say we discover that the physical structure of our brain utilizes only the electromagnetic force in the same kind of way a computer does.
the structure and the paths that the electricity take somehow, very complicatedly and beyond my understanding, somehow explain our ability to see patterns, then later we see a part of that pattern and we know that we can predict its future by refering to our previous experience with it. and this structure would have to allow comparisons of similar but not identical experiences.
i dont see what else the brain does besides these relatively simple things. except that we have chemicals that respond to specific sensory input, ‘emotions’ some fruity people call them.
what is going on in anybodys brain besides recognizing patterns and using the stored image of their outcome to predict the outcomes of similar ones? what is “known prior to” the observance of these patterns.
unexplained, irrational inclinations like what? “must have sex”?
If you’re asking what the a priori forms of our intuition are they are space and time. Other a priori concepts are number, contradiction, causality, and God.
A baby is attracted to its mother’s face before it ever sees her. A newborn will pick out and pay attention to its mother’s face, even a depiction of its mother face, out of a mix of difference faces.
a baby that cant focus its eyes can identify a picture? or are these experiments done once the baby is able to focus its eyes and therefore after its been able to empirically identify what his mom looks like? i dont know i think its like a month or 6 or something after its born before it can point both of its eyes at the same thing and detect distance.
but how can you do an experiment that concludes a baby knows what his mom looks like without seeing his mom unless you take it out of her crotch and bring it straight to the lab without letting him get one glance in?
i would say all of these things can be learned by recognizing a pattern and knowing that the pattern will repeat itself in the future.
you can know that one thing is different from two because they appear different, you can see that each of the two things in the group of two is exactly like the one thing in a group of one.
if you define the word ‘square’ to mean ‘having sharp corners that hurt when you slam your hand on them’ then you can identify that since a ball does not hurt when hand slammed, it is ‘not square’ (is this what you mean by contradiction?)
you can see that every time you punch your brother, he cries. youll punch him a few times maybe before you realize the connection, but eventually you will have enough memories stored in your brain that you will be able to refer back to them when trying to decide whether or not to punch, you can see that maybe the future will resemble the past, and therefore you can predict it.
in order for what i am saying to make sense, you have to assume that we have the built in ability to store memories, the ability to compare those memories to our current experience, and the ability to realize that what happened then may also happen now. i believe someday this can be explained through brain structure/activity.
the existence of god enters as a thought soon after the word ‘why’ is invented
And you would be wrong. See Hume. There is no guarantee that the future wil be anything like the past unless you believe Kant that these are a priori concepts.
But you just said you “Know” these patterns will continue in the future.
Just because you are able to connect events that seem to be similar and attribute it to the same “cause” and “effect” sequence, doesn’t mean past patterns will be affirmed by future patterns, It just means you like to clump together several unrelated events because your mind is too feeble to know the difference.
It takes several events that our brain sees as “similar” before we are sure enough to assume that thus-and-so will happen in the future, but the question you need to ask yourself is if these events are actually the same, or if our brain simply likes to relate them together out of weakness.
alright mr semantics when i use the word ‘know’ i mean ‘know as well as a human can’ which mr skeptic is not the same as ‘actually knowing it in itself’ if such a thing exists
oh good we agree, sounded like you disagreed for a second
right again mr skeptic, but again i am talking about how humans understand the idea of cause and effect, not how they know it is absolutely true in itself
as you experience instances of cause and effect, you experience that one follows the other in the timeline the same way you experience any other part of it. you would remember that punching your brother is accompanied soon after by his crying, just like you would remember it kind of hurts your hand.
if you can remember that it hurts when you punch him, you can remember that he will also cry soon after it happens
if you have lots of these memories that link these two events by their time value (you punch and he cries) every time, then you can predict that they will, in the future accompany eachother in time.
if you can predict that some things are always accompanied by certain others, call the first one cause and the second effect and youve got it, purely from empirical experience
No, dont bother to read Kant (well, ok read him but more importantly…). Read Popper. There is no guarantee that the past will be like the future…but in a certain sense it doesnt matter. The problem of induction is one that Popper thought he had sloved. The most effective way to solve problems is through falsification not induction.
Kant is complicated in a way and simple in another. He is complicated because he tells you exactly and precisely what he is thinking and requires hundreds of pages to do so. He is simple in that the absolute and irrefutable truth of what he says is self-evident to all logical intellects.
Kant caused a revolution in metaphysics because all prior philosophers had said that material objects were knowable as “things in themselves.” Namely that what you see is what it is. Kant said that that’s not true at all. He said that we have no access to the “things in themselves” because conscious beings project space, time, number, causality, and all a priori concepts on to them.
Space, time, and number are not part of the “things in themselves.” They are only in our minds.
Therefore while Kant is a material realist who acknowledges the existence of “things in themselves” as objects that present themselves to us, he is a transcendental idealist in that he says the things in themselves are not knowable. All that is knowable are the objects as perceived by us and other extraterrestrial consciousnesses and we can make no claim about the things in themselves as things in themselves or how they might appear to angels or God.