> I believe strongly in an external reality. I believe strongly that there
> is knowledge to be obtained. You referred to Kant? Kant believed that
> (crudely) the world is made up of a numina which we can't perceive
> directly at all, and a mind-contribution which largely consists of
> structuring systems such as time, space, dimensionality, and other
> properties. Our experience, said Kant, was a combination, an overlap of
> the two. If you're going to bring Kant into it, then I think he'd agree
> with me and George that you're trying to make your raw data part of the
> numina, and like it or not, there's some structuring in there too.
Yes - but Kant thought, e.g., that not only space but Euclidean
geometry was a necessary aspect of the way we perceive the world. The
ways in which we mentally structure the world have to be subject to
correction, both from advances in pure math (discoveries of consistent
non-Euclidean geometries) & observations of the world (which agree
better with general relativity than with Euclid-Newton).
George Murphy