[David] Maybe Kant suffers in translation, I've never been able to follow him unless someone else has first told me what he's saying. Schopenhauer and Ortega have been the most helpful and they say that Kant believed that we can only perceive reality by using a mind that has a preprogrammed bias.
[Krimel] I am a bit uncomfortable with the term bias but admit that it is technically correct. We understand "the world" using the tools at our disposal. I believe Pirsig's point about Kant's point is that some of those tools are built in as a result of our biology and some are learned. I am no expert on Kant either and I don't really thing heredity is was he was actually talking about. [David] Our innate ability to understand time and space are his examples but a better metaphor for my money is our ability to learn. It is logically impossible to teach the ability to learn. If you can't learn then you'll never be able learn to learn. So we all must be born with the ability to learn. It must be programmed into the biology of our brains. This, of course, determines what we can learn and the form of our knowledge and means that can't even trust direct sense data. [Krimel] Again I think the metaphor of encoding and decoding is helpful. We are born with the ability to decode sensory input. I don't think this figures into to Kant much but I think you are correct. We encode sensory data as neural impulses. One of the first to establish a principle of learning was Locke how put forth the concept that ideas develop through a process of association. Red reminds us of rose, apples and firetrucks because these concepts a commonly associated with redness. Modern researchers hold to a similar model of learning. Repeated patterns of exposure to sensory data strengthen associations and these strengthening patterns are encoded as patterns and pathways of neural impulses. It has also been shown that just having a network of patterns and association can lead to "learning" when such a network receives some form of stimulation followed by feedback. But the short answer would be that yes we are biologically equipped to collect, process and remember experiences. [David] Ortega believes that this limits our ability to understand TiTs. He calls it our perspective. Unless we can find a way around this fact metaphysics can never be "T"rue only "t"rue. [Krimel] I am not at all familiar with Oretega but this sounds about right. My position on "T"ruth is that whether or not it exists we are not equipped to capitalize the "T". We can not collect enough experiences to capitalize the "T" even if it hit us in the face. We aim at truth as a "limit" and we try to zero in on it but if we arrived at it we could still not achieve certainty about it. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
