Bound Existence: Part 3 — Bound Worlds [BW]
Our World and the Void Beyond
In Part 1 we established the philosophical groundwork for this series by Immanuel Kant, concluding Space and Time are the forms that we necessarily experience existence. To have a human experience, is to have a spatial-temporal experience, an experience Bound by Space and Time.
In Part 2 we explored how we are Bound by the dimension of Time and what beings may exist beyond Time.
In this part we will take a deeper dive into our Bound Existence, by outlining the borders of our experience, questioning what may be outside our existence…
Our World vs The World
You, me and every person is a perceiver perceiving. A term for how things appear to us, is phenomena; we experience phenomena. Phenomena is how the object appears to an observer. When we observe, we first receive sensory information, this information is then collected and represented to us.
The opposite term to phenomena, is noumena, which is the object of experience itself — the chair. The thing in itself (das Ding an sich). Kant claims we can never know the thing in itself, as all existence is experience of how things appear to us, not how they are in themselves.
The Great Conflation of the Two Worlds [GCW]
Empiricism (knowledge derived from the senses) has been a popular project for the last few centuries, with its prodigal offspring of Science and its many disciplines continually uncovering the mysteries of our empirical experience.
Physics for example, is the science of objects, energy and its relations. Physics provides extremely accurate results in the explanation and prediction of objects and its energies within the empirical world, and have revolutionised both how we view the world and how we interact with it.
Many philosophers complain that the sciences have conflated the noumena and the phenomena, pointing to the scientists who believe that they are uncovering the noumena rather than the phenomena. The complaint is as follow: science has abstracted so much from experience, through the use of formal tools such as mathematics and logic, that scientists think they are truly quantifying the thing in itself.
Is science really discerning The World (noumenal world), or are we only diving deeper in our understanding of Our World (phenomenal world)?
Determined Scientists
Science has gone a long way since the days of the traditional empiricists and the gang. It has gone such a long way that we can now accurately measure phenomena that is not even observable to our rudimentary senses (atoms and sub-atomic particles). So clearly we are discovering the thing in itself, if what we are uncovering are objects that are not even within our realm of sensory experience.
Forget about sensory experience, we are able to measure and predict energies and objects that we cannot even conceptualise in terms of size and force. (Can you picture in your mind the actual size of a photon, or how fast it travels?) Science allows us to abstract the properties of objects and our reality, to systematically study it and discover the secrets that lies.
Our power of abstraction allows us to experience the noumena — the thing in itself.
Doubling down on this point, particles are non-empirical by definition, as Quantum Mechanics reveals that waves are also particles; wave-particle duality is the observation that a particle behaves like a wave when not observed (the wave function gives the probability of finding that particle).
Waves are non-material and non-empirical, because when you observe such waves you collapse the wave state into a particle. Non-empirical by definition as observing the wave destroys it — wave form exists, but we cannot observe it, as the second we do it is destroyed and becomes a particle.
Quantum mechanics ability to discern the unobservable world, demonstrates that it is in the business of investigating the noumena — the thing in itself.
Unhappy Philosophers
Woah, woah, woah hold on a minute there. Abstraction is cool and all, but we are not stepping outside of our experience at all!
All of these objects, even the sub-atomic particles that we cannot see with our senses, are still within our realm of experience; if they weren’t, how would we be able to have experiences of measuring the Higgs boson or the speed of light?
And about waves being non-empirical objects, are they not still things that we know exist, we are of course able to discuss them and attribute properties as they are revealed to us. When we observe a quantum system or a wave it collapses into a particle, so if anything Quantum Mechanics proves that we are only ever able to experience and increase our knowledge of the phenomena and never the noumena.
The real problem is we are observing objects that exist out there, quantifying the outside world as it appears to us, and not discerning the outside world as it exists in itself.
What is really going on?
On the one hand, it seems the philosophers are a bit too extreme to claim that we can never have any knowledge of the noumena, while on the other hand, scientists hubris to claim that their disciplines are purely in the business of uncovering the thing in itself, (ignoring the reality that we experience things first as phenomena and then discern their nature, through our tools of abstraction), is also a tad too reductionistic.
So what is really going on? How do we resolve any conflation of the Two Worlds, where do we draw the line between Our World and The World?
Noumenal Inferences? [NIN]
Where do we draw the borders of our Bound World?
For Kant it was simple, our Bound World is the world that is experientially accessible to us. There is no knowledge beyond possible experience.
The progression of science seems to continually push the border of what is considered to be “possible experience”, our previous exploration of waves in Quantum Mechanics demonstrates that we are able to explore the Quantum world (or at least make inferences), something that is so foreign to us material beings that it is beyond all sensory experience.
The real problem lies in whether we can infer any knowledge of the noumenal world from our phenomenal world.
One could claim that we did exactly this in Part 2, where we explored the cool concept of a Fourth Dimensional Perduring Being [PB]; clearly we can imagine such a being without ever being able to experience it, so, are we not making inferences of such beings and their world that they inhabit?
A simple answer is — no.
- A conception of a fourth dimensional beings existence is not equivalent to experiencing what it is like to be that being.
- We still have no experience of noumena, just making inferences in our world of concepts and creating a reference to the concept of a hypothetical being.
Beyond this example, can we ever infer any knowledge of the noumenal world from our phenomenal world?
Path of Ignorance
On this point I chose the path of ignorance. For now…
That is to say, noumena (things in themselves) are always beyond our experience, so perhaps this category of things is designated to always be outside our reach of understanding. We truly are not talking of anything, as we do not even have reference to the things that inhabit this realm. Therefore there is no positive knowledge of this world, but only a negative understanding that there can be no knowledge. This void is forever closed to us, insofar as we utilise our understanding, intuition and sensibilities.
To truly understand the noumenal world we must understand our Bound World — that we are but mortals built a certain way to experience reality a certain way.
With every new insight, discovery and piece of knowledge gained we expand both the area of our understanding of our phenomenal world and the recognition of our ignorance of the void beyond.
As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance — Neil deGrasse Tyson
Each new piece of understanding grows our phenomenal existence and experience, but has an unknown consequence to the understanding of The World, as to claim that our knowledge has no consequence to the noumenal world, would be an inference of the noumenal world.
Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Basic Summary
There are two worlds, Our World (the world of experience), and The World (the world beyond our experience), we do not have access to the latter. This Noumenal World is outside the Bounds that have been designed for us. No conception, derivation or inference can be made to gain a positive understanding of the noumenon, but only a negative understanding of the term; that it is a world outside are own and as such, beyond or Bound Existence.
Technical Summary
Phenomena is revealed to us by our immediate experience, phenomena only reflects how objects appear to us and not what the objects are in themselves; that is the noumenal realm that we beings have only negative knowledge of.
Onto Part 4 — Where we will question the purpose of any metaphysical explorations (like those done in this series); fundamentally questioning the existence of metaphysics. Is there any room for “metaphysics” in our modern scientific world?
| Originally Published (06/07/22) |
| Next Publication (14/07/22) |
