The A Priori Fallacy of Kant

June 10, 2019 by Juan

Dialectics was the most important part of Socrates’ philosophy, of which the Socratic dialogue is the only part that is understood by academics. Its most important parts are the metaphysical laws that he established, such as:

• the immortality of the soul and its reincarnation
• the pantheist God (Brahma) as the source of all souls
• the superiority of the metaphysical over the physical
• and so on

Nowadays, dialectics seems to be understood to be an exercise in logic, without any reference to metaphysical truths, God, or to finding solutions. The culprit is the 19th century, specifically the German philosophers led by Kant who established a corrupted version of a priori knowledge.

Unlike Socratic knowledge which aimed for a practical or moral purpose, Kant’s knowledge is derived for the sake of exercising the brain. It would be like running around in circles uselessly just for the experience of running.

Destroying Kant’s a priori is essential if we are to destroy its child ideas called:

• Transcendental Analytic
• Transcendental Dialectic
• Transcendental Idealism

These are totally abstract and useless in the real world. These led to Epistemology which is supposed to parse fact from fiction, but is actually equally useless. This is because this was already done by the study of Logic .

Epistemology effectively killed off enlightened philosophy, which explains why junk philosophies sprang up during the 19th century:

• Nazism led to the Holocaust which destroyed many people
• Marxism led to the violent Communist Revolution
• Utilitarianism led to marginal utility, profit maximization, and consumerism which are destroying the planet

With Epistemology (and its religious version Ontology) wiped out from the face of the Earth, we can bring back the original Logic, Moral Philosophy, and Dialectics to release philosophy from its current shackles. Once freed, it can be used to solve the growing number of modern problems such as pandemics, terrorism, inequality, global warming, overpopulation, etc, all created by the evil philosophies of 19th century.

Kant’s Definition

Like most philosophers, Kant divides all knowledge as experiential (a posteriori), and non-experiential (a priori). Traditionally:

• a priori means ‘before experience’
  • Omniscience, prediction, prophecy, and intuition all fall under this, because you know something in advance before it actually happens
• a posteriori means ‘after experience’
  • This is how we normally know things – by experiencing them, either directly (as in seeing things) or indirectly (as in education or someone else telling you what they saw or know)

However, he makes a very subtle but corrupting addition that a priori knowledge is that not experienced by onself, but may be experienced by others.

So Kant’s “a priori knowledge” is really “a-posteriori-knowledge-from-others”.

It would be calling a man who has decided to become a female as a ‘woman’ just because that’s how he wants to be seen. But the word ‘woman’ does not really match the man’s nature and is false or a sophistry.

Fallacies and lies do not support themselves and need to be supported by other fallacies in a chain. Kant supports the a priori fallacy by adding the idea of pure and impure a priori.

This makes something non-empirical as somewhat empirical. Refering to our man-woman example, this is like calling the man as an ‘impure woman’ instead of calling him as a man.

So What’s the Big Deal?

The problem is that it corrupts the definition of knowledge and facts by mixing it, like mixed fruit, with opinions and beliefs:

• knowledge and facts are demonstrative and real
• opinions and beliefs may or may not be real

To solve this non-problem, academics had to create epistemology which is supposed to re-separate fact from opinion. This then adds unnecessary effort when the whole problem could have been avoided by not mixing up fact and opinion in the first place.

Academics and intellectuals would then create courses on useless epistemology to give employment to themselves.

The original tool to split fact from opinion is called dialectics and already was doing its job just fine, simply by accepting arguments that can offer proofs. Nowadays, this is seen in peer-reviews. Notice how Kant even tries to destroy the intellectually-democratic tool of dialectics:

When a person reviews your research paper, it is true that that person is showing the content of his cognitions, and none of yours. And yes, it is true that this allows him or anyone reviewing your work to oppose your own assertions and cognitions. But such steps are essential to creating knowledge, or separating fact from fiction. It is used to make sure that your observations are also observed by other people and are not arbitrary*.

*This explains why Marx and Hitler just pushed for their own arbitrary opinions and sophistically forced them onto people through half-truths and lies

Let’s Get Technical

Normally, what Kant calls impure a priori knowledge is called a posteriori knowledge from memory.

But this memory would destroy his idea of transendence. And so, he disregards memory and instead places the fact or idea within the metaphysical soul itself.

If each soul were a laptop, then Kant’s system would force all laptops to save everything to a cloud server, as the Transcendental Memory, instead of to its own local memory.

In such a case, the laptop is a ‘thin-client’ and is a mere extension of the cloud server and not an independent computer.

• Its new data comes a posteriori from its keyboard and mic
• Its old data comes a priori from the cloud server itself (which matches Kant’s definition).

Instead of the laptop doing the normal logic and processing of its old data and ideas, it would be done by the Transcendent cloud server and merely fed down to the laptop. The powerful server would then have more resources to do its own kind of Transcendent Analysis and Transcendent Logic that is superior to the logic of the tiny laptop.

But this is what Theology and organized religions do.

Kant is like an overeager software developer who invents and documents a lot of useless schemas and counterintuitive definitions to create his own transcendent virtual universe confined only by his fallacy of time. As such, he has no proposition on multiverses, teleportation, nor time travel.

A person who is sensitive to sophistry can see this scientific-sounding dogma being planted by Kant. This is obvious is his arbitrary defintion of goodness in his “categorical imperative”:

Thus, Kant ends up defning good and bad arbitrarily according to his whim, just as the Church defined it as they liked. What theologians call ‘God’, Kant calls Pure Reason. In both, God and Pure Reason needs no experiential proof, and there is no room for debate or dialectics. Both Theology and Pure Reason have no practical use since their meat is in the abstract or theoretical dimension only.

Both theolgians and epistemologists gain revenue by selling books and a fee or tithe from its believers or students as college debt. Theologians were then known as mendicant scholars, just as epistemologists are known as philosophers flipping burgers. Kant’s smart-sounding words draw in unthinking students just as the authoritative theological assertions drew in the weak-minded.

In contrast, in the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, the good is defined as the common interest. This common interest can only be known by getting all the a posteriori perceptions of pleasure and pain of all entities throughout space and time.

To know what is good or evil, the enlightened system gets the opinions of everyone, even criminals and terrorists, so that the flow or the Tao of all feelings and perceptions can be known. A compromise can then be created to bring back harmony as dharma.

Kant bypasses the perceptions of entities and goes directly to Providence, leading to arbitrariness. He would support the willpower of a good country invading a bad country to impose its version of goodness, as proven in his essay called Groundwork and Perpetual Peace.

Together with Nietzsche, it helps explain why Germany kept on invading countries in WWI and WWII under the idea of spreading its Nazi-goodness to inferior races, by sheer willpower.

In terms of practicality, Kantianism’s main rival, Objectivism, is superior simply because its meat is in the physical dimension as material objectives. It’s easy to see objectivist-philosophers being rich economists, bankers, and CEOs. Even Marxist-philosophers (dialectical-materialists) sometimes become national leaders. But who has ever heard of a Kantian president or world leader?

Let’s Fix Kant!

To prove that Kant’s system is useless, let’s translate his definitions into ordinary English:

This converts the confusing word “synthetic a priori judgements” into “judgements made from active thought confined within the mind”, or for brevity, “active-thinking judgements confined-to-the-mind”. This includes any serious thought, problem solving, and even prayer or meditation that is supposed to output an answer.

This simplifies the statement:

Geometry is a science which determines the properties of space synthetically, and yet à priori.

into:

Geometry determines the properties of space through active-thinking, yet confined-to-the-mind.

Much easier, huh?

With geometry, you can think of whatever shapes inside your mind and it would be fine. But you can’t do the same with geology or chemistry. But why did Kant end up having to create so many weird new concepts anyway?

A Natural Consequence of Denying Experience, Feeling, and Reality

According to David Hume, who inspired Kant to write his work, all thinking is based on feeling. If a computer were a thinking being, then its electricity would be its feeling. A computer with no electricity cannot think and is technically dead, but once electricity runs through it, it becomes ‘alive’ and starts to process logic in its virtual memory.

For some reason, Kant denies reality to focus purely on the virtual by cutting off all experience and feeling. This is similar to unplugging a computer to see how a computer would run all by itself. Instead of relying on an external power source or external experiences and feelings, he imbues the mind or computer with that power directly from his own mind, by assigning new qualities and dimensions to its processes:

It’s similar to Islam banning interest on loans, which causes it to be transferred as rent as a workaround or roundabout solution, and then creating processes to regulate that, as a bloated complex idea called Shariah banking.

Kant bans reality and so he has to recreate everything himself. This is why Kant must have the highest regard for his own mind (since it’s the one that powers everything in his Kant-only-reality):

Probably a German Thing

Instead of basing the judgement on strong or weak feelings or sensations and their location or distance from the self, Kant adds strength or weakness and distance on the thinking action itself. This is why he has to painstakingly specify whether each thought process was:

• high energy (active thinking)
• low energy (passive thinking)
• was confined (a priori)
• not confined (a posteriori)

Mechanically, it would be like totally denying the relation of gasoline consumption to engine power, or electrical consumption to CPU speed with the belief that the engine power and cpu speed can run by themselves, or that the mind exists for or by itself (as “I think”). These then leads to obvious fallacies in his explanation of the nature of time, existence, and, more importantly, of morals.

Hegel and Marx as similarly-complicated-writers who write so much but have relatively little meat or valuable thought. All of this makes me pity philosophy students who try to understand Kant.

The Useless Theory of General Relativity

The most disastrous product of this strange German mentality is Albert Einstein who used Kant-style thinking to create the Theory of Relativity, which is totally arbitrary.

Like Kant, Einstein used his own mind to assign reality to spacetime by turning it into a fabric that dictates how the universe moves, expands, is warped, etc. This then allows physicists to create their own spacetimes according to their own imagination:

• Walker created a universe with Robertson-Walker spacetime
• De Sitter created a De Sitter spacetime
• Godel created a Godel universe
• Taub led to a universe with Taub-NUT spacetime
• Pensrose created a cyclical universe as Conformal Cyclic Cosmology

Useless Kant, Useless Einstein, Useless Physics

Some of those physicists then get Nobel prizes for theories that have no reality. This is similar to:

• academics who peddle useless courses or degrees that students pay for with real money
• crypto startups which peddle gradiose ideas powered by useless cryptocurrency or NFTs

This useless Einsteinian physics is totally opposite of ancient physics (from the ancient Greeks to Descartes) which already concluded that spacetime is an illusion and has no reality.

Newton’s physics created so many technologies that we still use today. But Einstein physics only claims global positioning satellites (GPS) as its product. Einstein’s supporters ignore the fact that engineers would have perceived the time-differences in their satellites and made the adjustments themselves without needing the idea of a spacetime fabric*.

*Instead of a fabric, we assign the cause of time dilation to the aether, as explained by the ancients.

We pity the physicists wasting their time trying to solve General Relativity and finding out the structure of the universe all from the sophistical Theory of Relativity, just it is sad to see:

• students spending real money studying Epistemology instead of something useful like data science or programming.
• people ‘investing’ in cryptocurrencies or NFTs instead of investing in real businesses

In a free society, it is alright to allow sophistical theories. But it is totally wrong to decree that such wrong theories are correct, and that the wrong way is the right way. Doing so would be like to guiding people onto a cliff, as is happening to the current world which has no solution to global warming, overpopulation, stagflation, war, or mass extinction.