u/fgerbode

I have just come out from under the 9-lecture Robert Wolff YouTube presentation on the Critique. It was a clear exposition, but on one point I feel unclear. Kant seems to saying that the imagination starts with the manifold of intuition and then reproduces its contents in a certain rule-determined order, which unifies it and results in the creation of objects in experience. The implication is that a rule specifies the order in which objects appear, and the ordering principle is that of causation, according to the Second Analogy. . Does this mean that the only way we know which things come first is determining what causes what?. Hume had the opposite viewpoint that the temporal order is given in experience and we empirically determine causation by induction.

Seems to me that temporal order is often obvious without our being able to ascribe a particular cause to it (we often do not know). Is the assumption that there must be a causal connection enough of a rule to establish temporal order? The assumption that everything has a cause is a good heuristic assumption that causes us to seek knowledge, but I don't see that as providing an adequate ordering principle. I feel I must be missing something. Can anyone help?

Survival and sanity depend on the establishment of appropriate habits. Some habits are acquired or conditioned without being consciously established, such as a child’s learning to walk or flinching from touching a stove top. Others are consciously established, as when one does musical scales and finger exercises to establish good piano-playing skills.

The thing about habits is that when they are well established they become unconscious, invisible, experientially a part of ourselves. That can be a disadvantage if the habit is not serving us well, because it becomes hard to spot. But arguably, that is also an advantage, because there are a limited number of things we can attend to at any particular time. Habitual exercise of common routines can free up our limited attentional resources to attend to other things. A pianist who has built technical skill by doing a lot of scales and finger exercises does not have to think about the mechanics of what they are doing and has attention free to concentrate on musical phrasing. Habits that are helpful to us we think of as skills, while the rest are simply considered bad habits.

Most of what we do in life is habitual, or we would not be able to function at all. When a habit is established, our attention is free to look outward to accomplish what we want to accomplish. When an infant learns to walk, they must at first consciously attend to the constituent parts of that process and then establish habits, routines that work. Over time, they can walk without having to think about it, and they can then go about hanging out with a parent or playing with a valued toy.

Apart from physical habits, we also establish cognitive habits that allow to economize on conscious thought. We are strongly motivated to decide what we agree to as real and then stick to that knowledge. We then internalize what we are certain of and allow ourselves to use that knowledge quite unconsciously to think of other things. It does not serve us well to continually rethink what we believe, as that would be very destabilizing for us and lead to confusion or madness.

This conservative tendency tends to make us want to view certain things as objectively or absolutely true. This is part of the allure of physicalism and current scientific theories. Once we have established these “absolute truths”, we don’t have be conscious of them anymore and are free to direct our consciousness to other things. Thus we achieve a kind of economy of thought that is essential to living life.

On the other hand, it does not serve us well to be permanently entrenched in our habits, be they physical or mental. So when a particular habit is troublesome in some way, we have to perform a kind of triage on it—to decide whether we should eliminate it, modify it, or leave it in place. This requires a kind of willingness to reconsider. We have to be willing to step back from our habitual beliefs, which had been experientially unconscious and a part of our self, and submit them to the light of consciousness in order to decide to keep them, change them, or eliminate them.

Philosophy, to a large extent, consists of looking critically at our mental habits, those fundamental beliefs we have held unconsciously, and noticing which are actually troublesome in some way, stepping back from them to bring them into consciousness, and conducting an appropriate triage to see if we want to keep them, delete them, or modify them. The ability to reconsider is an essential prerequisite for this process.

Ontology and epistemology are two different philosophical topics, but somebody must have figured out an answer to this conundrum: If experiences A B and C lead to conclusions that D E and F are real, can D E and F be used to invalidate the reality of A B and C? If all we know is from our experience, surely experience must have a firmer ontological status than any conclusions reached from it, because if the evidence is invalid, surely any conclusions reached from it must also be invalid. I would be interested in people's views on this point.