Are objects created by our minds?
by Dmitri Bontoft
by Dmitri Bontoft
Philosophers sitting around discussing whether the table in front of them exists is the kind of behaviour that gets them a bad reputation. To understand why they feel the need to do this, it’s necessary to understand some of the background against which modern philosophy was born.
In the middle ages the primary philosophical institutions were the "schools" of the ancient European universities. The schools (or scholastics) combined a great deal of speculation with a large amount of religious authority to produce dogma.
This led to a lot of complications in their accounts of mental concepts
As the enlightenment dawned at the beginning of the 18th century, discoveries were being made everywhere: in physics, mathematics, economics, geography, technology and in religion and politics. There was a sense that an intellectual revolution would bring about astounding progress and this indeed turned out to be the case.
As part of this revolution, the dogma of the scholastics had to give way to new thinking and the main weapon against the speculation that was so entrenched up until that point was to be scepticism. It was important to make a break from what had gone before and scepticism allowed philosophers to begin with a clean slate.
David Hume was a leading light in this movement:
"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."
- David Hume
Hume was sceptical about everything. He was sceptical about many things that are taken for granted including "laws" of physics, causality and indeed our own minds. He believed that our minds are merely a bundle of perceptions along with certain basic tendencies to connect these together in patterns as if we are just complicated computer programs
Hume’s position was too radical for some but his arguments were difficult to answer without getting into speculation. Nevertheless some people felt that there was more that we could be sure of about the world than he allowed and one of those people was Immanuel Kant.
Kant felt strongly that there was something essential about our experiences that was missing from Hume's account. For him these were the notions of time, space, objects and causality. His claim was that these notions were necessary for any conscious being but because he felt persuaded by many of Hume’s arguments that these could not be deduced merely from our experience he had to look elsewhere for the reason that they must exist.
Since the world outside our minds can’t provide this certainty, Kant argued that this certainty must come from the logical properties of consciousness itself. This is Kant’s transcendental deduction. Because our minds exist and because minds need the idea of space, time and causality before they can even experience anything, then these other things must exist as well. Not only that but these things must exist a priori, (meaning " before we experience") rather than a posteriori (meaning "after we experience")
This was the revolutionary part of Kant’s thinking, termed his "Copernican revolution" because he reversed the relationship between the world and the mind. In the same way that the earth was seen to revolve around the sun, instead of the mind adapting to its experiences of the world, the world was now to be seen as conforming to the needs of the mind.
"I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself"
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
But you might ask: "So what? Either we live in a universe where our brains make us think there are objects and causality, or we live in a universe where our minds project objects and causality onto it. Isn’t it the same in the end?"
Because we come to know the world only by combining our "intuitions" or senses with the fundamental categories that our minds require (space, time, causality), we can never really perceive the world as it actually is. Beyond the objects we perceive is the world of the unperceivable or "nuomena". Much controversy surrounds the question of whether we can be said to "know" about the noumena since they are beyond our perception, but this seems to be Kant's claim.
Perhaps the fundamental difference is that Kant’s view allows there to still remain some mystery about the nature of our minds. For Hume: objects, space and time are a mechanistic result of our experiences. But for Kant we impose objects, space and time on the world by being conscious of it, these are not inherent, either in the objects or the other people we meet, or in ourselves. There lies a possibility of freedom from a mechanistic view of human nature.