Kant and Vance, Pt I

I recently read two independent and unrelated theories of how we experience reality, i.e., how the mind influences the environment and vice versa. I love it when these things occur synchronistically out of the blue. It’s like a signal from the Great Beyond or a higher dimension or a universal consciousness or God or the noumena or – you get the idea.

Anyway, I tortured myself by sadistically reading a little bit of Kant over the Memorial Day weekened. Just the introductions, supplemented by a 20-page chapter in a Walter Kaufmann book. Interesting, would love to devote more time and study to it, but ... life’s too short. But I dig Kant’s central thesis, even if I only have the shallowest of interpretations of it.

I am also two-thirds done with a neat little SF paperback called Big Planet by Jack Vance. Figured I could get a quickie space opera in before I tackle Thomas Pynchon. It’s working; I was up past midnight last night reading it. Then, I came across a theory of the mind (I guess), and remembered Kant immediately.

From my understanding, Kant central thesis is that it is our mind that creates our reality. Time and space, among various other categories, do not exist “objectively,” “out there,” but are tools the mind uses to make sense of a reality which is essentially unknowable.

Vance has an alien discuss, way too briefly, the “Tempofluxion Dogma.” To quote from page 120 of my Ace Paperback edition, “ ... the advouters claim that as the river of time flows past and through us, our brains are disturbed – jostled, if you will – by irregularities, eddies, in the flow of the moments. They believe that if it were possible to control the turbulence in the river, it would be possible to manipulate creative ability in human minds.”

So we have Kant saying that our minds mold reality like a potter’s hand a piece of clay, and we have Vance’s aliens thinking eddies in the river of time affect the creative visions in our minds. Almost mirror opposites. I’m not sure which version – if any – is correct, but one thing fascinates me in both cases.

That’s the molding or influencing that occures when the two interact.

But let’s back track a moment. Using a Pascal’s Wager type thing, we can have four outcomes when we compare Kant with Vance.

#1 – Kant’s view is correct; Vance’s view isn’t.

#2 – Vance’s view is correct; Kant’s isn’t.

#3 – Both views are correct.

#4 – Neither view is correct.


Or more simply, when it comes to making sense of reality

#1 – Our mind is the agent

#2 – The “out there” is the agent

#3 – Minds influence the environment and vice versa

#4 – Neither our minds nor the environment accounts for our experience of reality.

There. That clears everything up. (smiley.)


What I want to do this week is examine each of the four possibilies. But not from a philosophical angle; me, I’m just an amateur’s amateur when it comes to that most esoteric, turgid, and verbose of disciplines. I’d like to approach it from a science fiction buff-slash-writer’s point of view. After all, that’s so much more exciting and engaging, wouldn’t you agree? When it’s not examining our current culture and our current selves, SF is best at extrapolating our potential destinies through the use of that little yet most useful of questions, What If?

So please stop back during the week. It should be interesting and you may help keep me in check.