Part 0: Background

Kant From An Evolutionary Perspective

This idea, transcendental idealism, is a man walking on phantom legs: locomotion is achieved via selective understanding. Evolutionary theory is the cure for this leap from logic into one man’s faith; we merely need to describe how we can go from noumena to phenomena and from purely unfiltered ‘reality’ external to the mind to ‘Transcendental Idealism.’ Fortunately, evolution is entirely capable of explaining how rocks can become delusional enough to think they are alive. The core of this (my) concept is that you are not evolving a proximal understanding of reality that is only mildly different from ‘noumenal reality.’ No: your perceptions of reality were progressively built up, specialized, and abstracted from ‘older’ realities. I use ‘reality’ in the solipsist sense, i.e., reality exists for an individual organism in a very particular way, and organisms have no access to what the ‘actual’ universe looks like. Let’s get into it.

After reading Critique of Pure Reason, I was struck with the urge to align the Kantian worldview with evolutionary theory; he was so close to having a useful account of reality as it appears to you that, by a little modification and a little extension, we could build a system of reality construction. The basic thought I had was that the Transcendental Aesthetic—space and time as forms of intuition—and the Transcendental Logic—the concepts and rules through which appearances become objects of thought—needed to be placed inside an account of how minds originate and vary. That was not Kant’s project. His project was to explain the conditions under which experience and knowledge are possible, not the evolutionary origin of those conditions. Posterity did not simply prove this entire apparatus correct; later work made parts of the constructive insight look fruitful while leaving the full transcendental system contested. But we can do better for the engineering problem.

To quickly get you up to speed on Kantian theory, he was against the empiricist picture in which all cognitive structure is passively received from sense experience, while also rejecting dogmatic rationalist claims to knowledge beyond the bounds of possible experience. Kant’s central idea is that experience already depends on forms and concepts supplied by the cognizing subject. Space and time are forms of sensible intuition; the categories are concepts of the understanding used to organize appearances into objects of possible experience. That does not mean the anatomy of a sensory organ is itself a piece of a priori knowledge, or that the subject learns a rule before ever encountering anything. It means that some structure is presupposed by experience rather than copied out of experience. And that idea in particular stuck with me like a tick.

“I think, therefore I am.” Here is the phrase that has injured philosophy the most: a heady mixture of solipsism and egoism is all it took to shackle the minds of the great systematizers and force their expenditure on triviality. To make great systems and frameworks of mind means little, regardless of how correct one can be, unless there is practical application. We should measure our system’s correctness via its potential for practical application. “I think, therefore I am” is an island of mathematical tautology only fit (and attractive) for the autistic mind; given the language of communication, definitions, the cultural setting, and the genetic predisposition of the individuals committing to dialectic, we can examine an infinite variety of logical games which can all be true. Kant inherits the post-Cartesian problem of how a subject can know anything at all, but he also attacks the rational-psychology leap from the bare unity of the “I think” to a substantial, immortal soul. More unfortunately, the whole project of “philosophy” is tainted by a series of logical games generated out of misunderstanding, and the subject should usually not be engaged with seriously.

Split the sea and walk across the ocean floor with me while tautologists play their games.

My modification of the thesis is: “Our representation of reality presupposes the interpretive structures required to generate ‘reality’ for the organism. The origin of mind comes from a manifold combination of interpretive structures and efficient responses as a single unit encoded in a particular way via evolutionary pressures. E.g., some encoding process (evolution) hammered out a lower-dimensional version of reality which—when understood and decompressed—can inform you of the version of reality one is seeing; this can be represented mathematically.”

For humans, we find the basis of our mind in the mental representation we have of reality, the ordered transmission of expedient data to the mind, the symbolic transmission between minds (conversation/writing), and the collective delusion we experience and infer to one another through symbolic transmission. Consciousness (this reality you are experiencing) is an individual projection, a group effort and affect, and is easier to think about as a series of ordered delusions imposed onto our mental interior than something entirely rational. We ‘evolved’ our ‘Synthetic A Priori Judgments,’ those mental structures that add contextual understanding to the subjects we are looking at, to react to increasingly complex streams of data gathered through sensory organs and processed into increasingly complex phenomena in our minds.

From simple rules, we can examine the development of complex systems. Imagine a group of organisms that can only see a 48x48 grid of pixels, they all ‘see’ a shape traveling across the pixel surface and the organism has three programmed responses: Attack, Mate, Run. Let’s say one response in this scenario is correct: Attack. All organisms that didn’t have a bias toward that action didn’t pass on their genes. Natural selection refines the infinite data stream into biasing structures. Nothing new here. Let’s examine whether we make this a little bit more complicated: how about if we had a vector for the size of the observer and a vector for the size of the shape? We can imagine an interaction in which the bias for attacking or running is size-dependent on relative size differences. However, size is a spatial phenomenon, so we need a vector for distance and position; and how do you compute the distance and position vectors? You’d need time and velocity vectors such that, over time, shapes’ relative increase or decrease in size gives the position and distance to the observer. You’d also need causality to infer that shapes seen in this state are the same shapes seen in the previous state. Thus, we can see a sort of synergistic interrelatedness between space, time, causality, and other things that probably share some primitive in the mind’s interpretive structures.

Mathematics is a great example of these interpretive structures operating in concert and cohesively developing a system of rules that seems to be universally correct, even though mathematics isn’t part of the physical world. To count to 3, you need the a priori knowledge that: 1. separation exists, 2. that separations in a ‘chunk’ of data constitute an ‘object,’ 3. that there can be more than a singular object. From this premise (and a bit of a logical leap), you can count to 3: object 1 is in my mental interior, object 2 is in my mental interior, object 3 is in my mental interior and the sum, an abstract ‘de-separation,’ is a variable representing all of the objects. This is Kant’s ‘synthesis’, a single act of knowledge generated from observing what is ‘manifold’ in them. From this basis, you can abstract the object from the physical data that is being represented in your mental interior and treat it independent of physical reality, yet another interpretive structure. This function of adding together objects where the sum is represented by a value contains ‘predicates,’ which provide extra context to abstract objects. We evolved a huge array of predicates to deal with data that needed synthetic manipulation for efficient responses.

So, we see the basis of mathematics, a synthetic a priori judgment that cannot be understood by ‘pure reason’ alone. ‘Math’ is just the most efficient way to interact with your interpretation of abstractions. In fact, your notion of what ‘reason’ is comes from a biasing mechanism that assists you in understanding & parsing a very complex set of environmental data, all in an effort to assist you in reproduction.

A posteriori knowledge, knowledge through experience, is subsumed by the a priori, because our interpretive structures form the basis by which we can learn things. We are designed to learn in (generally, not pedagogically) specific patterns; otherwise, our development is stunted. Which is why we cannot separate understanding from interpretation; they are functionally the same thing. The practical application for pedagogy –to do is to learn–however, this idea is hugely extensible and can explain very complicated behaviors. Your politics is the interpretation of your reality with your biases, your understanding of violence is from your inbuilt interpretive structures, and your understanding of yourself is biased through your interpretive structures. Hence, a large part of psychology uses “constructs” to compress recurring patterns of mind and behavior into factors that can be measured. Psychiatry uses some of the same language, but it is not reducible to that one method.

However, all of the information I’ve just supplied to you is very Kantian in origin, and it doesn’t explain the core idea we’re tackling. What we’ve just talked about is pure conjecture on how the mind may work in an abstract way, and how reality is plausibly experienced, this has almost no practical application, it is merely a device to softly introduce the following: Exploring how the mind works from the point of view of a mind is extremely difficult and is not a first principles approach, by figuring out the primitives and then attempting to understand origin of mind we can get a more holistic understanding of what is happening to people.

From here, I’m going to make a critique of Kant, then we’re going to talk about the nature of phenomenal representations (and how to represent them mathematically), then we’re going to get into how those representations cascade into phenomenal structures, and then finally we’re going to integrate it all together so we can see how minds work. Simple.

However, I’m going to preface the next section, which is full of vitriol, by stating that I believe Kant’s childish moral philosophy has done more harm to the human race than any philosophy before it and should be exiled from our dialectic; we will not be touching on this as it is a complete distraction.

Now comes the worst part of reading Kant … the table of categories.

A Fucking Table

Kant’s Table of Categories is key to the Critique of Pure Reason and lists the pure concepts he says the understanding uses to synthesize appearances into objects of possible experience. The categories are arranged under four headings: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community or reciprocity), and modality (possibility–impossibility, existence–nonexistence, necessity–contingency). Kant does not present this as an empirical taxonomy of human traits. He argues that the table is derived from the logical forms of judgment and is therefore complete. While the derivation sounds architecturally neat, I still think the bridge from forms of judgment to a complete inventory of cognition is made to do far more work than it earns.

The worst part about reading German philosophers is the tour-de-force required for them to explain simple ideas (you’ll find the irony in that statement soon, lmao); Kant explained his ideas so succinctly that his manifesto sprawled across hundreds upon hundreds of pages, with far fewer concrete examples than a modern reader would want and an almost continuous stream of architecture. The second-worst part of reading German philosophers is that they assume everyone reading it will be German. I know where Kant says the table comes from: the table of the logical forms of judgment. I still do not think that derivation is sufficient to establish a complete and universal inventory of the concepts required for every possible cognition, and I have no idea why I should accept the rest of the system merely because the table closes neatly. Kant couldn’t contemplate the chaos of noumena becoming phenomena without his own mental instruments, but he cannot expect me to use the same flawed device as a way of coping with chaos.

Here are some quotes:

“Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. Hence it is as necessary to make our concepts sensible, i.e., to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions understandable, i.e., to bring them under concepts.” — Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75, translation wording adapted

Kant argues that the categories “prescribe laws a priori to appearances,” and therefore to nature understood as the sum of appearances. — Critique of Pure Reason, B163–B165, wording abridged and adapted

This is what happens when someone has a linguistic IQ of 150 and needs to explain away something so the rest of his theory works. Moreover, the Critique does not make cross-cultural or individual variation central to its account of the conditions of experience. Nietzsche’s line that a philosophy is a kind of personal confession feels right again.

This is where I differ greatly from Kant, his assumptions leave too many gaps in his core philosophy and even if you were to understand The Critique Of Pure Reason in its totality, there would be little practical application. I don’t believe the categories are a necessary predicate of experience. With a slight modification to Kant’s core, we can draw a vast ocean of wealth out of his philosophy, instead of a stupid table and everything that comes after it. Some aspects of the table may be a linguistic description of what I describe later; however, as it stands now, it lacks composability, nuance, degrees of intensity, and it is not a universal key to understand any form of cognition.

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