Critical Philosophy, or Empty and Vain Opinions about the Emptiness and Vanity of Opinions

Here's the key: the brain has no access to the world outside. Sealed within the dark, silent chamber of your skull, your brain has never directly experienced the external world, and never will (Eagleman).

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, Eagleman.

Naturally, if you arbitrarily separate the brain from its mind, then the brain has no access to the outside world, for it is but an object like any other. You can also subtract life from an organism and regard it as a machine, but why adopt such an impoverished view? 

Viewed holistically, it is via its mind that the brain has direct access to the world of reality, precisely. For not only is there a deeper unity between mind and brain that dualism denies, there is a similar unity between mind and world.

Analogously, we can talk about cause and effect as if they are two different things, but in actuality they are simultaneous, two sides of a single event. Likewise, knower and known -- intelligence and intelligibility -- are two sides of a single occurrence: we only know that which is intelligible, and only insofar as it is intelligible.   

Ever agree with something you don't understand?

Sure. Quantum physics. Or evolution. No one really understands how organisms evolve from microbes to man. That's just a lot of bravado. But here we are, so there must be a sufficient reason. 

That's how I feel about James Gibson's theory of direct perception. Something about it eludes me, but I just know it's true. 

Gemini, is it correct that Gibson refutes Kant's opinion, man, that we do not have direct access to reality as it is in itself?

Yes, James J. Gibson's theory of ecological perception is a form of direct realism, which stands in opposition to the representationalist and indirect realist views often associated with Kantian philosophy.

So, he basically disagrees with everyone. Sounds like my kind of guy. Reminds me of Robert Rosen in biology, who is honest enough to see the absurdity of reducing biology to physics and subjects to objects: like climate change, naive reductionism works in theory, just not in reality. 

It is as if Gibson gives us an anti-Kantian Critique of Pure Criticism, so there. Two can play that con. To repeat a comment I made to the previous post, you can't simultaneously say the world is an illusion and in the next breath say what reality really is, for that is literally like having your crock and eating it too.

Literally?

Yes, insofar as you swallow that crock. I just don't like the idea of some tenured pinhead telling me what I can and can't know. I'll be the judge of that. 

Judgment. Important little word.

Indeed. In the neotraditional retrofuturistic Raccoon view, Is is the soul of judgment. Can it be that Kant is the first person in human history to judge rightly that we can make no categorical judgments about the nature of reality? If that is true, it is necessarily an opinion, man. 

Seriously, am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules of logic? It is as if Kant pretends to an omniscience without any object, for he knows everything about nothing. 

Gibson rejected the consensus view that perception is a process of inferring a representation of the external world from impoverished sensory data. This is a key departure from the Kantian idea that we can't access "things-in-themselves" (noumena) and instead only perceive the world through the organizing structures of our minds.

How does that work? 

Gibson's theory posits that we are in direct contact with the world. Perception isn't mediated by mental representations, sense data, or cognitive processes that "construct" reality. Instead, our perceptual systems are evolved to directly pick up on information that already exists in the environment.

Concur: the world is full of intelligible information. If it isn't, then that is the end of science and philosophy, and the beginning of the philodoxical pneumababble of the tenured.

Gibson's work, particularly his research on vision, focused on the ambient optic array, which is the structured light that surrounds an observer. This light contains all the necessary information about the environment's properties, like surfaces, textures, and layouts. The act of perception is simply the "picking up" of this information, not its interpretation or construction.

Thaaat's right, Dude. This means to me that we're back to a talking cosmos, one packed with intelligible information ordered to the human intellect that knows it in the single act of knowing referenced above. 

A central concept in Gibson's theory is the affordance, which are objective properties of the environment that are directly perceived, not mental qualities we project onto the world. This means that we perceive the world in terms of its practical meaning to us, without needing a separate cognitive step to add that meaning.

	Kantian Perspective	Gibsonian Perspective
	The "thing-in-itself" (reality, the noumenon) is unknowable; we only access the phenomenal world shaped by our minds.	The world is directly perceivable; we are in contact with an objective reality.
	Indirect perception; a process of inference and construction of mental representations from sensory data.	Direct perception; a process of detecting information from the environment without mental mediation.
	Meaning is imposed on sensory experience by the mind's categories of understanding.	Meaning (in the form of affordances) is a real, perceivable property of the environment.

I like that: an inseparable relationship between perceivers and their environment. Why look at them dualistically, instead of seeing them as single, holistic process featuring interior-to-interior communication? It reminds me of human intersubjectivity, in which the twoness is embedded in a deeper oneness. 

We're only just getting started, but we're already close to the daily allotment. We'll close with this passage by Schuon on the "suicidal rationalism" of critical philosophy:

we are asked to believe that knowledge, thus reduced to a combination of sensory experiences and the innate categories, shows us things such as they appear to be and not such as they are; as if the inherent nature of things did not pierce through their appearances, given that the whole point of knowledge is the perception of a thing-in-itself..., failing which the very notion of perception would not exist. 

To speak of a knowledge that is incapable of adequation is a contradiction in terms.... in short, it is absurd to deduce from the obvious fact that our knowledge cannot become totally identified with its objects... that all speculations on the aseity of things are “empty and vain." To turn this dictatorial conclusion into an argument against metaphysical “dogmatism,” so far from unmasking the latter, serves only to demonstrate the emptiness and vanity of critical philosophy, thus causing the argument to rebound upon itself.

Besides, "an intellectual limit is a wall of which one has no awareness."

One cannot therefore have it both ways: either the intelligence by definition comprises a principle of illimitability or liberty.... or else, on the contrary, the intelligence comprises, likewise by definition, a principle of limitation or constraint, in which case it no longer admits of any certitude and cannot function any differently from the intelligence of animals, with the result that all pretension to a “critical philosophy” is vain.

If the normal functioning of the intelligence has to be subjected to a critique, then the criticizing consciousness has to be subjected to a critique in its turn by asking, “what is it that thinks?” and so forth -- a play of mirrors whose very inconclusiveness demonstrates its absurdity, proved moreover in advance by the very nature of cognition.... 

[A] thought that is “criticist” is in contradiction with its own existence. A subject who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting; and this is just what has happened to critical philosophy, swept away in its turn, and through its own fault, by existentialism in all its forms.