This article will explain the problem of the mind, from the context of modern theoretical physics, and why this is a problem for physicalism that makes physicalism meaningless (not necessarily false, just meaningless).  Then we will cover what Transcendental Idealism is and why this view is the more compatible frame of view on both the mind and the ‘physical’ universe.

Theoretical Physics?

Starting in the last century with Quantum Mechanics, there was a philosophical crisis in theoretical physics because of how the model and predictions do not seem compatible with our normal intuitive concepts of the world. The most fundamental structural concepts like causality, physical, matter, space, or time do not seem to resemble the way we comprehend them in the everyday world of human experience, and outside of the mathematics, seem incomprehensible on an intuitive level of understanding.

To give a very brief summary, thought experiments such as Schrödinger’s cat from the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, seem to defy any literal sense or intuitive consistency. If QM is taken literally, the implication is that a cat could be simultaneously dead and alive inside a box until the box is opened and the cat is observed.

Einstein and others notably tried to bring back an intuitively comprehensible spirit to physics through thought experiments like the EPR Paradox, demonstrating how Quantum Mechanics implies there can be an instantaneous connection between two particles over a potentially infinite distance. Instead, they proposed a Hidden Variables interpretation that QM was incomplete and that was why it makes so little intuitive sense. However, the Hidden Variables theory was later statistically falsified though Bell’s Theorem.

Technical details aside, by strong implications in theoretical physics, it seems like we are stuck with a view of the universe which does not conform to our everyday intuitive world of cars, trees, cats, and so on… This would suggest that whatever is fundamentally going on in the universe, it seems to be beyond our intuitive comprehension.

 

Why is this a problem for physicalism?

The problem for physicalism (generally, the view that the only things which exist are physical) is that if physics is no longer intuitive, physicalism becomes meaningless. Physicalist-type statements cannot be made in a meaningful way. Consider a basic statement a physicalist might make, “only physical things exist.” The problem is, since physics has distanced itself from intuitive everyday meanings, we have no idea what to make of any type of physicalist/materialist claim. As such, three major questions now arise from this statement:

1. What is Physical?

Following concepts in QM, particles, matter, and energy may occupy indeterminate states such as position, momentum, or even existence itself! So is ‘physical’ just an empty placeholder for ‘that which physics studies?’ This would seem empty meaning and pure dogma.

2. What are Things?

Are cars, trees, or people ‘things’ on some fundamental level? Or is it only entities like fundamental particles in the universe? Is everything that can be thought or imagined a thing?

3. What does Exist mean?

Similar to the first question on ‘physical,’ the QM uncertainty principle applies to existence itself. For example, with the concept of Virtual Particles. Outside of the mind, outside of our intuitive concept of ‘exist’, the actual nature of existence itself is called into question. It is not even clear that the ‘existence’ of ‘things’ works with any resemblance to how we imagine it. 

In light of this seeming mismatch between theoretical physics and intuitive concepts like ‘physical things,’ are we left with an inevitable conclusion that human experience and thought is simply hopeless and inaccurate? I don’t think so! The problem with this conclusion is that is misses the fact that human experience and thought is the primary mode to us. In ‘real life’, our human world of thought, experience, relations, and things is more real than the abstract and incomprehensible ‘universe’ explained by physics. We need a better conceptual frame than just materialism to account for this priority. 

 

Transcendental Idealism

Transcendental Idealism, first formulated by Immanuel Kant in 1781, provides a clean resolution to this problem. On this view, the world of human experience is structured or framed by internal (a priori) categories of understanding. For example, concepts like space or time are internal/innate to the human mind. Rather than coming from the senses, space and time are required as structures in the mind in order for sensory experiences like vision to make sense in the first place. This also applies to other structures in the mind including our previous questions like physical, existence, causality, etc… In transcendental idealism, these fundamental types of concepts may be understood as categories of understanding which are present in the mind independently of experiences. They are not learned from experience or derived from thinking but are preconditions that are needed before experience or thinking can happen in the first place.

What this means is that the normal way we perceive/experience and think about the world may be on an entirely different level from the way the universe really is. To distinguish the relation between mind and world, we can use these two concepts:

Noumena: So-called things-in-themselves which are also the hypothetical/theoretical (transcendental) entities science operates on. For example subatomic particles or forces would be noumena. Just to clarify, when I use the word universe, I always mean as this theoretical realm of noumena that is beyond/outside of the human mind.

Phenomena: In contrast to noumena, phenomena are things as they appear to us in the senses and mind generally. This makes up the experienced reality like colors, trees, mountains, cats, etc… In essence, the world of normal thought and experience that we live in every day. When I use the word, ‘world,’ I am referring to this phenomenal mode of human experience (in contrast to the ‘universe’ of physics).

So,

Universe = realm of noumena (domain science models).

World = realm of phenomena (realm of human experiences/senses/mind/thoughts)

This distinction between noumena and phenomena—between theoretical-scientific universe and intuitive-lived world—solves the problem or answers the question of why the universe (as modeled through physics) can be inconsistent with human intuitions, and why this is not wholly surprising or unexpected. 

Although Transcendental Idealism was developed in the era of Newtonian classical physics, if Kant were alive in the 20^th century, he probably would have questioned why we should have expected the universe of physics to conform to the intuitive world of human experience in the first place? Indeed, following this view of the mind, we should not expect the universe would conform to the world in our mind except through some coincidence. The universe is almost certainly far more complicated than the structures/categories of our understanding.

More broadly, what this does for philosophy is to separate questions on the mind from questions on the universe (outside the mind). If things as they appear to us (phenomena) may be framed that way by categories within our mind, no content in the mind *needs* to necessarily relate to things-in-themselves (noumena). This means, for example, that phenomenology, which entirely suspends the question of the ‘physical world’ is fully legitimate even from a scientific perspective. From this perspective, the claim is not that there is no physical universe but only that, if so, it doesn’t matter (for the mind) what it is and how it works. Because we can legitimately suspend that question when looking at the mind and consciousness, it does not matter what the laws of physics are or if they apply to the mind (via the brain). 

I won’t go into much further detail here on what I think transcendental idealism must imply for physics itself, except to say, the implication is that physics is and always must be a model, rather than a literal description. Even if physics arrives at a ‘theory of everything’ that consistently accounts for everything that can be observed so far, the fundamental entities are still only placeholders. Physics describes behaviors of hypothetical entities in relation to other hypothetical entities using the simplest possible consistent account. However, the entities themselves will always be placeholders (no description), except as behavioral relations to other entities.

 

Additional Resources, Notes and Points of Interest

A. Implications

There should be clear implications of Transcendental Idealism that should in theory be testable. For example, if we have an intuitive 3-dimensional mode of spatial thinking, we should not be able to intuitively have 4-dimensional visual experiences (or any number of dimensions above 3). This does seem to match up with actual experience unless you can intuitively visualize what is happening in this image:

Hint: it is supposedly a tesseract, a 4-dimensional analog to the 3-d cube, that is undergoing a simple rotation

Intuitively/visually, I don’t see a rotation here. What I see is two cubes (in 3 dimensions) that are being contracted/expanded and bent in a funnel type motion. Needless to say, that’s not what’s supposed to be happening in 4-dimensions where the structure itself is supposed to be static but simply rotating…

B. Support from Other Fields

This general view of structures/preconditions in thought and perception is also corroborated with analogs in modern linguistics. Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker in particular present very good evidence of patterns and structures that are universal in all human languages. In The Language Instinct, throughout chapter 2, Pinker also provides evidence that children are able to correct inconsistencies in the language of their parents in predictable and consistent ways.

Likewise, the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues indirectly in support of transcendental idealism from an evolutionary perspective. Namely, that we do not see reality as it is and it is not even to our advantage to see reality as it is, a view supported by mathematical computer simulations. I.e., a simpler model of reality prioritizes speed and things that are most important to survival and procreation. See video here: https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?language=en

D. Since Newton

This is not even a new ‘problem’ from Quantum Mechanics. In “Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding” (source Article, and related Video), Noam Chomsky brings up the interesting point that even in Newton’s time, the question on the nature of physics was likely very relevant and therefore almost certainly an influence for Kant. Transcendental Idealism is not specially addressed but it is clear even in classical physics, the same questions on the nature of physics, the mind, and the universe were already being asked. To quote two paragraphs:

As the import of Newton’s discoveries was gradually assimilated in the sciences, the “absurdity’ recognized by Newton [of gravity’s force-at-a-distance] and his great contemporaries became scientific common sense. The properties of the natural world are inconceivable to us, but that does not matter. The goals of scientific inquiry were implicitly restricted: from the kind of conceivability that was a criterion for true understanding in early modern science from Galileo through Newton and beyond, to something much more limited: intelligibility of theories about the world [or as I would call it, behavioral models of the universe]. This seems to me a step of considerable significance in the history of human thought and inquiry, more so than is generally recognized, though it has been understood by historians of science.

Friedrich Lange, in his classic 19th century history of materialism, observed that we have “so accustomed ourselves to the abstract notion of forces, or rather to a notion hovering in a mystic obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension, that we no longer find any difficulty in making one particle of matter act upon another without immediate contact,…through void space without any material link. From such ideas the great mathematicians and physicists of the seventeenth century were far removed. They were all in so far genuine Materialists in the sense of ancient Materialism that they made immediate contact a condition of influence.” This transition over time is “one of the most important turning-points in the whole history of Materialism,” he continued, depriving the doctrine of much significance, if any at all. “What Newton held to be so great an absurdity that no philosophic thinker could light upon it, is prized by posterity as Newton’s great discovery of the harmony of the universe!”

Chomsky’s own conclusion, evident in the second paragraph, is that ‘physicalism’ is an empty and meaningless term because the understanding of physics even from Newton’s time had already moved into an abstract model and therefore, beyond a literal type of account that could be taken at face value. I agree generally and the same conclusion is drawn using transcendental idealism. Namely, the issue is not that physicalism is not incompatible at any point but that it’s just an empty statement. Physicalism is a metaphysical statement about noumena while physics is simply a behavioral-type account of entities in consistent relation to other entities. The ‘physical’ that physicalism is referring to are just placeholders within physics itself which makes physicalism also about these placeholders (theoretical entities within physics).

E. More on Transcendental Idealism

For an in-depth account, see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/

Also see the physicalism entry: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

Or a more brief account on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_idealism

 

Originally posted May 20, 2016