the problem of existence
for human beings, one of the basic problems is this question of
experience…how do we judge/understand experience…
for example, I see a black and white box…this box is about waist high…
it has a flat top with 4 metal round things on it…above
the 4 metal round objects in a L shape is a black surface with knobs that
turn…this black and white box seems to get very hot if I turn one of the knobs…
so, what is this? A stove… but how are we to experience this stove?
according to some thinkers, we have an image of the stove already…
but the reality is, we learn what a stove is from experience…
someone, most likely our mother, has told us to stay away from the stove
because it is hot… and not being sure what hot is, we go ahead and touch it…
and we find out what hot is…the stove is just one device and we soon learn
that by putting food into the stove, we get cooked food out of the stove…
we see this just by being in the kitchen and seeing the results and then
if lucky, eating the results…soon we hear of a word, appliance…
ummmmm, we are not really sure what an appliance is… but our dear
mother explains that an appliance is a stove, an appliance is also a dishwasher,
a fridge, a washer and dryer… we soon understand that there is a series of
machines called appliances… we have a category of appliances…
Now philosophers would have you believe that somehow we have mental
categories that allow us to place the stove into context… but context means experience…
and we don’t envision the stove from categories, we learn about the stove from
experience…
Philosophers like Kant seem to forget that we have a lifetime of experiences
that we use to understand our world……. we know time and space, not because
of some mental categories but because we have existed within time and space
all our lives… we have experienced time and space, every single second of our life…
how do we learn space? studies have shown that babies that miss the crawling
stage of childhood have more trouble with spatial understanding… we learn
space by experiencing space with such events like crawling…and reaching out to
grab things… simple trail and error leads us to our understanding of space…
if we fall down as a child and children fall down all the time, it is because
they haven’t gotten used to space yet………
I see a book, Kant’s critique of Pure reason on the table, I reach over and
grab it…because of the many years of existing within space, it is an easy
task…I am able to grab it on the very first try…my body and spatial sense
is up to the task of grabbing the book because I have done so, literally a million
times…there is no sense of a mental operation involved in the physical act
of grabbing the book… now a mental sense was involved in my thinking
about grabbing the book… but not in the actual grabbing the book
is space a mental construct? once spaced is experienced and understood
as experience, then space can be a mental construct, but before it
is a mental construct, it is first experienced…now, we can experienced
space, but it can’t be explained to us…describe space……
you would be hard pressed to be able to describe space…
experiences are often explained to us… as in the stove…
mom says the stove is hot, but we don’t know what hot means
or what is the purpose of the stove is… and by experience, we begin
to understand what hot is or what the stove is for…
but you can’t do that with space or time…
space/time must be experienced to be understood…
you can’t explain it…you must experienced it
and we do, all of our lives…every single second of our life
is spent in space/time…
so is space/time a mental construct? as it cannot be explained or understood
outside of experience, I would say no…it seems to be something experienced
but not a mental construct………it has a reality to it that we can experienced
now is space/time one of Kant’s “thing in itself”? something that is a concept
that are objects as they are independent of observation…but space/time is
is really only understood by us as experiences… they might be independent of
observation but how would you go about showing this? you can only explain
space/time by using experiences as a means of understanding space/time…
so as an thought experiment, try to explain space/time without any reference
to experience………… I don’t think it can be done…so is space/time independent
of observation? it doesn’t look like it…
Kropotkin