A Kantian Approach to the Fermi Paradox
Applied Philosophy
Let’s talk about a proficuous approach to the Fermi paradox which I am not aware has been taken into account by scholars trying to solve it yet. I am referring to a solution that necessarily follows, a fortiori, from Immanuel Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’, first part of his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’.
Here it is: We only able to search for aliens anywhere by gathering information with our sense-perceptive apparatus enhanced or not by any technological tools, i.e., directly or indirectly.
Every stimuli coming from the outside reaches our minds only after being caught by any of our senses (sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing). This process happens in such a way that before arriving at consciousness, any and all information gets a previous, a priori stamp of space and time, through an imprinting that is an essential trait of our ‘sensible intuition’.
There is no reason to assume that any alien, a hypothetical extra-terrestrial being eventually generated by some type of biological (or of another nature) evolution somewhere in the Universe/Multiverse, should also be endowed with similar senses molded so as to catch Time and Space the same way as our consciousness does.
There is no conceivable rationale to imagine that the ability to capture data from the outside by an alien might be even compatible with ours, an obvious condition for any contact with human minds.
NOTHING allows us to feed the wishful thinking that there exist extra-terrestrial beings whose sense-perception could be space-timely conditioned so much as ours.
On the other hand, we must stress that this is not a question of denying reality to the outside world, nor of saying that Time and Space are concepts without physical counterparts. There is no ontological idealism in Kant, that is, he does not claim that the essence of the existing world is ideas, as Plato does. Time and Space are human instruments for capturing the world, behind which an indeterminate existence of something unknowable, inaccessible to our consciousness without their a priori mediation, is assumed.
Originally published at https://reality-to-who.blogspot.com.
