Quote:
Originally Posted by beppe
Things happen all the time and every where that we do not have the faintest idea of, with the huge space and time scales of universe. That is why I feel that extra terrestrial manifestations, along the schemes of our actual understanding of matter, and our human time scales, are just pure fantasy.
|
Are you not falling into the trap from which Kant tried to save us? We are necessarily empirical realists - we cannot but take the empirical world to be real (ask an empirical idealist not to look before they cross a busy road and you will soon discover how untenable empirical idealism is) - but we are also necessarily transcendental idealists - we take there to be some reality to which we cannot have access, it is transcendent to our experience and, therefore, unknowable. So far, so good. The difficulty comes when we try to "know" the transcended with our empirical realist structures of knowledge. If there are things happening in the universe of which we know nothing then...well, we know nothing of them! If one of the things we don't know is whether the earth has intentions then we don't know it, and by your argument it seems that in principal we cannot know it, which I am happy to accept.
Recognizing the limitations of human knowledge does not take us beyond those limitations, and does not make the limited knowledge we have fantasy - it could only be characterized as fantasy if one had some knowledge of transcendental reality against which to measure the "unreality" of the empirical world - but then of course that "knowledge of transcendental reality" would be the subject of human knowledge and, thereby, would not be transcendent!