These are my notes taken reading this article by Edward Younkins. Sorry its not polished. Potentially I "misspoke", and some of my thoughts below are not completely thought out, so please don't crucify me. My philosophy comes from a background of modern information on evolution and computer science/information theory. So I think my ideas are closer to real than both Kant and Rand... I accept Kant's differentiation between analytic (true by definition) and synthetic (asserts empirical facts). I agree with Kant that the reality we simulate with our brains is not the same as reality itself. Our sensors convert real interactions into information... but information about an interaction is not the same as the reality being itself. Hence for example, we could be in Plato's cave (or the matrix), but never know. To be "true" can have two meanings: either one is trying to prove that information is consistent with our reality (empirical) or that information is a possible state when flowing through a particular mathematical formula (analytic). Neither, unfortunately, can be absolutely certain, but one can have great confidence in both. I think here I disagree with both Kant and Rand, and revert back to Hume, where Kant would argue for certainty in the analytic and Rand would argue for certainty in both.
Now on to the ideas "analytic" information: One can say that he discovered that: "This set of inputs, when operated on by this formula/algorithm, results in this set of outputs". But there is always the possibility that the formula was not performed correctly, or that the input was corrupted, or that the output was corrupted. This is necessarily true given the nature of computers (including our brains): that we use parts of reality to perform the computation/simulation/formula, and even though we try our best to make the computer's inputs reliable, and the machinery's application of formula reliable, and the reading of its outputs reliable, these mechanical systems are vulnerable to changes that we try to design to prevent, such as power spikes from lightning causing voltage levels in DRAM to change by a different process than we designed it to (we only want the DRAM to change values when instructed by the CPU).
Empirical facts make claims about what is and how reality works... and except for some basic axioms like "Existence exists" and "I exist"... one can never be absolutely certain that one's knowledge is absolutely consistent with reality. One can only have confidence... although the confidence can be rediculously high. So for empirical information, certainty is never pure, but surely one can increase certainty by observation and one can use empirical information to increase goal attainment... where more certain information is generally more likely to be useful than less certain information. Given that there are manipulators and fools in the world, one must think for oneself... and use one's best judgement to what is true and how things work in order to chose between actions. Some empirical information is so strongly repeated in observation that one rarely would even consider suspect it... such as "acceleration" due to the "force" of Earth's "gravity".
On "a priori": In my view, "a priori" refers to a multi-verse view that all fully self consistent systems exist (yet are fully independent and do not interact) (exist, but independently). Within our reality, many analytic ideas do not exist as a subset of our reality in the form of information (non-interacting/changing relations) until the relations between parts of reality in our brains for example think them. So when someone says that analytic information exists and is true "a priori", in my view, I'd agree that such truth exists in some other reality as a fully self consistent system... but that it does not exist as information within our reality, within our brains, until we think/discover it, and actually perform mathematical operations on the input to come to the same conclusions (output). Now as for humans specifically, I agree that we are "born" with a set of formulas that our mind initially starts off with... the formulas are built into our DNA etc... which are then built to create the structure of our brain that is then capable of initially performing certain kinds of calculations/formulas/algorithms by design. On the other hand... our brain has the ability to change itself, change the formulas it uses. The formulas that we are built with in our DNA are helpful for more primitive survival situations... but due to ever changing technology and social interactions, our ability to change the formulas we use gives us incredible potential to get ever closer to discovering what reality is, how it works, and hence to be able to use this information to be more successful in achieving our goals.
I disagree with Kant in that there is information in our brains that is forever unchangeable in "Man’s basic concepts (e.g., time, space, entity, causality, etc.) are not derived from reality or experience, but instead stem from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness." Rather instead I would argue that our reality itself is a self consistent mathematical formula and a collection of data... and within this reality, its possible that we can alter the formula that we use to predict our sensation, and we continue to alter the formula we use to predict, until one day we will find the formula that our reality applies to its data. Not that this will enable us to successfully perfectly predict the future into any time: Even if we did discover reality's formula, we do not and cannot know of all of the constituent of reality's data, and hence we cannot factor all of them into the simulation we perform in our brains, applying our best known formula to the subset of our reality known to us.
"Kant explains that the phenomenal world is the world of earthly physical reality including man’s senses, perceptions, reason, and science. This phenomenal world, as perceived by a man’s mind, is a distortion or misrepresentation of the real world. Kant contends that the distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty itself. He argued that that what the human mind perceives and conceives the world to be is not the world as it really is but rather as it appears to a specifically structured human reasoning faculty."
I would here say again that part of the problem is just that we have yet to discover exactly what our reality's formula is. One day we may very well discover what the formula is, and hence the simulations we perform will be near accurate to how our reality works... although... I would agree that our simulations will forever be a "distortion" of actual reality being itself. We may discover the formulas... but we will never be able to perform the formulas exactly... because we have to perform calculations using either: 1. Discrete math, which cannot perfectly represent continual relationships; or 2. Analog simulation, which is unpreventably corrupted by "noise" givent that we are using a subset of reality to perform the simulation. So in this I would agree with Kant that the phenomenal world is forever to be distorted by our minds... due to the nature of information processing systems. On the other hand, I would argue that through increasing the reliability of our mechanics, the capacity of our memory and processing ability, and the consistency of the formula we use with our reality's formula that describes the relations between its parts... we will improve our certainty to be able to predict the consequences of our actions, give ourselves more likely achievable goals, and achieve more goals than ever before.
You say that "It follows that because men depend upon the type of mental constitution they have, that man’s mind is impotent, reality is unknowable, and knowledge is merely an illusion." Consciousness is the process of the relations of one's own parts being changed through the interaction of other parts of reality. I'm not a huge fan of any philosopher's definition of "knowledge"... what's the purpose of asserting that an idea must be or is "absolutely true"? I just leave it to saying that from an individual's perspective, a particular piece of information has some confidence level of being: 1. True (consistent with math: analytic, or with reality: empirical); 2. Useful for learning (discovering what is and how things change) or planning (applying learned info to simulate and select actions to increase goal attainment). To me "knowledge" is equivalent with information, although it has the connotation that someone has judged with high confidence that the information is valid and beneficial. For example, one could know a long sequence of the decimal digits of the ratio between circle circumfrance and circle diameter (3.14159...), which is useful for many things, but say knowing PI only to 15 digits may very well be as beneficial as knowing it to 2000 digits, even though the former is less valid than the later. In fact, learning 2000 digits of PI might be a waste of your time and memory, hence learning valid yet useless information can actually the opposite of beneficial: harmful. Given the benefits of specialization and trade... different people will evaluate different information as beneficial for themselves to remember and be able to recall quickly.
Thoughts... differences in design between humans results in differences in memory capacity (at different cache levels), serial processing speed, parallel processing speed, and reliability of all of these systems. Hence say rational thought is possible for all humans, but for some its more corrupted than others. And for some it they are able to come to the conclusions faster than others. And some are able to remember more good conclusions that others, and are able of finding/remember relavent information faster through better "indexing"/"sorting" ability. All of this manifests itself in the variations in intelligence that we see among the human population. The benefits of specialization and trade enhance the differences between humans in their own knowledge. People with smaller memory capacities, slower processing speeds, and more easily corruptable memory are more succeptable to manipulation by those with greater "mental"/information storage and processing ability.
Objectivists tend to be the sort of people who have very reliable working memory. Abstract thoughts are maintained in memory intact for long periods of time, particularly, in a debate, from premises through mathematical propositions to conclusion. Objectivists vary in memory and processing ability, but through their intellectual reliability they all take pride that they come to very similar conclusions on complex questions on things like human nature and what we should do. And we take pride in this intellectual reliability, the intactness of our information, and our success in the discoveries that we have made, some through our own minds, and some by verifying the ideas of others. "Objectivism" is Ayn Rand's philosophy. We as individuals, who are fond of Rand, differ on Rand in some of the premises, like the exact nature of humans, life, and reality. But we share Rand's objectivity, which is to say that we use our own reason and observation individually to come to our own conclusions rather than using any other method such as argument by majority or historical belief. We have ambition to identify contradictions and resolve them, verses others are more inclined to live with and act out the inconsistencies.
From an ethical perspective, Objectivists tend to have the goal of living towards the long term success of the human species, but particularly while maintaining our ability to control nature rather than be controlled by nature, which means that greater intelligence and greater productivity of human life enabling values are more virtuous and important than the success of a special interest group. But this is necessarily "elitist": via capitalism, the most able succeed more, and the least able in the short term (their own live's generation) succeed less. Elitists want to reward by merrit in accomplishing in some given goal rather than simply distributing rewards eavenly. Hence those who prefer their own special interest group (even if that group is the entirety of currently existing humans... and in this case, if they are calling for 100% wealth redistribution, then they may not be able to conclude for themselves the effects of this policy, and they do not trust the Capitalist's assertion of the effects) over the human race's success in controlling nature oppose pure Capitalism, although they may not necessarily reject Objectivism, they would just deny that Rand's generalization of human nature (compared to animals who do not specialize and trade) applies to them, because they have a different underlying moral premise than Rand, and hence decide that different actions (such as by the government) would be preferable.
"In essence, Kant’s gimmick involved switching the collective for the objective when he advanced the idea of common mental categories collectively creating a phenomenal world." I'm not an expert on Kant, but if this is true, then I would just say that Kant is over emphasizing the effect of design in limiting a human's ability to discover what is, how things work, and to predict the results of potential actions in order to increase goal attainment. We all have the common problem of not being able to know all of reality in its entirety (we cannot even know portions of reality to exact continual precision), and that we can make various kinds of information processing mistakes. But we can still be highly successful, particularly by thinking objectively.
Re: Kant's ethics: That morality/ought comes from our inherent/a priori/design... which gives a person "duty". "For Kant the good will, the will acting from duty, is unconditionally good. He argues that the good will, separate from any consequences, is an end in itself." Well, what I would say is that from a government's perspective, whether a person has "good will" would determine whether the person should be incompacitated or retributed. But this its plain nonsense to call an action performed with good intentions that has negative consequences on one's goal attainment as "good". I instead would argue that whether an action is judged good by a goal seeker depends entirely on how the action effects his goals (the consequences). That morality is relative to each individual's goals, and his means are implicated by his state and ability (identity). Rand generalized humans, and found that humans who have goals that are aligned with this generalization live with a harmony of interest. So I say that morality is subjective, but due most humans having a common identity, most humans conclude that particular actions have very similar effects on their goal attainment. But there is no "duty" to have any particular ethical or moral system... people are able to change theirs (even if we start off with some goals initially per our unique DNA design). Without first accepting a goal for oneself, one cannot make a "moral" decision.
"He states that an action is moral only if a person has no desire to perform it, but performs it totally out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit of any kind from it. Kant makes moral duty an obligation completely independent of a person’s desires and totally without any connection to factual considerations, including the facts of one’s human nature."
Now... this is all nonsense, as debunked in my previous paragraph. It leads me to wonder, what is Kant's "duty" that he is claiming that everyone has that must be obeyed?
"[Kant] insists that we can never determine whether or not an action is good or right by considering its effect on one’s happiness."
And hence he as nulled any meaning of "good". Happiness is the identification of increased personal goal attainment. Obeying some "duty" (duty to what exactly?)... is "good" for accomplishing what goal? The goal of following the "duty". What was is the duty? Is the duty to try to accomplish happiness? Apparently he asserts that the "duty" is anything other than to accomplish happiness... but yet left not said what one's duty is, it just can't be to accomplish one's own goals.
"Kant provides a test for determining the moral status of various actions. He says that a person who performs his moral duty in the teeth of his contrary inclinations exhibits moral worth. On the other hand, a person who helps other people and gains pleasure from such actions displays no moral worth. Similarly, if a person wants to be honest he deserves nor moral credit. An individual who does not have a natural desire to help others or to be honest but nevertheless does so from duty does display moral worth."
Basically it seems that Kant is preaching that we follow some unnamed duty... but he does not describe excatly what that duty is. Any duty is fine, just as long as its not a duty given/chosen by yourself (self given goal). Well, where do goals come from other than one's self (identity)? I can think of one other place: from the men who want to rule others by telling others what they should accomplish (what their duty is). For if Kant was arguing that goals/duty came from an "a priori" place (such as one's unique design/DNA), then even still, one's goals/duty would be one's own... a contradiction. But of course in real we can change our own goals, and our experiences can influence us to change our goals, and our knowledge of our identity in the world shapes what we believe we can accomplish and what means we can perform to accomplish them. (Edited by Dean Michael Gores on 3/06, 10:35am)
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