Kant and Vance, Pt II

How to we “know” what’s “out there”?

Simple question, difficult answer.

Yes, superficially it’s an easy question. But with a little thought, a little digging, it’s not as basic as one might think. What is reality? – is one of the basic problems very, very deep thinkers have been wrestling with for millennia. No kidding.

Just a few points to consider. When you and I look out a window, do we see the same thing? How can we know this? If there’s a difference of opinion as to what’s outside, who is correct? How might my color blindness affect this question? How might my schizophrenia? Do we each now see an objective reality, or a subjective one?

Is “reality” me communing naked out in nature with a copy of Walden in my backpack? Or is it when I commute with a million other rats negotiating New York City streets to get to work before the hands of a certain mechanical device relocate to a certain spatial spot? Or is it the “news” I listen to on the radio as I commute? Or is “reality” the “reality” teevee show I watch later that night? Is a political rally “reality”? How ’bout the club scene, and all the alcohol induced deceptions we’re forced to dance when we participate? How about a history book purporting to be an objective and accurate eyewitness to a recent (or even a distant) historical event? How about the Bible? Is that “reality”? How about the Mass?

See, how we “know” what’s “out there”, “reality” is not a simple deduction, when you consider it from various angles.

Plus, there was this guy named Hume who lived around the time of the American Revolutionary War. I had to read one of his (thankfully slim) treatises way back in college. Hume’s fame rests more or less on the fact that he destroyed certitude. Though I no longer know the arguments and reasonings, Hume was so devastatingly destructive that even something as commonsensical as cause-and-effect could no longer be assumed to be true. Nor could I, after reading Hume, really believe you exist, let alone something more transcendent as God.

Anyway, there’s a famous line in Philosophy 101 classes that reading Hume awoke Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers.” The strange little German set about refuting Hume’s skepticism and developed a new way of viewing Reality.

The world “out there,” according to Kant, is basically unknowable. We cannot experience it as it truly is. What we can do, and do do, or rather, what our minds do do (okay, enough of the childish do do references) is “mold” reality into some experience we can understand. The mind impresses upon this out-there-stuff these vast Newtonian-Aristotelian concepts such as time, space, quantity, plurality, etc, to reform it into something it can interpret and make sense of. I’m sure legions of Kant scholars are giggling like wee schoolchildren over my simplified simplification, which probably only approximates a percentage point of what Kant was getting at.

I like this theory a lot. It appeals to the philosopher in me, though it’s about 180-degrees opposite from what Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Church might say. It also appeals to the scientist in me. This concept of Kant’s explains a lot of quantum mechanics, the science of the really, really small. During my tenure at Seton Hall studying physics, “philosophy” in my physics classes was verboten; but I read a lot of pop sci books as well as some stuff by Bohr and Heisenberg about what quantum physics really implies. There’s that shadowy out-there-ness, a probability wave responsible for all matter (still don’t know how to conceptualize it), that collapses when our mind observes it. Sounds Kantian, right?

Even better, it appeals to the science fiction buff in me. Think about ...


This faculty we are endowed with that clamps on time, space, quantity, etc, on the noumena, the unknowable out-there-ness – is this something controlled subconsciously by us? If yes, does this explain dreams? How might a brain damaged person see the world if the facility is somehow broken?

Does this faculty or molding feature make us who we are? If one lacked it, what would happen?

Would an alien entity have this Kantian molding feature? If not, how would it interact with us? What would its, say, religious beliefs be?

Can this molding feature influence time and space? Or just the noumena? Surely if one can mold reality via time and space, one could also manipulate time and space? Is it even possible? Attainable with practice, instruction? Enlightenment?

What if I could consciously control this faculty? What would be the point? Perhaps we do, already, to a minor extent ...

What exactly is the noumena? Could a scientific experiment or some type of scientific probe be designed to explore the noumena as it is, not as it appears to us as phenomena?

Is the noumena what a Zen adept sees when he attains samadhi?

Or would someone go batsh*t insane if this facility broke down and he glimpsed the noumena?


Intriguing food for thought, no? One of my novels-in-progress (well, rather novel-idea-half-fleshed-out-awaiting-to-be-outlined) takes some of these very questions for its starting point. It’s not very thought out, really just a germ of an idea that appeals to me. Hopefully within a few years I can actually get a hundred thousand well-written words on the subject off to a literary agent and then to publication.

Or I could just manipulate time and space ...