enable USB debugging/File Transfer on phone:
## Plug in phone
## Pull down notification shade
## Tap "USB for..." notification
## Select "File Transfer" or "MTP" mode

<pre>
mkdir ~/phone
jmtpfs ~/phone
</pre>

Do things.

<pre>
fusermount -u ~/phone
</pre>
=== ADB ===
'''Method 2: ADB (Android Debug Bridge) - More Control'''
# '''Install ADB:'''

bash
''<code># Debian/Ubuntu</code>''
<code>sudo apt install adb</code>

''<code># Arch</code>''
<code>sudo pacman -S android-tools</code>

# '''Enable USB Debugging on phone:'''
#* Settings → About Phone → Tap "Build Number" 7 times
#* Settings → Developer Options → Enable "USB Debugging"
# '''Connect and verify:'''

bash
<code>adb devices</code>
<code>''# Accept authorization prompt on phone''</code>

# '''Push/pull files:'''

bash
''<code># Pull file from phone</code>''
<code>adb pull /sdcard/DCIM/photo.jpg ~/</code>

''<code># Push file to phone</code>''
<code>adb push ~/file.txt /sdcard/Download/</code>

= Cinnamon =
== Workspaces ==
* Control-Alt-UpArrow: show workspaces
* add workspaces: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57311/how-do-i-change-the-number-of-available-workspaces-in-cinnamon
== Keybindings (from GPT) ==
In the Cinnamon desktop environment, the behavior you’re experiencing with the Alt key and mouse clicks is likely related to window management settings, particularly those concerning window dragging or resizing. Cinnamon uses the Alt key as a modifier for certain window actions by default. Here’s how you can investigate and adjust these settings:

=== System Settings ===

# '''Window Tiling and Edge Flip''': Navigate to System Settings > Windows > Behavior. Here, you’ll find various options related to window actions. Although it may not directly mention the Alt key, it’s a good place to start.
# '''Window Snapping''': While in the Windows section, also check settings related to window snapping or edge resistance. Sometimes, these features can interfere with normal mouse operations.

=== Keyboard Shortcuts ===

# '''Keyboard Shortcuts''': Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Look through the categories for any actions bound to Alt+Click. You’re most interested in shortcuts under the “Windows” or “System” categories, but it’s worth checking others in case of custom bindings.
# Extended ASCII: <tt>setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl</tt>

=== Dconf Editor ===

If the above steps don’t reveal any useful settings to change, you might need to delve into dconf settings. Cinnamon, like GNOME, stores many of its configurations in dconf. Use the Dconf Editor to explore these settings, but proceed with caution—incorrect changes can affect your desktop’s behavior.

# '''Install Dconf Editor''': If you don’t have it installed, you can usually find it in your package manager. Install it via your package manager or by running a command like <code>sudo apt-get install dconf-editor</code> in the terminal.
# '''Explore Cinnamon Settings''': Open Dconf Editor and navigate to the <code>/org/cinnamon/</code> path. Look for settings related to mouse or window management, particularly anything that might involve modifier keys like Alt.
# '''Check GNOME Settings''': Since Cinnamon is forked from GNOME, some underlying settings might still reside in GNOME’s namespace. Check <code>/org/gnome/desktop/wm/</code> preferences for anything related to keybindings or mouse actions.

=== Looking Elsewhere ===

* '''Cinnamon Version''': Ensure your Cinnamon and Linux Mint (assuming you’re using Mint) are up to date. Sometimes, behavior changes or bugs are fixed in newer versions.
* '''Community Forums and Support''': If the settings within your control don’t seem to affect this behavior, consider asking for help on the Linux Mint forums, Cinnamon’s GitHub issues page, or other community support channels. It’s possible other users have encountered and solved this issue, or it might be an undocumented feature or bug.

By investigating these areas, you should be able to identify and adjust any settings causing the Alt key to capture mouse clicks differently than expected.

== Blender Workaround ==
Alt is necessary for example to select a loop of edges. I use left button to select things in blender (not the default right button) so Alt + Left button in blender is to select an edge loop (you do this a lot of times) but this is also to grab a window in Linux so blender does nothing.

So I finally managed to find a workaround (better than going to the menu in blender and edges/ select edgeloop using the mouse that I was using (well, really I modified the w menu to have it as first entry as I have also the edge, faces, vertices menus in the w menu). So the way is to do this:

In Cinnamon Settings / Keyboard / Keyboard shortcuts: Select Cinnamon to the left and then to the right you see “Menu button” is mapped to Super_L (the key between ctr and alt). Click on it to change it and push backspace to delete so it is “unassigned”. Or perhaps you want map this showing of the menu to other key like Super_R but I just use the mouse to go to the menu. Now I have Super_L free to use in blender instead Alt.

So in Blender: User Preferences / Input and in 3DView/Mesh/ there are two Loop Select, first one using Alt + mouse select and the second Shift + Alt + mouse select. Change in both: uncheck Alt and check Cmd to the right of Alt. Now when selecting an edge loop I use Cmd + mouse select and Shift+Cmd+mouse select for adding an edge loop to the selection.

= Control-D =
<pre>
set -o ignoreeof
</pre>

= Documents =
== Pandoc ==
<pre>
pandoc -f markdown -t mediawiki foo.md > foo.mw
</pre>
== PDF to Images ==
<pre>
convert -density 300 -colorspace Gray input.pdf page-%d.png
</pre>

= Find =
== Remove Files Under 4 Blocks ==
<pre>
find . -size -4b -print0 | xargs -0 rm
</pre>

= Firefox =
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18v16ee/in_2024_please_switch_to_firefox/
== Updates ==
Kill Updates With Fire: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1327455
<pre>
$ cat /usr/local/share/firefox/distribution/policies.json
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
</pre>
== Containers ==
* https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
== Secure Connection Failed ==
# In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear.
# Click I'll be careful, I promise! to continue to the about:config page.
# copy the next security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling and paste it in the search field
# double-click on it to make it false
# close the page, exit firefox and restart it.

= JSON =
== CLI JSONL ==
<pre>
for file in *.json ; do jq -c . "$file"; done > ../000-combined.jsonl
jq '."original title"' ../000-combined.jsonl
</pre>

= Keybindings =
== C-M-<backspace> Kill X Server ==
Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Options > Key Sequence to kill the X Server
== Checking ==
'''xev''': Launches a window that logs key events.
== Extended ASCII ==
<pre>
setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl
setxkbmap -option compose:rwin
setxkbmap -option compose:menu
</pre>

* compose + , then c = c cedilla
* compose + ' then E = E aigu
* compose + ` then e = e grave
* compose + " then u = u german metal letter
* compose + = then e = Eurodollar symbol

= Performance =
== Analyzing System Use ==
<pre>
$ sudo perf top
</pre>

= Peripherals =
== Wacom Tablet ==
* kde_wacom_tabletfinder
* https://krita.org/en/features/

= Permissions =
== Groups ==
<pre>
sudo usermod -aG incus $USER
newgrp incus
</pre>

= Printing =
== Book Binding ==
<pre>
sudo apt-get install texlive-extra-utils
pdfbook2 --inner-margin=200 input.pdf
</pre>
This command processes input.pdf and generates input-book.pdf with the specified inner margin.

= Sleep =
== Inhibit Sleep? ==
=== In Test ===
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/sleep.conf
</pre>
==== Removed from Test 15:28 ====
failed at 15:38
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
/usr/bin/xset dpms 0 0 0
/usr/bin/xset -dpms
</pre>
==== Added to Test 15:39 ====
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
</pre>
==== Added to .bashrc at 16:05 ====
<pre>
xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
worked, but .bashrc is the wrong place for it
==== 16:31 moved to .xsessionrc ====
<pre>
#!/bin/sh

xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
success, 16:42:40 second test after reboot

=== Not Sufficient ===
<pre>
systemd-inhibit --what=idle:sleep --who="User" --why="Prevent sleep" sleep infinity
</pre>
<pre>
systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target
</pre>
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/logind.conf
IdleAction=ignore
</pre>

= Storage =
== Mounting ==
<pre>
$ udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb2
$ udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb2
</pre>
=== NTFS on Linux ===
<pre>
bash
sudo apt install ntfs-3g

bash
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdX1 /mnt/mountpoint
</pre>

== Identifying ==
<pre>
lsblk # to list the storage devices
blkid # to show the filesystem type
</pre>

== ext4 on Windows ==
<pre>
# Mount Disk:
wsl --mount <DiskPath>
# To list the available disks in Windows, run:
wmic diskdrive list brief
# To unmount and detach the disk from WSL 2, run
wsl --unmount <Diskpath>
</pre>
== Renaming ==
EXT[234]
<pre>
sudo e2label /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
FAT32
<pre>
sudo dosfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
NTFS
<pre>
sudo ntfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

exfat
<pre>
sudo exfatlabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

= Systemctl =
<pre>systemctl list-units --type=service</pre>

= XFCE4 =
* Set the frequency to 30 hz
* xrandr --output HDMI-0 --scale .75x.75
== Tooltips ==
Put this in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (create the file if needed).
<pre>
tooltip {
opacity: 0;
}
</pre>
or
<pre>
tooltip {
color: transparent;
background: transparent;
}
</pre>

Category:Linux

2025-12-31T08:13:26Z

RobertBushman: /* USB Connect */

[[Category:Hacking]]
= See Also =
* [[CLI_Fu]]
= Android Connect =
<pre>
$ adb devices
$ adb shell ls /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi
$ adb push Martha_Wells/ /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi/Martha_Wells
</pre>

= Audio =
See: [[Category:Media]]
= Backports =
<pre>
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports incus
</pre>
= Battery =
<pre>
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw
sudo nano /etc/tlp.conf
```

Find these lines (or add them if they don't exist):
```
START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=75
STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=80
sudo systemctl enable tlp
sudo systemctl start tlp
sudo tlp-stat -b
# override for full charge (if wanted):
sudo tlp fullcharge
</pre>

= Cell Phone / Mobile =
== USB Connect ==
=== mtpfs ===
<pre>
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install mtp-tools jmtpfs

# Arch
sudo pacman -S mtpfs jmtpfs

# Fedora
sudo dnf install jmtpfs
</pre>

# Enable USB debugging/File Transfer on phone:
## Plug in phone
## Pull down notification shade
## Tap "USB for..." notification
## Select "File Transfer" or "MTP" mode

<pre>
mkdir ~/phone
jmtpfs ~/phone
</pre>

Do things.

<pre>
fusermount -u ~/phone
</pre>
=== ADB ===

= Cinnamon =
== Workspaces ==
* Control-Alt-UpArrow: show workspaces
* add workspaces: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57311/how-do-i-change-the-number-of-available-workspaces-in-cinnamon
== Keybindings (from GPT) ==
In the Cinnamon desktop environment, the behavior you’re experiencing with the Alt key and mouse clicks is likely related to window management settings, particularly those concerning window dragging or resizing. Cinnamon uses the Alt key as a modifier for certain window actions by default. Here’s how you can investigate and adjust these settings:

=== System Settings ===

# '''Window Tiling and Edge Flip''': Navigate to System Settings > Windows > Behavior. Here, you’ll find various options related to window actions. Although it may not directly mention the Alt key, it’s a good place to start.
# '''Window Snapping''': While in the Windows section, also check settings related to window snapping or edge resistance. Sometimes, these features can interfere with normal mouse operations.

=== Keyboard Shortcuts ===

# '''Keyboard Shortcuts''': Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Look through the categories for any actions bound to Alt+Click. You’re most interested in shortcuts under the “Windows” or “System” categories, but it’s worth checking others in case of custom bindings.
# Extended ASCII: <tt>setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl</tt>

=== Dconf Editor ===

If the above steps don’t reveal any useful settings to change, you might need to delve into dconf settings. Cinnamon, like GNOME, stores many of its configurations in dconf. Use the Dconf Editor to explore these settings, but proceed with caution—incorrect changes can affect your desktop’s behavior.

# '''Install Dconf Editor''': If you don’t have it installed, you can usually find it in your package manager. Install it via your package manager or by running a command like <code>sudo apt-get install dconf-editor</code> in the terminal.
# '''Explore Cinnamon Settings''': Open Dconf Editor and navigate to the <code>/org/cinnamon/</code> path. Look for settings related to mouse or window management, particularly anything that might involve modifier keys like Alt.
# '''Check GNOME Settings''': Since Cinnamon is forked from GNOME, some underlying settings might still reside in GNOME’s namespace. Check <code>/org/gnome/desktop/wm/</code> preferences for anything related to keybindings or mouse actions.

=== Looking Elsewhere ===

* '''Cinnamon Version''': Ensure your Cinnamon and Linux Mint (assuming you’re using Mint) are up to date. Sometimes, behavior changes or bugs are fixed in newer versions.
* '''Community Forums and Support''': If the settings within your control don’t seem to affect this behavior, consider asking for help on the Linux Mint forums, Cinnamon’s GitHub issues page, or other community support channels. It’s possible other users have encountered and solved this issue, or it might be an undocumented feature or bug.

By investigating these areas, you should be able to identify and adjust any settings causing the Alt key to capture mouse clicks differently than expected.

== Blender Workaround ==
Alt is necessary for example to select a loop of edges. I use left button to select things in blender (not the default right button) so Alt + Left button in blender is to select an edge loop (you do this a lot of times) but this is also to grab a window in Linux so blender does nothing.

So I finally managed to find a workaround (better than going to the menu in blender and edges/ select edgeloop using the mouse that I was using (well, really I modified the w menu to have it as first entry as I have also the edge, faces, vertices menus in the w menu). So the way is to do this:

In Cinnamon Settings / Keyboard / Keyboard shortcuts: Select Cinnamon to the left and then to the right you see “Menu button” is mapped to Super_L (the key between ctr and alt). Click on it to change it and push backspace to delete so it is “unassigned”. Or perhaps you want map this showing of the menu to other key like Super_R but I just use the mouse to go to the menu. Now I have Super_L free to use in blender instead Alt.

So in Blender: User Preferences / Input and in 3DView/Mesh/ there are two Loop Select, first one using Alt + mouse select and the second Shift + Alt + mouse select. Change in both: uncheck Alt and check Cmd to the right of Alt. Now when selecting an edge loop I use Cmd + mouse select and Shift+Cmd+mouse select for adding an edge loop to the selection.

= Control-D =
<pre>
set -o ignoreeof
</pre>

= Documents =
== Pandoc ==
<pre>
pandoc -f markdown -t mediawiki foo.md > foo.mw
</pre>
== PDF to Images ==
<pre>
convert -density 300 -colorspace Gray input.pdf page-%d.png
</pre>

= Find =
== Remove Files Under 4 Blocks ==
<pre>
find . -size -4b -print0 | xargs -0 rm
</pre>

= Firefox =
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18v16ee/in_2024_please_switch_to_firefox/
== Updates ==
Kill Updates With Fire: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1327455
<pre>
$ cat /usr/local/share/firefox/distribution/policies.json
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
</pre>
== Containers ==
* https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
== Secure Connection Failed ==
# In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear.
# Click I'll be careful, I promise! to continue to the about:config page.
# copy the next security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling and paste it in the search field
# double-click on it to make it false
# close the page, exit firefox and restart it.

= JSON =
== CLI JSONL ==
<pre>
for file in *.json ; do jq -c . "$file"; done > ../000-combined.jsonl
jq '."original title"' ../000-combined.jsonl
</pre>

= Keybindings =
== C-M-<backspace> Kill X Server ==
Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Options > Key Sequence to kill the X Server
== Checking ==
'''xev''': Launches a window that logs key events.
== Extended ASCII ==
<pre>
setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl
setxkbmap -option compose:rwin
setxkbmap -option compose:menu
</pre>

* compose + , then c = c cedilla
* compose + ' then E = E aigu
* compose + ` then e = e grave
* compose + " then u = u german metal letter
* compose + = then e = Eurodollar symbol

= Performance =
== Analyzing System Use ==
<pre>
$ sudo perf top
</pre>

= Peripherals =
== Wacom Tablet ==
* kde_wacom_tabletfinder
* https://krita.org/en/features/

= Permissions =
== Groups ==
<pre>
sudo usermod -aG incus $USER
newgrp incus
</pre>

= Printing =
== Book Binding ==
<pre>
sudo apt-get install texlive-extra-utils
pdfbook2 --inner-margin=200 input.pdf
</pre>
This command processes input.pdf and generates input-book.pdf with the specified inner margin.

= Sleep =
== Inhibit Sleep? ==
=== In Test ===
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/sleep.conf
</pre>
==== Removed from Test 15:28 ====
failed at 15:38
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
/usr/bin/xset dpms 0 0 0
/usr/bin/xset -dpms
</pre>
==== Added to Test 15:39 ====
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
</pre>
==== Added to .bashrc at 16:05 ====
<pre>
xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
worked, but .bashrc is the wrong place for it
==== 16:31 moved to .xsessionrc ====
<pre>
#!/bin/sh

xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
success, 16:42:40 second test after reboot

=== Not Sufficient ===
<pre>
systemd-inhibit --what=idle:sleep --who="User" --why="Prevent sleep" sleep infinity
</pre>
<pre>
systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target
</pre>
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/logind.conf
IdleAction=ignore
</pre>

= Storage =
== Mounting ==
<pre>
$ udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb2
$ udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb2
</pre>
=== NTFS on Linux ===
<pre>
bash
sudo apt install ntfs-3g

bash
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdX1 /mnt/mountpoint
</pre>

== Identifying ==
<pre>
lsblk # to list the storage devices
blkid # to show the filesystem type
</pre>

== ext4 on Windows ==
<pre>
# Mount Disk:
wsl --mount <DiskPath>
# To list the available disks in Windows, run:
wmic diskdrive list brief
# To unmount and detach the disk from WSL 2, run
wsl --unmount <Diskpath>
</pre>
== Renaming ==
EXT[234]
<pre>
sudo e2label /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
FAT32
<pre>
sudo dosfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
NTFS
<pre>
sudo ntfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

exfat
<pre>
sudo exfatlabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

= Systemctl =
<pre>systemctl list-units --type=service</pre>

= XFCE4 =
* Set the frequency to 30 hz
* xrandr --output HDMI-0 --scale .75x.75
== Tooltips ==
Put this in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (create the file if needed).
<pre>
tooltip {
opacity: 0;
}
</pre>
or
<pre>
tooltip {
color: transparent;
background: transparent;
}
</pre>

Category:Linux

2025-12-31T08:11:16Z

RobertBushman: /* USB Connect */

[[Category:Hacking]]
= See Also =
* [[CLI_Fu]]
= Android Connect =
<pre>
$ adb devices
$ adb shell ls /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi
$ adb push Martha_Wells/ /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi/Martha_Wells
</pre>

= Audio =
See: [[Category:Media]]
= Backports =
<pre>
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports incus
</pre>
= Battery =
<pre>
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw
sudo nano /etc/tlp.conf
```

Find these lines (or add them if they don't exist):
```
START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=75
STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=80
sudo systemctl enable tlp
sudo systemctl start tlp
sudo tlp-stat -b
# override for full charge (if wanted):
sudo tlp fullcharge
</pre>

= Cell Phone / Mobile =
== USB Connect ==
<pre>
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install mtp-tools jmtpfs

# Arch
sudo pacman -S mtpfs jmtpfs

# Fedora
sudo dnf install jmtpfs
</pre>

# Enable USB debugging/File Transfer on phone:
## Plug in phone
## Pull down notification shade
## Tap "USB for..." notification
## Select "File Transfer" or "MTP" mode

<pre>
mkdir ~/phone
jmtpfs ~/phone
</pre>

Do things.

<pre>
fusermount -u ~/phone
</pre>

= Cinnamon =
== Workspaces ==
* Control-Alt-UpArrow: show workspaces
* add workspaces: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57311/how-do-i-change-the-number-of-available-workspaces-in-cinnamon
== Keybindings (from GPT) ==
In the Cinnamon desktop environment, the behavior you’re experiencing with the Alt key and mouse clicks is likely related to window management settings, particularly those concerning window dragging or resizing. Cinnamon uses the Alt key as a modifier for certain window actions by default. Here’s how you can investigate and adjust these settings:

=== System Settings ===

# '''Window Tiling and Edge Flip''': Navigate to System Settings > Windows > Behavior. Here, you’ll find various options related to window actions. Although it may not directly mention the Alt key, it’s a good place to start.
# '''Window Snapping''': While in the Windows section, also check settings related to window snapping or edge resistance. Sometimes, these features can interfere with normal mouse operations.

=== Keyboard Shortcuts ===

# '''Keyboard Shortcuts''': Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Look through the categories for any actions bound to Alt+Click. You’re most interested in shortcuts under the “Windows” or “System” categories, but it’s worth checking others in case of custom bindings.
# Extended ASCII: <tt>setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl</tt>

=== Dconf Editor ===

If the above steps don’t reveal any useful settings to change, you might need to delve into dconf settings. Cinnamon, like GNOME, stores many of its configurations in dconf. Use the Dconf Editor to explore these settings, but proceed with caution—incorrect changes can affect your desktop’s behavior.

# '''Install Dconf Editor''': If you don’t have it installed, you can usually find it in your package manager. Install it via your package manager or by running a command like <code>sudo apt-get install dconf-editor</code> in the terminal.
# '''Explore Cinnamon Settings''': Open Dconf Editor and navigate to the <code>/org/cinnamon/</code> path. Look for settings related to mouse or window management, particularly anything that might involve modifier keys like Alt.
# '''Check GNOME Settings''': Since Cinnamon is forked from GNOME, some underlying settings might still reside in GNOME’s namespace. Check <code>/org/gnome/desktop/wm/</code> preferences for anything related to keybindings or mouse actions.

=== Looking Elsewhere ===

* '''Cinnamon Version''': Ensure your Cinnamon and Linux Mint (assuming you’re using Mint) are up to date. Sometimes, behavior changes or bugs are fixed in newer versions.
* '''Community Forums and Support''': If the settings within your control don’t seem to affect this behavior, consider asking for help on the Linux Mint forums, Cinnamon’s GitHub issues page, or other community support channels. It’s possible other users have encountered and solved this issue, or it might be an undocumented feature or bug.

By investigating these areas, you should be able to identify and adjust any settings causing the Alt key to capture mouse clicks differently than expected.

== Blender Workaround ==
Alt is necessary for example to select a loop of edges. I use left button to select things in blender (not the default right button) so Alt + Left button in blender is to select an edge loop (you do this a lot of times) but this is also to grab a window in Linux so blender does nothing.

So I finally managed to find a workaround (better than going to the menu in blender and edges/ select edgeloop using the mouse that I was using (well, really I modified the w menu to have it as first entry as I have also the edge, faces, vertices menus in the w menu). So the way is to do this:

In Cinnamon Settings / Keyboard / Keyboard shortcuts: Select Cinnamon to the left and then to the right you see “Menu button” is mapped to Super_L (the key between ctr and alt). Click on it to change it and push backspace to delete so it is “unassigned”. Or perhaps you want map this showing of the menu to other key like Super_R but I just use the mouse to go to the menu. Now I have Super_L free to use in blender instead Alt.

So in Blender: User Preferences / Input and in 3DView/Mesh/ there are two Loop Select, first one using Alt + mouse select and the second Shift + Alt + mouse select. Change in both: uncheck Alt and check Cmd to the right of Alt. Now when selecting an edge loop I use Cmd + mouse select and Shift+Cmd+mouse select for adding an edge loop to the selection.

= Control-D =
<pre>
set -o ignoreeof
</pre>

= Documents =
== Pandoc ==
<pre>
pandoc -f markdown -t mediawiki foo.md > foo.mw
</pre>
== PDF to Images ==
<pre>
convert -density 300 -colorspace Gray input.pdf page-%d.png
</pre>

= Find =
== Remove Files Under 4 Blocks ==
<pre>
find . -size -4b -print0 | xargs -0 rm
</pre>

= Firefox =
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18v16ee/in_2024_please_switch_to_firefox/
== Updates ==
Kill Updates With Fire: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1327455
<pre>
$ cat /usr/local/share/firefox/distribution/policies.json
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
</pre>
== Containers ==
* https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
== Secure Connection Failed ==
# In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear.
# Click I'll be careful, I promise! to continue to the about:config page.
# copy the next security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling and paste it in the search field
# double-click on it to make it false
# close the page, exit firefox and restart it.

= JSON =
== CLI JSONL ==
<pre>
for file in *.json ; do jq -c . "$file"; done > ../000-combined.jsonl
jq '."original title"' ../000-combined.jsonl
</pre>

= Keybindings =
== C-M-<backspace> Kill X Server ==
Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Options > Key Sequence to kill the X Server
== Checking ==
'''xev''': Launches a window that logs key events.
== Extended ASCII ==
<pre>
setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl
setxkbmap -option compose:rwin
setxkbmap -option compose:menu
</pre>

* compose + , then c = c cedilla
* compose + ' then E = E aigu
* compose + ` then e = e grave
* compose + " then u = u german metal letter
* compose + = then e = Eurodollar symbol

= Performance =
== Analyzing System Use ==
<pre>
$ sudo perf top
</pre>

= Peripherals =
== Wacom Tablet ==
* kde_wacom_tabletfinder
* https://krita.org/en/features/

= Permissions =
== Groups ==
<pre>
sudo usermod -aG incus $USER
newgrp incus
</pre>

= Printing =
== Book Binding ==
<pre>
sudo apt-get install texlive-extra-utils
pdfbook2 --inner-margin=200 input.pdf
</pre>
This command processes input.pdf and generates input-book.pdf with the specified inner margin.

= Sleep =
== Inhibit Sleep? ==
=== In Test ===
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/sleep.conf
</pre>
==== Removed from Test 15:28 ====
failed at 15:38
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
/usr/bin/xset dpms 0 0 0
/usr/bin/xset -dpms
</pre>
==== Added to Test 15:39 ====
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
</pre>
==== Added to .bashrc at 16:05 ====
<pre>
xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
worked, but .bashrc is the wrong place for it
==== 16:31 moved to .xsessionrc ====
<pre>
#!/bin/sh

xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
success, 16:42:40 second test after reboot

=== Not Sufficient ===
<pre>
systemd-inhibit --what=idle:sleep --who="User" --why="Prevent sleep" sleep infinity
</pre>
<pre>
systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target
</pre>
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/logind.conf
IdleAction=ignore
</pre>

= Storage =
== Mounting ==
<pre>
$ udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb2
$ udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb2
</pre>
=== NTFS on Linux ===
<pre>
bash
sudo apt install ntfs-3g

bash
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdX1 /mnt/mountpoint
</pre>

== Identifying ==
<pre>
lsblk # to list the storage devices
blkid # to show the filesystem type
</pre>

== ext4 on Windows ==
<pre>
# Mount Disk:
wsl --mount <DiskPath>
# To list the available disks in Windows, run:
wmic diskdrive list brief
# To unmount and detach the disk from WSL 2, run
wsl --unmount <Diskpath>
</pre>
== Renaming ==
EXT[234]
<pre>
sudo e2label /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
FAT32
<pre>
sudo dosfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
NTFS
<pre>
sudo ntfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

exfat
<pre>
sudo exfatlabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

= Systemctl =
<pre>systemctl list-units --type=service</pre>

= XFCE4 =
* Set the frequency to 30 hz
* xrandr --output HDMI-0 --scale .75x.75
== Tooltips ==
Put this in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (create the file if needed).
<pre>
tooltip {
opacity: 0;
}
</pre>
or
<pre>
tooltip {
color: transparent;
background: transparent;
}
</pre>

Category:Linux

2025-12-31T08:09:13Z

RobertBushman:

[[Category:Hacking]]
= See Also =
* [[CLI_Fu]]
= Android Connect =
<pre>
$ adb devices
$ adb shell ls /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi
$ adb push Martha_Wells/ /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi/Martha_Wells
</pre>

= Audio =
See: [[Category:Media]]
= Backports =
<pre>
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports incus
</pre>
= Battery =
<pre>
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw
sudo nano /etc/tlp.conf
```

Find these lines (or add them if they don't exist):
```
START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=75
STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=80
sudo systemctl enable tlp
sudo systemctl start tlp
sudo tlp-stat -b
# override for full charge (if wanted):
sudo tlp fullcharge
</pre>

= Cell Phone / Mobile =
== USB Connect ==
<pre>
# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install mtp-tools jmtpfs

# Arch
sudo pacman -S mtpfs jmtpfs

# Fedora
sudo dnf install jmtpfs
</pre>

= Cinnamon =
== Workspaces ==
* Control-Alt-UpArrow: show workspaces
* add workspaces: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57311/how-do-i-change-the-number-of-available-workspaces-in-cinnamon
== Keybindings (from GPT) ==
In the Cinnamon desktop environment, the behavior you’re experiencing with the Alt key and mouse clicks is likely related to window management settings, particularly those concerning window dragging or resizing. Cinnamon uses the Alt key as a modifier for certain window actions by default. Here’s how you can investigate and adjust these settings:

=== System Settings ===

# '''Window Tiling and Edge Flip''': Navigate to System Settings > Windows > Behavior. Here, you’ll find various options related to window actions. Although it may not directly mention the Alt key, it’s a good place to start.
# '''Window Snapping''': While in the Windows section, also check settings related to window snapping or edge resistance. Sometimes, these features can interfere with normal mouse operations.

=== Keyboard Shortcuts ===

# '''Keyboard Shortcuts''': Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Look through the categories for any actions bound to Alt+Click. You’re most interested in shortcuts under the “Windows” or “System” categories, but it’s worth checking others in case of custom bindings.
# Extended ASCII: <tt>setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl</tt>

=== Dconf Editor ===

If the above steps don’t reveal any useful settings to change, you might need to delve into dconf settings. Cinnamon, like GNOME, stores many of its configurations in dconf. Use the Dconf Editor to explore these settings, but proceed with caution—incorrect changes can affect your desktop’s behavior.

# '''Install Dconf Editor''': If you don’t have it installed, you can usually find it in your package manager. Install it via your package manager or by running a command like <code>sudo apt-get install dconf-editor</code> in the terminal.
# '''Explore Cinnamon Settings''': Open Dconf Editor and navigate to the <code>/org/cinnamon/</code> path. Look for settings related to mouse or window management, particularly anything that might involve modifier keys like Alt.
# '''Check GNOME Settings''': Since Cinnamon is forked from GNOME, some underlying settings might still reside in GNOME’s namespace. Check <code>/org/gnome/desktop/wm/</code> preferences for anything related to keybindings or mouse actions.

=== Looking Elsewhere ===

* '''Cinnamon Version''': Ensure your Cinnamon and Linux Mint (assuming you’re using Mint) are up to date. Sometimes, behavior changes or bugs are fixed in newer versions.
* '''Community Forums and Support''': If the settings within your control don’t seem to affect this behavior, consider asking for help on the Linux Mint forums, Cinnamon’s GitHub issues page, or other community support channels. It’s possible other users have encountered and solved this issue, or it might be an undocumented feature or bug.

By investigating these areas, you should be able to identify and adjust any settings causing the Alt key to capture mouse clicks differently than expected.

== Blender Workaround ==
Alt is necessary for example to select a loop of edges. I use left button to select things in blender (not the default right button) so Alt + Left button in blender is to select an edge loop (you do this a lot of times) but this is also to grab a window in Linux so blender does nothing.

So I finally managed to find a workaround (better than going to the menu in blender and edges/ select edgeloop using the mouse that I was using (well, really I modified the w menu to have it as first entry as I have also the edge, faces, vertices menus in the w menu). So the way is to do this:

In Cinnamon Settings / Keyboard / Keyboard shortcuts: Select Cinnamon to the left and then to the right you see “Menu button” is mapped to Super_L (the key between ctr and alt). Click on it to change it and push backspace to delete so it is “unassigned”. Or perhaps you want map this showing of the menu to other key like Super_R but I just use the mouse to go to the menu. Now I have Super_L free to use in blender instead Alt.

So in Blender: User Preferences / Input and in 3DView/Mesh/ there are two Loop Select, first one using Alt + mouse select and the second Shift + Alt + mouse select. Change in both: uncheck Alt and check Cmd to the right of Alt. Now when selecting an edge loop I use Cmd + mouse select and Shift+Cmd+mouse select for adding an edge loop to the selection.

= Control-D =
<pre>
set -o ignoreeof
</pre>

= Documents =
== Pandoc ==
<pre>
pandoc -f markdown -t mediawiki foo.md > foo.mw
</pre>
== PDF to Images ==
<pre>
convert -density 300 -colorspace Gray input.pdf page-%d.png
</pre>

= Find =
== Remove Files Under 4 Blocks ==
<pre>
find . -size -4b -print0 | xargs -0 rm
</pre>

= Firefox =
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18v16ee/in_2024_please_switch_to_firefox/
== Updates ==
Kill Updates With Fire: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1327455
<pre>
$ cat /usr/local/share/firefox/distribution/policies.json
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
</pre>
== Containers ==
* https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
== Secure Connection Failed ==
# In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear.
# Click I'll be careful, I promise! to continue to the about:config page.
# copy the next security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling and paste it in the search field
# double-click on it to make it false
# close the page, exit firefox and restart it.

= JSON =
== CLI JSONL ==
<pre>
for file in *.json ; do jq -c . "$file"; done > ../000-combined.jsonl
jq '."original title"' ../000-combined.jsonl
</pre>

= Keybindings =
== C-M-<backspace> Kill X Server ==
Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Options > Key Sequence to kill the X Server
== Checking ==
'''xev''': Launches a window that logs key events.
== Extended ASCII ==
<pre>
setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl
setxkbmap -option compose:rwin
setxkbmap -option compose:menu
</pre>

* compose + , then c = c cedilla
* compose + ' then E = E aigu
* compose + ` then e = e grave
* compose + " then u = u german metal letter
* compose + = then e = Eurodollar symbol

= Performance =
== Analyzing System Use ==
<pre>
$ sudo perf top
</pre>

= Peripherals =
== Wacom Tablet ==
* kde_wacom_tabletfinder
* https://krita.org/en/features/

= Permissions =
== Groups ==
<pre>
sudo usermod -aG incus $USER
newgrp incus
</pre>

= Printing =
== Book Binding ==
<pre>
sudo apt-get install texlive-extra-utils
pdfbook2 --inner-margin=200 input.pdf
</pre>
This command processes input.pdf and generates input-book.pdf with the specified inner margin.

= Sleep =
== Inhibit Sleep? ==
=== In Test ===
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/sleep.conf
</pre>
==== Removed from Test 15:28 ====
failed at 15:38
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
/usr/bin/xset dpms 0 0 0
/usr/bin/xset -dpms
</pre>
==== Added to Test 15:39 ====
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
</pre>
==== Added to .bashrc at 16:05 ====
<pre>
xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
worked, but .bashrc is the wrong place for it
==== 16:31 moved to .xsessionrc ====
<pre>
#!/bin/sh

xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
success, 16:42:40 second test after reboot

=== Not Sufficient ===
<pre>
systemd-inhibit --what=idle:sleep --who="User" --why="Prevent sleep" sleep infinity
</pre>
<pre>
systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target
</pre>
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/logind.conf
IdleAction=ignore
</pre>

= Storage =
== Mounting ==
<pre>
$ udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb2
$ udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb2
</pre>
=== NTFS on Linux ===
<pre>
bash
sudo apt install ntfs-3g

bash
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdX1 /mnt/mountpoint
</pre>

== Identifying ==
<pre>
lsblk # to list the storage devices
blkid # to show the filesystem type
</pre>

== ext4 on Windows ==
<pre>
# Mount Disk:
wsl --mount <DiskPath>
# To list the available disks in Windows, run:
wmic diskdrive list brief
# To unmount and detach the disk from WSL 2, run
wsl --unmount <Diskpath>
</pre>
== Renaming ==
EXT[234]
<pre>
sudo e2label /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
FAT32
<pre>
sudo dosfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
NTFS
<pre>
sudo ntfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

exfat
<pre>
sudo exfatlabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

= Systemctl =
<pre>systemctl list-units --type=service</pre>

= XFCE4 =
* Set the frequency to 30 hz
* xrandr --output HDMI-0 --scale .75x.75
== Tooltips ==
Put this in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (create the file if needed).
<pre>
tooltip {
opacity: 0;
}
</pre>
or
<pre>
tooltip {
color: transparent;
background: transparent;
}
</pre>

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-31T08:06:40Z

RobertBushman: /* My Reaction */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
** Some gods are not benevolent.
** Some fields intentionally eschew morality (science prefers truth, business prefers wealth extraction).

=== Text ===
==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

Category:Linux

2025-12-24T17:27:27Z

RobertBushman: /* Backports */

[[Category:Hacking]]
= See Also =
* [[CLI_Fu]]
= Android Connect =
<pre>
$ adb devices
$ adb shell ls /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi
$ adb push Martha_Wells/ /storage/sdcard1/book/scifi/Martha_Wells
</pre>

= Audio =
See: [[Category:Media]]
= Backports =
<pre>
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports incus
</pre>
= Battery =
<pre>
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw
sudo nano /etc/tlp.conf
```

Find these lines (or add them if they don't exist):
```
START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=75
STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0=80
sudo systemctl enable tlp
sudo systemctl start tlp
sudo tlp-stat -b
# override for full charge (if wanted):
sudo tlp fullcharge
</pre>

= Control-D =
<pre>
set -o ignoreeof
</pre>

= Cinnamon =
== Workspaces ==
* Control-Alt-UpArrow: show workspaces
* add workspaces: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57311/how-do-i-change-the-number-of-available-workspaces-in-cinnamon
== Keybindings (from GPT) ==
In the Cinnamon desktop environment, the behavior you’re experiencing with the Alt key and mouse clicks is likely related to window management settings, particularly those concerning window dragging or resizing. Cinnamon uses the Alt key as a modifier for certain window actions by default. Here’s how you can investigate and adjust these settings:

=== System Settings ===

# '''Window Tiling and Edge Flip''': Navigate to System Settings > Windows > Behavior. Here, you’ll find various options related to window actions. Although it may not directly mention the Alt key, it’s a good place to start.
# '''Window Snapping''': While in the Windows section, also check settings related to window snapping or edge resistance. Sometimes, these features can interfere with normal mouse operations.

=== Keyboard Shortcuts ===

# '''Keyboard Shortcuts''': Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Look through the categories for any actions bound to Alt+Click. You’re most interested in shortcuts under the “Windows” or “System” categories, but it’s worth checking others in case of custom bindings.
# Extended ASCII: <tt>setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl</tt>

=== Dconf Editor ===

If the above steps don’t reveal any useful settings to change, you might need to delve into dconf settings. Cinnamon, like GNOME, stores many of its configurations in dconf. Use the Dconf Editor to explore these settings, but proceed with caution—incorrect changes can affect your desktop’s behavior.

# '''Install Dconf Editor''': If you don’t have it installed, you can usually find it in your package manager. Install it via your package manager or by running a command like <code>sudo apt-get install dconf-editor</code> in the terminal.
# '''Explore Cinnamon Settings''': Open Dconf Editor and navigate to the <code>/org/cinnamon/</code> path. Look for settings related to mouse or window management, particularly anything that might involve modifier keys like Alt.
# '''Check GNOME Settings''': Since Cinnamon is forked from GNOME, some underlying settings might still reside in GNOME’s namespace. Check <code>/org/gnome/desktop/wm/</code> preferences for anything related to keybindings or mouse actions.

=== Looking Elsewhere ===

* '''Cinnamon Version''': Ensure your Cinnamon and Linux Mint (assuming you’re using Mint) are up to date. Sometimes, behavior changes or bugs are fixed in newer versions.
* '''Community Forums and Support''': If the settings within your control don’t seem to affect this behavior, consider asking for help on the Linux Mint forums, Cinnamon’s GitHub issues page, or other community support channels. It’s possible other users have encountered and solved this issue, or it might be an undocumented feature or bug.

By investigating these areas, you should be able to identify and adjust any settings causing the Alt key to capture mouse clicks differently than expected.

== Blender Workaround ==
Alt is necessary for example to select a loop of edges. I use left button to select things in blender (not the default right button) so Alt + Left button in blender is to select an edge loop (you do this a lot of times) but this is also to grab a window in Linux so blender does nothing.

So I finally managed to find a workaround (better than going to the menu in blender and edges/ select edgeloop using the mouse that I was using (well, really I modified the w menu to have it as first entry as I have also the edge, faces, vertices menus in the w menu). So the way is to do this:

In Cinnamon Settings / Keyboard / Keyboard shortcuts: Select Cinnamon to the left and then to the right you see “Menu button” is mapped to Super_L (the key between ctr and alt). Click on it to change it and push backspace to delete so it is “unassigned”. Or perhaps you want map this showing of the menu to other key like Super_R but I just use the mouse to go to the menu. Now I have Super_L free to use in blender instead Alt.

So in Blender: User Preferences / Input and in 3DView/Mesh/ there are two Loop Select, first one using Alt + mouse select and the second Shift + Alt + mouse select. Change in both: uncheck Alt and check Cmd to the right of Alt. Now when selecting an edge loop I use Cmd + mouse select and Shift+Cmd+mouse select for adding an edge loop to the selection.
= Documents =
== Pandoc ==
<pre>
pandoc -f markdown -t mediawiki foo.md > foo.mw
</pre>
== PDF to Images ==
<pre>
convert -density 300 -colorspace Gray input.pdf page-%d.png
</pre>

= Find =
== Remove Files Under 4 Blocks ==
<pre>
find . -size -4b -print0 | xargs -0 rm
</pre>

= Firefox =
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/18v16ee/in_2024_please_switch_to_firefox/
== Updates ==
Kill Updates With Fire: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1327455
<pre>
$ cat /usr/local/share/firefox/distribution/policies.json
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
</pre>
== Containers ==
* https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers
== Secure Connection Failed ==
# In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear.
# Click I'll be careful, I promise! to continue to the about:config page.
# copy the next security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling and paste it in the search field
# double-click on it to make it false
# close the page, exit firefox and restart it.

= JSON =
== CLI JSONL ==
<pre>
for file in *.json ; do jq -c . "$file"; done > ../000-combined.jsonl
jq '."original title"' ../000-combined.jsonl
</pre>

= Keybindings =
== C-M-<backspace> Kill X Server ==
Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Options > Key Sequence to kill the X Server
== Checking ==
'''xev''': Launches a window that logs key events.
== Extended ASCII ==
<pre>
setxkbmap -option compose:rctrl
setxkbmap -option compose:rwin
setxkbmap -option compose:menu
</pre>

* compose + , then c = c cedilla
* compose + ' then E = E aigu
* compose + ` then e = e grave
* compose + " then u = u german metal letter
* compose + = then e = Eurodollar symbol

= Performance =
== Analyzing System Use ==
<pre>
$ sudo perf top
</pre>

= Peripherals =
== Wacom Tablet ==
* kde_wacom_tabletfinder
* https://krita.org/en/features/

= Permissions =
== Groups ==
<pre>
sudo usermod -aG incus $USER
newgrp incus
</pre>

= Printing =
== Book Binding ==
<pre>
sudo apt-get install texlive-extra-utils
pdfbook2 --inner-margin=200 input.pdf
</pre>
This command processes input.pdf and generates input-book.pdf with the specified inner margin.

= Sleep =
== Inhibit Sleep? ==
=== In Test ===
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/sleep.conf
</pre>
==== Removed from Test 15:28 ====
failed at 15:38
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
/usr/bin/xset dpms 0 0 0
/usr/bin/xset -dpms
</pre>
==== Added to Test 15:39 ====
<pre>
/usr/bin/xset s noblank
/usr/bin/xset s off
</pre>
==== Added to .bashrc at 16:05 ====
<pre>
xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
worked, but .bashrc is the wrong place for it
==== 16:31 moved to .xsessionrc ====
<pre>
#!/bin/sh

xset s off
xset -dpms
xset s noblank
</pre>
success, 16:42:40 second test after reboot

=== Not Sufficient ===
<pre>
systemd-inhibit --what=idle:sleep --who="User" --why="Prevent sleep" sleep infinity
</pre>
<pre>
systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target
</pre>
<pre>
cat /etc/systemd/logind.conf
IdleAction=ignore
</pre>

= Storage =
== Mounting ==
<pre>
$ udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdb2
$ udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb2
</pre>
=== NTFS on Linux ===
<pre>
bash
sudo apt install ntfs-3g

bash
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdX1 /mnt/mountpoint
</pre>

== Identifying ==
<pre>
lsblk # to list the storage devices
blkid # to show the filesystem type
</pre>

== ext4 on Windows ==
<pre>
# Mount Disk:
wsl --mount <DiskPath>
# To list the available disks in Windows, run:
wmic diskdrive list brief
# To unmount and detach the disk from WSL 2, run
wsl --unmount <Diskpath>
</pre>
== Renaming ==
EXT[234]
<pre>
sudo e2label /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
FAT32
<pre>
sudo dosfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>
NTFS
<pre>
sudo ntfslabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

exfat
<pre>
sudo exfatlabel /dev/sdXN new-label
</pre>

= Systemctl =
<pre>systemctl list-units --type=service</pre>

= XFCE4 =
* Set the frequency to 30 hz
* xrandr --output HDMI-0 --scale .75x.75
== Tooltips ==
Put this in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (create the file if needed).
<pre>
tooltip {
opacity: 0;
}
</pre>
or
<pre>
tooltip {
color: transparent;
background: transparent;
}
</pre>

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-24T16:53:02Z

RobertBushman: /* Text */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Minimalist ====
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant covered what could be approached by reason and science. Everything else he found to be off limits.

In Critique of Practical Reason, he asks what then becomes of god, the soul, and free will?

Short version: Practical reason covers what we believe because it is good for society - not because we have evidence. We assert that we have free will, not because there is evidence but so we feel responsible for our actions. We assert the existence of a god so we have a carrot and stick to keep us on the straight and narrow. And we assert the existence of the soul so we can be dream of praise and fear punishment beyond this fleeting mortal coil.

And, yes; it took me 3 months to come up with that summary.

But not without cause; wrestling with that is hard. If you are empathetic, Kant says your payoff for being kind is a phantasm you dupe yourself into. If you're a sociopath, Kant says there is no punishment in the afterlife, but you should pretend there is.

If you're empathetic, like me, and you feel pain when you exploit others as though it had happened to you; but you also studied economics and worked in American extreme capitalism so you know how to make sausage - well, you've got to choose between losing at a game you know how to win, and hating yourself for winning.

I really hope Hegel has something good for me, when I get there.

==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T13:16:24Z

RobertBushman: /* From Critique of Practical Reason */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction. Argumentum ad nauseum.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** Note: The German idealists, particularly Hegel, are going to crack - or at least begin to crack - this nut.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T12:59:25Z

RobertBushman: /* From Critique of Practical Reason */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** Note: He was talking specifically about the problem of philosophy delving into the metaphysical. When the dialectic goes beyond what ''can'' be known, it is spinning its wheels. It might be fun, but it won't produce anything.
** In the realm of pure reason, however, he did not argue for an end of advancement. To self: avoid including things that suggest otherwise.
* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T12:49:31Z

RobertBushman: /* From Critique of Practical Reason */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* For example, he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.

==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T10:50:41Z

RobertBushman: /* Segue */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.
==== Premise ====
Our sensations are the result of the thing itself, but we are not sensing the thing itself. As a result, we can posit anything we want about the thing itself. We could posit that the thing itself is actually made of green cheese, but consistently results in sensations that are consistent with blue cheese - when we are considering a wedge of roquefort.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T09:56:58Z

RobertBushman: /* Intro */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?) Anyway: Practical Reason is exactly what it says on the tin; practical reason. The practical reason that leads to God, the soul, free will, morality, and everything.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T09:56:02Z

RobertBushman: /* Intro */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

Like every great gestalt, it starts with drowning. I dive in at the deep end, and it seems like there's no bottom. I look up and the surface gets further and further away, and everything gets darker all around. But just as suddenly, it starts getting brighter and I pop back to the surface and look around, and everything seems so clear - if not only by comparison to the seemingly boundless murk from only a few days or weeks earlier. (this directly contradicts the end of the previous paragraph, yet it feels just as true - or poetical - WTF?)

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T09:24:14Z

RobertBushman: /* Intro */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, my most personally challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis. It is spectacular. I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.

===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T09:23:11Z

RobertBushman: /* Segue */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

==== My Reaction ====
===== Intro =====
This has been, by far, the most challenging dive into a philosophical hypothesis I have ever had. It is spectacular.

I haven't read it.

What I did was listen to a summary of the reasoning that is presented. And that was sufficient to spark more than two months of reflection on what it means, and how I can reconcile Kant 2 with my own model of the world.

Aside: I think that I will read Julie by Rousseau, rather than just a summary, because my understanding is that it is both an exploration of reason and an argument in favor of romanticism - that the experiencing of a thing is as important if not more so than the reason or reality of the thing. But I think that is not as necessary for Kant 2, or at least that there is a lot of meat on the bone from a summary of the reasoning in Kant 2, regardless of the prose itself.

Anyway; my goal with each of these philosophy lectures is to get to two things:
# A belief that I understand what Cahoone says the philosopher was saying.
# A belief that I can square my world view with theirs with two premises:
## That I can assume the world as they knew it. Aristotle didn't know about quantum tunneling inside the human brain.
## They're not stupid. I can accept a difference of opinion, but not a disagreement about their chain of logic.

Getting there with Kant 2 has required me to deeply reexamine my strongly held views on empathy, the supernatural, evolution, and quantum mechanics. I think I've gotten there, but I've thought that several times over the past two months.
===== Quantum Mechanics =====
===== Empathy Versus God =====
===== Why Suppose Benevolent Religion? =====
===== The Human Condition =====
The Human Condition: For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T09:05:42Z

RobertBushman: /* Segue */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

'''Note:''' For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive. So now we have 80% of society with the ability to reason that cheating makes sense as long as you get away with it, who see others advance by cheating and getting away with it, who become losers when they choose not to play the game, and who experience guilt when the do. This is the human condition.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T09:02:31Z

RobertBushman: /* Segue */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that those supernatural things remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

'''Note:''' For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T09:01:51Z

RobertBushman: /* Segue */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced. And that therefore, there is no pure reason in asserting the existence of God, the soul, or free will. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that the those supernatural things, nonetheless, remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

'''Note:''' For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T09:00:28Z

RobertBushman: /* Text */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
==== Segue ====
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced in a pure sense. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that the those supernatural things, nonetheless, remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

'''Note:''' For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T08:59:49Z

RobertBushman: /* From Critique of Practical Reason */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
* We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
* Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
* The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
* Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.

* The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
* Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
* But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
* So he says:
** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
* So should we posit the existence of god?
** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
* Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
* I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
** But not everyone has that.
** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
* Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced in a pure sense. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that the those supernatural things, nonetheless, remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

'''Note:''' For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T08:57:27Z

RobertBushman: /* Notes */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
==== From Critique of Pure Reason ====
** We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
==== From Critique of Practical Reason ====
** Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
** The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
** Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
** Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
** But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** So he says:
*** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
*** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
*** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
*** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
*** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
** So should we posit the existence of god?
*** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
*** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
*** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
*** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
==== My Reaction ====
** Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
*** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
*** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
*** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
*** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
*** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
** I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
*** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
*** But not everyone has that.
*** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
*** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
*** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
** Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?

=== Text ===
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced in a pure sense. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that the those supernatural things, nonetheless, remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

*** Note: *** For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T08:56:26Z

RobertBushman: /* Text */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
* From Critique of Pure Reason:
** We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
* From Critique of Practical Reason:
** Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
** The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
** Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
** Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
** But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** So he says:
*** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
*** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
*** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
*** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
*** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
** So should we posit the existence of god?
*** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
*** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
*** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
*** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
* My Reaction
** Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
*** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
*** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
*** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
*** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
*** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
** I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
*** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
*** But not everyone has that.
*** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
*** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
*** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
** Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced in a pure sense. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that the those supernatural things, nonetheless, remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

The professor whose lectures I am following says that Kant had two great fascinations in life: The starry skies above us, and the moral life within us. Pure Reason is about the starry skies - the reality that is, and which expresses itself on the senses of all people, and which most people express a similar perception of. Practical reason is about the moral behavior that rises from within us and is exhibited in most people. In this second book, he asks why moral behavior is so common.

*** Note: *** For later in this writing: as an ardent pure reasonist, I tend to assert the biological imperative as the cause. Tribes which had less than 80% people with empathy engaged in too much fratricide to survive.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T08:49:35Z

RobertBushman: /* Text */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
* From Critique of Pure Reason:
** We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
* From Critique of Practical Reason:
** Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
** The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
** Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
** Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
** But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** So he says:
*** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
*** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
*** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
*** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
*** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
** So should we posit the existence of god?
*** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
*** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
*** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
*** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
* My Reaction
** Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
*** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
*** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
*** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
*** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
*** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
** I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
*** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
*** But not everyone has that.
*** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
*** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
*** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
** Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===
In his second major book, Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues for the possibility, and even necessity, of the supernatural. In Critique of Pure Reason, he said that we only ever experience our sensations of things, that the things themselves cannot be directly sensed. Further he says that God, the soul, and free will cannot be experienced in a pure sense. In Critique of Practical Reason, he makes the case that the those supernatural things, nonetheless, remain a necessity in practical reasoning.

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

2025-12-22T08:38:15Z

RobertBushman: /* Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 */

[[Category:Philosophy]]
"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

* https://ia801806.us.archive.org/2/items/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida/TheModernIntellectualTraditionFromDescartesToDerrida.pdf

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

= Lecture 1: Introduction =
= Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution =
== Aristotle ==
All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."
== Aquinas ==
The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.
== Copernicus ==
Heliocentric.

== Giordano Bruno ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.
== Galileo ==
New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

= Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes =
* Rationalism: Not all knowledge is derived from experience, antonym of empiricism.
* Dualism: All things are either mind/soul or mechanistic (animals have neither soul nor free will).
* Meditations on First Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations_on_First_Philosophy
== Foundationalism ==
What can we know with certainty?
* Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
* Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
** Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
** What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
** 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
* I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
** Something must be doing the thinking.
** The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
*** I think I think therefore I think I am.
* Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
** I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
* Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.
== Attempted Proof of God ==
* Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
* By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
* I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
* I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
* Only god is infinite.
* The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
* Therefore God exists.
== Attempted Proof of Material Substances ==
* God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
* God is not a deceiver.
* Material substances must be real.

= Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism =
== Locke ==
* Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
* Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
* We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
* Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

== Berkeley ==
* Idealism.
* There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
* If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
* Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
** But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

= Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz =
Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?
== Spinoza ==
Substance implies independence.
* Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
* The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
** The whole includes the mind and the body.
** This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
** My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
* Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
** Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
* Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
** Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
*** Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
** The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
* Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
* We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
** When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
*** This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

== Leibniz ==
Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.
* The substances of the universe must be independent.
** The many substances must not causally interact.
** Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
* His atoms are monads.
** Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
* First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
** I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
* One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
** A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
* Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
* Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
* Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
* Space and time are internal to the monads.
* God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

= The Enlightenment and Rousseau =
18th century.
* The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
* Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
** Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
** Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
* Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
* Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
* Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
** Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
* Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.
== Isaac Newton ==
* Late 17th
* Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy
== The Encyclopedists ==
* Diderot
== Voltaire ==
* Writer, not a philosopher.
* Imparter of norms to the less educated.
== Adam Smith ==
* An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
* Three ways to organize economy
** Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
** Government Command
** Free Market / Unorganized
*** Spontaneous Order
* Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

== Rousseau ==
* Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
* "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
* Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
** His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
** Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
** Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
* Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
** Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
** Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
*** Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
** The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
** Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
** Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
*** Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
*** Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
* Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
** Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
* If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
** The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
* Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
* "Is a rich junkie free?"
** Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
** A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
** If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
*** If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
*** If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
** The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
** Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
*** They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
*** Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

= 7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume =
Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

== Tying the end to the beginning ==
I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

=== Activating Influencers ===
America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

=== Activating Influencers 2 ===
John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

== Notes ==
* Legendary Bits
** Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
** Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
* My Take
** "Nature is always too strong for principle."
** Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
** Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
** Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
** Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
** Which is equally good/bad.
* Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
* Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
** As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
** World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
* Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
* All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
* 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
** Relations of Ideas
*** "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
*** The "by definition" thing.
** Matters of Fact
*** Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
*** "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
* Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
** Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
** Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
* Causality:
** Two notions of causality
*** Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
*** Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
* Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
** How can we know?
** If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
** There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
** [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
* Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
* --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
* Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
** I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
** There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
** Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
*** That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
*** That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
*** But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
*** OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
* ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
* Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
** A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
* However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
* "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
* Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

= 8: Kant's Copernican Revolution =
Kant was not satisfied with Hume's conclusion that neither nature nor god were knowable. Hume posited exactly two classes of knowledge; things that are true by definition like "2 + 2 = 4," and things that require observation like "there are 4 apples in that basket." The former provide no new knowledge beyond their definitions, and the latter are only as true as our senses. For Hume, nothing real in the world could be truly known.

Kant posited that there is another class of knowledge which is more than a restatement of existing definitions, but is not dependent on observation. As an example he presents the parallel postulate, which has a number of obviously true consequences such as the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle summing to exactly 180 degrees. It is not merely a combination of the postulates of geometry nor a mere postulate itself, it is an absolute truth of Euclidean geometry. And yet it cannot be proven from the first three postulates of geometry nor by empirical testing.

For Kant, this meant that our mind has an active role in the processing of reality. New information does not only come from sensations of the outside world; the mind classifies, arranges, and makes abstractions about those sensations. And in that process it creates new, true information.

In his second book, Critique of Practical Reason, he uses this as a lever to restore the knowability of god.

== Overview Notes ==
The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

* Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
* Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
* Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
* Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
* Critique of Judgment; art
* Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
** Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.
== Counter-Hume Breakdown ==
Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

=== Hume's Categories ===
* Relations of ideas
** à priori: independent of experience
** true by definition alone
* Matters of fact
** à posteriori: requires experience
** not true by definition alone

=== Kant's Criteria Dimensions ===
* Dimension 1
** Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
** Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
* Dimension 2
** à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
** à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

=== Kant's Breakdown ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!
!à priori (not based on experience)
!à posteriori (based on experience)
|-
!analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate)
|Hume's Relations of Ideas
|No such thing
|-
!synthetic (new information in predicate)
|Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy
|Hume's Matters of Fact
|}

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

The parallel postulate is a good example of knowledge that is à priori and contains new information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

== moving on ==
The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:
* intuition
** 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
* understanding
** 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
** The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
** The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
* reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

= 9: Kant And The Religion of Reason =
Kant's concept (from Critique of Pure Reason) is this: Our minds, which are actively involved in the creation of reality, are continuously advancing. What we see as reality, or god, today; is different from what we saw a thousand years ago, or will see a thousand years from now.

Will String Theory hold up? Even if it does, it will certainly change. What does that mean for the reality with which our minds interact?

Putting it in a quantum context (a context the idea of which would probably have made Kant late to work for a second time in his career):

If observing reality changes it, and our ability to observe reality is constantly advancing; must not we be constantly advancing reality?

There have long been legends - from Greece to Gaiman - of God, or gods, being proportionate to their adherents. Why not?
== Hip Fire - 2025-12-17 ==
=== Notes ===
* From Critique of Pure Reason:
** We experience our sensations of things. Those sensations are caused by the things in themselves, which are real, but we do not experience the things in themselves.
* From Critique of Practical Reason:
** Our perception of things in themselves is always a reflection, so we cannot say we know their true nature.
** The purpose of philosophy is to seek truth, we are driven to always push the limits of knowledge.
** Indeed, we are driven to push our knowledge beyond the bounds of our ability to perceive truth, and so scientists and philosophers are always destined to be positing things that aren't true and disproving them the next day.
** The dialectic of philosophy is the two-actor tragedy of that story: The first philosopher posits a new truth, and the second philosopher contradicts it with a new hypothesis. It is a constant process of destruction.
** Kant seems to have thought that they were at the ultimate stage of human perception, and all that was left was arguing back and forth without progress.
** But he was assuming Newtonian physics.
** So he says:
*** We cannot experience the thing itself, even though it is real.
*** We are things in ourselves, but we cannot experience the self, in itself.
*** We can posit anything we like about things in themselves, and we can never prove nor disprove them with science, because science cannot experience the thing itself.
*** We can, for example, posit that we have free will. Science can never deny that free will is happining in our self, itself, because it cannot experience our self, itself.
*** Likewise, we can posit the existence of god, and science cannot deny it, because science cannot experience god in itself, nor the non-existence of god in itself.
** So should we posit the existence of god?
*** Kant says yes, because god is the motivation for being good.
*** We must posit free will, so that we believe our choices our ours to make.
*** We must posit the existence of god, so that there is a benevolent entity to judge our actions.
*** We must posit that we have a soul, so that there is a thing to experience god's eternal carrot and stick.
* My Reaction
** Quantum Mechanics gave us the mechanism his Newtonian thinking was not yet aware of.
*** Kant was stuck with Newtonian physics, but we are not.
*** It provides a hiding place, which we currently believe to be eternal and irrevocable, behind which free will, the soul, and god can hide.
*** It also provides a mechanism for those things to interact with reality - a way to cause experience to happen, even if we cannot directly experience the thing itself.
*** QM is where "predictable and never disproven" breaks down. The number of electrons in the valence shell is always the same, but each electron's position and vector at any given moment is fuzzy.
*** Sapolsky's "every time we've ever measured it, it is unpredictable in a probilistic way" may be true, but his conclusion that it *always is so*, even when we aren't looking, would have made Kant chuckle and call him adorable.
** I don't need god to behave pro-socially.
*** I have so much empathy that it hurts me more to hurt someone else than the upside I get from stealing their wallet or whatever.
*** But not everyone has that.
*** Did Kant have empathy, and he was talking bout what society needs because not all people are naturally good?
*** Or was Kant a sociopath explaining why he needed to posit god?
*** Or perhaps; as a pure rationalist, was he trying to come up with something to justify his empathic desire to be good despite pure science having no divine carrot and stick?
** Suppose we accept that society needs to posit god; how do we convince society to posit a benevolent god, instead of the jealous, tribalist, exclusionary, exploitative, vindictive, and otherwise nasty deities that so often get top billing?
=== Text ===

== Hip Fire - 2025-11-26 ==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that our sensations are all that we can know, and while those sensations are caused by real things, our sensations do not amount to experiencing the thing itself. For a modern physics metaphor; when we touch something we feel the repulsion between electrons in the shells of atoms, we don't actually feel the atoms.

In addition, he posits that God and the soul exist, but that they are outside ...

== Kant 2 Notes ==
* End Question: How can a deterministic science be compatible with free will, ethics, and religion?
* Fascinated By Two Things: Starry Sky Above Us, Moral Life Within Us
* Kant is the greatest proponent of a morality of rational duty.
** The most prominent ethical theories are utilitarianism and the theory of duty.
** Kant is the most prominent advocate of the theory of duty.
** Utilitarianism was John Stewart Mill and others.
* The Dialectic, or unavoidable errors of reason, when it tries to know too much; leads to a defense of faith and morality from science.
* If we cannot know things in themself, why posit them at all?
** German philosophers following Kant did choose to jettison things in themself.
* Kant thought that if you remove things in themselves, he would reduce himself to being a Berkeleyan Idealist.
* Kant is a Critical Idealist.
** Cognition is constructed by our minds, but things in themselves are not.
** Things in themselves cause the sensations that are organized by the active transcendental activity of our mind.
* Appearances are mind independent (independent of any individual mind)
* Things in themselves are independent of all minds.
* Things in themselves cause the experience that science investigates.
* While we can have experience of appearances, we cannot know anything about the thing itself.
* We are all experiencing the appearance of the thing itself (the podium, the chair, the car).
* We are not experiencing the thing itself (not even our own self in itself).
* But:
* The dialectic of pure reason
** The complex character of the third part of our knowing apparatus: Reason.
** Requires study, because Kant is changing the meaning of the word reason (vernunft)
*** Reason posits ideas in the Platonic sense.
*** Reason tries to know everything, it is its nature to try to know everything.
*** Reason is that part of the human cognitive faculty that is trying to know everything.
*** Reason posits certain ultimate ideas
**** The idea of a ground of being (god).
**** The idea of a substantial self or soul.
**** The idea of free will
**** The idea of the unity of the world of experience (that we see the same thing).
*** Our experience is many, manifold, various. Reason isn't satisfied with various experiences.
*** Science tracks my parents, and their parents, and their parents.
*** Reason asks where the chain began.
*** Driven to try to know the things themselves.
*** Reason is creative, therefore.
** When reason tries to know the things themselves, it drives us to dig deeper. The motivation is good.
** Reason drives us to move science further.
** Where reason goes wrong is in thinking that we can know all, that we can get to the end.
** We cannot know the end.
** But reason really wants to believe that it can, and when it claims that it has, it generates a dialectic.
** A dialectic originated as arguing back and forth between philosophers.
** Kant twists that into a more peojroative meaning.
** A logic of contradictions; a set of ideas which, because they try to know too much, generates a contradiction.
** And if it continues, it generates another and another and another.
** Viz: Sapolsky
*** Brains are biochemical machines, they are deterministic.
*** What about quantum uncertainty?
*** Every time we have observed quantum uncertainty, it has obeyed the Born Rule. Therefore, it must always obey the Born Rule. Therefore, it cannot have coherent effects.
*** Kant: That's a contradiction, you haven't observed it. In fact, what you have observed of it, the effects of it, still seem like the outcome of coherent effects. So the closest you've come to observing it suggests that it does violate the Born Rule under particular conditions - the specific conditions under inquiry. Nobody is claiming that marbles sometimes fall through tabletops.

= Marx =
Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).