Predictive History - The Story of "Civilization", "Secret History", "Game Theory" and more - Civilization #55 - Kant, Hegel, and the Theory of Everything

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Civilization #55 - Kant, Hegel, and the Theory of Everything

Okay, so today we will do Emmanuel Kant and Fetri Kegel. So my main argument is that Kant is really ticking the main thesis of Dante, which is the imagination is the animating force of the universe, and love is the unifying force of the universe. And what he will do is he will use his epistemology, Episopatology just means theory of knowledge. How do we know what we know? And then he will do three things.

He will clarify it. So if you read Dante, it's not very explicit what he's saying. You have to interpret him properly. What Kant will do is make Dante explicit to the world. Then he will rationalize it. Rationalize it just means that he will remove divinity. He will remove theology from it and create a system of logic, okay? And so then he will systemize it.

All right, so this is the mission of Kant to take the secret of the universe as first presented in Dante and then create a system of logic that then is able to incorporate itself into science and history and philosophy in the world that we know. All right, so together, Dante and Kant really did create the world that we live in today. All right, so let's first talk about the background. Like why is Kant engaged in this project? So for most of Western history, there have been two major philosophers.

They are Plato and Aristotle. And up until the point, and up until Kant, you could divide all philosophy into these two major camps. Plato believes that God is called the form of the good. Form of the good. So the form of the good, it is this perfect, immaculate, eternal force that emits, emanates, breathes, things. And then he creates something called the ideals.

And these are the perfect conceptions of beauty, reason, justice. And then these ideals. these ideals give rise to the forms. And these are the perfect encapsulation of these ideals. So think of the perfect horse, or the perfect chair, or the perfect square. We live, this is the real world, okay? This is what is true and real. We live in the shadow world.

So remember back to the allegory of the cave. So everything in the shadow world is only a imitation of the forms and so in this conception what is good is to move towards the form of the good to return to the form of the good and what is evil is to move away from the form of the good okay that's why for Plato art poetry is evil because you're imitating imitation and what and why for Plato mathematics and philosophy are inherently good because it is teaching you how to return to the form of the good and Plato's important because what happens is that Plato's ideas become the basis

for heaven and earth right and so this is the basis for Christianity remember in the Catholic Church doctrine your life our life on this planet doesn't really matter. What matters is our return to heaven to be with God. And we say about Plato that he's a dualist. So there are three conceptions of the universe. There is a materialistic worldview, which is what Aristotle is. Materialistic just says that only things that you can see and touch matter. Idealistic is what Hegel represent, which is that only ideas matter. And then Plato believes that both matter and ideas do matter, okay?

So he's a dualist, whereas Aristotle is a materialist. So that's Plato. Pretty clear, right? Good. All right, now let's move on to Aristotle. For Aristotle, his god is called a prime mover. The prime mover is the first thing that moves. Because when the first thing moves, it causes things to move as well.

There's cause and effect. So in this world, what matters is movement. everything's moving towards what towards what towards a call telos which is what purposes it's it's a Greek word for purpose so for example as a teacher my telos is to teach as well as I can and my mission in life is to constantly learn to improve and to practice so that my teacher becomes better and better that's the idea of telos and we can understand for observation and experience what each thing's telos is.

And then you can start to categorize things, okay? And Aristotle, his ideas, of course, become the basis for science. And as I mentioned, Aristotle has a materialistic worldview as opposed to Plato's dualistic worldview. Aristotle doesn't really care about things outside the material world. He's only concerned about the here and now. So these are the two major schools of thought during integrity. Now, as I mentioned previously in class, as a Catholic Church comes into power and it has a monopoly of power,

it suppresses these philosophical inquiries. But after the Renaissance, these schools of thought, Plato and Aristotle, they will reemerge. All right, so they will reemerge into three major schools of thought. So taking up Plato's perspective will be a people called the rationalist. So the three most famous rationalists are René Descartes, Lemnick's, and Spinoza. But they are basically adopting Plato's worldview, which is there is a god and through mathematics, through logic, we can from first principles reason out the mind of God.

So the project of rationalism is towards obniscience. And again, this is best represented by Descartes. And this becomes, of course, the basis for the enlightenment. So that's the first major school of thought, the rationales. They're also called the Continental. the continental philosophy, because it's really based on the continent of Europe. Opposing the rationalists are the empiricists, okay? And these are people who are adopting the Aristotle worldview.

The imperious is the most famous is John Locke. And what John Locke believes is our minds are born tabula rasa, which just means blank slate. meaning there's nothing in our minds. So the only way that we can acquire knowledge, acquire wisdom, is through experience. Experience and something called induction. So in logic, there are two methods. The first is deduction, where you take the generalize to the specific,

and then induction is to take the specific, and then you generalize it into the abstract. So for example, if I see five boys wearing white shirts, then I can generalize and say that all boys wear white shirts. But if the general principle is all boys wear white shirt, then in the reduction, I can say, well, you're a boy, therefore you wear a white shirt. So that's the idea of empiricism. And of course, this becomes a basis for what we call the scientific method.

Now, there's another school of philosophy called skepticism, and this was pioneered mainly by a man named David Hume. And so what David Hume's going to do is he's going to look at this idea of induction and argue, no, you can't do that. You cannot generalize things. Just because you meet one million swan that are white does not mean that all swan are white. It is entirely possible that there's a black swan out there. Okay, so what David Hume does is he negates induction. And what he argues is, basically, our understanding of the world is based primarily on custom.

For him, custom just means consensus. We agree this is right, therefore it is right. There's no inherent truth to this thing, all right? So David Hume is very controversial because he argues that knowledge, true knowledge, is just impossible. which means that the entire project of philosophy is pointless. Okay, you know what you know through experience and for custom.

You cannot abstract things, you cannot reason out things beyond that, and therefore, what's the point of philosophy? All right, so that's David Hume. Now, what's going to happen is Emmanuel Kahn is going to read David Hume and be so agonized over his conclusions that he writes him and call the critique of pure reason. And this is considered the greatest treatise of philosophy ever in human history. It's extremely dense, extremely complicated.

And quite honestly, I have not been able to complete it. I've tried my best, but it is way too difficult for me. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to oversimplify his argument in order to make it clear for us. He's so fundamental to development of human civilization that we need to study him, but I'm warning you that I am not in any way an expert on Kant. But I hope that today's class will become a basis for your further study and inquiry into Kant and philosophy.

All right. So in this critique of pure reason, what Kant is going to do is he's going to show that all three schools of thought, rationalism, imperisholism, imperatives. and skepticism are all in their own way problematic and in doing so he's going to instruct a new theory of everything a new theory of the world that will become the cornerstone for neuroscience physics and artificial intelligence okay so his contribution to human civilization cannot be understated all right so for Kant this rational school is problematic because he believes that obniscience

is just not possible. It is impossible for us to ever achieve the mind of God. There are limitations to the pursuit of knowledge. There are limitations for capacity to reason. So that's the first argument. Second argument is the empiricist argument of tabular rasa cannot possibly be true. He's going to show us through a lot of empirical prove that it's not possible for minds to be blank slates. We need to have certain mechanisms of thought already in place.

for us to engage with the world, okay? So that's the problem with the empiricists. His problem with Hume is he believes that there's knowledge that is real and inherent and true. And so knowledge can be pursued. Philosophy is important. In fact, for Khan, philosophy is the most important pursuit in human history, okay?

So by responding to all three of these major schools, Con, in his critique of pure reason, he's going to create a radical new theory of the world, okay? His own unique epistemology based on the thinking of Dante. All right, so let's go into his argument very quickly. And again, this is an oversimplification. All right, so we are all endowed with the capacity to reason. We all have minds and our minds engage reality.

What Kant says is this. The moment that we engage in reality, we create a new universe called parents. So let me first go over the terminology. It's very important you understand terminology in order to understand Kant. So for Kant, reality are things in themselves. And here he uses the Greek nomina, things in themselves. This is the world that is true and real. And then the word of appearance are what it call things for us, things that we see, but which

may not be true and he uses the Greek word phenomena okay and what he's arguing is within us there is a mechanism in our minds that is always perceiving reality in a way that allows us to understand interpret and manipulate it okay okay so this is his thesis okay so let me first explain how he got to this thesis. So what Kant does is this. He reasons out, he tries to reason out what is possible in Espermology, okay, in philosophy. And so what he does is he creates categories. So there are four major categories that we need to know. Okay, and again, this is a bit technical and complicated, but we need to do this in order

to further understand Kant. So what Kant says is, There are two types of knowledge. There's a priori, and there's a prostereory. Apiorari is Latin for things that come before. A prosteory is Latin for things that come after. So a priori means knowledge that is independent of experience. Things that are universal and necessary. Things that are true in themselves.

And A pastor of course are things that use. learn after you experience it. He also has two more categories of logic. The first is called the analytical. The analytical and then the second is called a synthetic. Analytical just means things that are true in themselves. So they are true by definition. So let's say, for example, a square has four sides.

A triangle has three sides. That's an analytical statement because it's true in it. I can also say that A is A. I can also say that Mary is a woman, okay? These are all just identity statements, things that are true in themselves. Synthetics, and so synthetic statements are statements that are not analytical, meaning that you need to build these statements based on other information, and they can be false. So just think of synthetic as non-analytical. So what kind does then it says,

well then if there are two by two, there's four possibilities, okay? And if you think about what apore analytical is, that's just what logic is, right? This is just what's logical. Apostero-stery, synthetic, is this what we call empirical. This is the John Locke project, imperacism.

Things that you know and learn after you experience it. Analical aporestory is just, just doesn't really matter, right? Because a square is four sides. It doesn't matter if you see a square of four sides, it doesn't really change anything. The main conflict between David Hume and Immanuel Kahn is whether or not a priori synthetic knowledge exists.

For David Hume, he says this in his writings, it is impossible for a prior to a synthetic knowledge to exist. But what Emmanuel Kott will show us is it does exist. And he calls it transcendental idealism, Transcendental Idealism. And he's going to spend his entire book, A Critic of Pure Reason, about a thousand pages, explaining why this must be true.

Why is it that you must have a priority synthetic knowledge in your brain in order to understand the world? All right? So again, this is his main argument. And what it will show us is this. If you study mathematics, if you look at philosophy, if you look at classical physics, your toning in physics, and you break things down

to the most fundamental level, what you will discover is we have to bring into an assumptions into this field of knowledge for it to exist, okay? And these two very basic things that we bring in are called space and time, space and time. Space, it just means sensation, and time is sequence. Okay, say time is just an order of things.

One, two, three, four, five. Space is this or inaction with the world around us. Unless we have these two basic concepts, no knowledge is possible, space and time. So this is really important, and this is a hard concept to understand. What Khan is saying is that space and time do not exist in reality.

Space and time is a projection of our minds in order to, we can subsidize reality in a way that allows us to understand it and manipulate, okay? Space and time. All right. In other words, a very simple way to understand this is our minds turn the world into a story. Why?

Because if you have space and time, you have causality, cause and effect. Okay? Time movement, right? So now you have causality, cause a story. So what kind is saying, is we are just imagining reality into a story and that allows us to understand it. All right.

So what Kant's going to do after he proves that space and time must exist a priority is he's not going to explain how we take reality and we turn it into a parent's. Okay. And what he's going to show us is that our mind has a prime, process of doing this. And this process is three stages. There's apprehension, there's reproduction, and then there's recognition. So apprehension is just you're engaging the things in themselves and through space-time, okay? By inputting space-time into the things in themselves, you're able to reproduce it in your brain. You're able to create an image of it in your brain. And then what you're going to do in order to understand it is to think filter space time using something he calls categories.

Okay? Categories, just think of it as our algorithm. A better word is heuristic, okay? Heuristic. Computers you use algorithms, we use heuristics. And there are 12 different categories, but there are four major categories. The first is quantity. How much of a thing it is. quality what are the properties of this thing relation is this thing thing logical or empirical and then modality which is what is this strength of the relation of this thing okay okay I know this is complicated but later on we

will use some examples from real life to better understand how this works all right so and you don't really need to remember the categories just remember that like what kind of saying is in here Here it in our mind is a heuristic, an algorithm that allows us to turn information into knowledge. And when we do this, what happens is we create a schema, a representation of the world, which allows for understanding the world. So, for example, we see a lot of triangles, but we don't actually have an image of a triangle in our head. We only have a concept of a triangle in our heads, okay?

And this is true for a lot of things. And then the schema then returns to the categories, which allows us to filter the world even more. So it is a feedback loop. So does this all make sense? This is Kant's perception of the world. And again, if you want to know the proof, if you want to know his logic, then you have to read the book for yourself, which will take you about 10 years. All right.

All right, so all this is saying is this is called reaffirming the Dante believed that the imagination is the animating force of the world. So about us, reality cannot be alive. It is our imagination that makes reality alive to us. Now this is from the critique of pure reason. He also wrote a book called the Critic of Practical Reason. where he presents like a theory of morality. All right, so let's go over it. So for Kant, the highest ideal immorality

is something called the categorical imperative. And this is separate and distinct from something called the hypothetical imperative. The hypothetical imperative is, okay, if you are a child in a school, how should you behave? This is specific, this is circumstantial. The categorical is the absolute.

This is how you should always behave. And for Kant, there are three major principles that underlie all morality, okay? So let's go over them one by one. The first is the idea of universal law. So Kant says, imagine that each of your action will be universalized, will be generalized, so that everyone will behave the way you do.

So for example, you can choose to steal, but imagine everyone's stealing. Well, what kind of world would that be? You certainly would not want to live in that world, right? So behave as though everyone is watching you, and everyone's going to do what you're going to do. Be the best possible example to everyone. All right, so that's the first principle.

Second principle is see humans, each as an end onto itself and not as a means. Do not manipulate people, do not use people. Treat people with respect. Okay. And the third, It's the idea of autonomous will, which means that everything you do is something that you reason out yourself. You're not coerced into it.

You're not manipulating into doing it. You're not tricked into it. It's something that you sitting by yourself in a room, you're able to reason it out independently. So this is the idea of the categorical imperative, which Kant believes is what we should all strive to. and what we're all capable of doing because we're capable of reason. We're capable of imagination. We're capable of imagining a moral world. And this is important because this becomes a basis for what we have today, the United Nations,

human rights in national law, okay? That's how influential Khan has been in development of human civilization. All right. So how can we understand the categorical imperative? Well, let's go back to Jean-Henheim. Jacques Rousseau. Remember, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he proposed the idea of the general will. The general will is not democracy. Democracy is simply, you get everyone to vote, okay? So in this room, I ask everyone, what should we have for lunch?

And then someone proposes, let's have ice cream. And everyone raises his hand and says, yeah, let's have ice cream, okay? That's democracy. But for John Dr. Rousseau, what he argues is the general will is the best interest of people that you can derive from just by reaching out yourself okay so if you were also down by yourself and ask what you're at for lunch it wouldn't be ice cream because ice cream makes you fat it's too much sugar it's bad for you okay you would probably think we should have salad so the general will represents the best interest of everyone involved okay so if i would ask you

what should we have for lunch everyone would say if we're following the general will a salad or maybe a chicken breast. So in other words, the categor imperative, it is just the individualized general will. It's a general will that you internalize to yourself and you behave as though you are the general will. So that's a way of understanding the categorical imperative. Now there's another way of understanding the categorical imperative

and just using Dante. So remember, we read the Divine Comedy, and Dante's categorical imperative is very simple. Love someone. Doesn't matter who, it could be your wife, it could be your mother, or it could be your child, it could be your best friend. But love that person. And when you love that person, then all three things are true. It means you are now going to be your best.

It means you are treating this person with respect. It means that you are choosing to love this person, okay? So love is the unifying force of the universe. All right, so that's what Dante is really saying. And so in other words, Kant, he is just systemizing what Dante said in divine comedy, all right? Does that make sense? All right, so for us to better understand Kant's argument,

I want to give you three examples. to better understand what Kant is saying. The first example is, imagine you are writing a diary. I want you to write a diary for a whole year. So every day you're writing what happened today. So you have 365 separate entries. Okay? So every day at night, at 9 p.m., you're just reflecting on what happened today.

And then at the end of the year, what I want you to do is write one long diary entry. Okay? Now, if you think about it, in theory, these separate entries should add up to equal this one long entry, right? But what you finally actually do this experiment is this long entry that you wrote almost has no relation at all with these 365 separate entries.

Does that make sense? Right? Okay? So, in other words, what we're doing is constantly every day we are reimagining the world in a new way and we're building on top of this okay so that's the first experiment another saying this is all we're doing is we're taking discrete data points which is what 365 thyroid entries is doing and then combine them into one complete story all right

here's another experiment you can do memory so organized hundred classmates and go to a park together and spend the whole day in a park and organize the day so that everyone's doing the same thing all right everyone's doing the same thing and then Next day asked all hundred students to write down his experience all of that one day and I guarantee you Every person will be the will be different each person's experience will be unique on to himself Thus confirming affirming what Kant said. Okay, the imagination is the animating force of the universe right so let's do one more experiment and this is a thought experiment it's something you can't do but let's just imagine it imagine you end up on a island okay and this island is very fertile very opulent lots of fruits lots of

fish you don't have to worry about starving but one day you go to sleep and then your mind is wiped clean it becomes a tabular rasa as proposed by John Locke okay so you're you have no more memory you can't speak you've lost the capacity of language you've lost capacity to reason you don't know where you are you don't know who you are okay you get up and now the question then is what will happen to you well if you're John Locke what's gonna happen to you is you're gonna start to death because you don't know what to eat okay you take a stone and you put in your mouth you take a leave you put them up you don't

know what to eat you've lost all knowledge okay but according to Kant what cotton would say is okay sure you've lost our knowledge but because you have a priori synthetic knowledge because you manipulate reality around you because your mind is very good at filtering information categorizing information it'll take you a very short amount of time to figure out what is edible okay you know stones wood that's a category of stuff you cannot eat but then you know fruits water fish is another category of things you can need.

All right, so, and I think just through pure intuition, we can figure out, you know what, Kant makes more intuitive sense than John Locke. Okay? So, doesn't make sense. So again, first experiment you can do, and you will discover that if you do one long entry, it will not correlate to these separate entries, okay?

The memory experiment you can also do, you can also do. The thought experiment you can't really do, but you can reason it out and discover it to be true. All right, so that is Cod, a very short, simple introduction to Cod. Any questions before I move on to Hegel? Yeah, that's a great question.

Yeah. Okay, so two great questions, okay? The first question is, how did Cod perceive himself? The second great question is, how does science perceive him today? So, simple answer is, Cot saw himself, as a revolutionary thinker.

He saw himself as Copernicus. He's going to finally change the way that we perceive the universe. In fact, he calls it, what his critical period, a Copernican revolution. I'll discuss this later on, okay? How Khan actually perceived himself.

Second is, Kant's ideas, I'll show you later on, is really the basis for modernist science. Einstein was heavily influenced by Kant. Einstein read Kant when he was and because of Kant's theories of space time and through a per centrican knowledge that gives him the theory of relativity Okay, and if you study quantum mechanics You will discover a lot of ideas were heavily influenced by Kant so his influence on science is incredible

It's and and I'll discuss this moving on okay All right, good, so now let's move on to Hegel All right, so with Kant his philosophy is remember Remember, we interact with the nomana, which gives us the phenomena, the things that we can see, their parents. There are three major issues that are unresolved in Kant. Kahn acknowledges these issues, and it doesn't really provide a solution, okay? These three issues are this.

The first issue, of course, is what is the nomina? What are the things in themselves? And Kahn says, we can never know. Okay, that's the first major issue. Second issue is, okay, sorry, but if our brains are capable of reason through a priori synthetic knowledge, where does not come from? What's a source for our mind? And the third problem is uniformity. If it is true that we are in fact always projecting onto Nomana, to create phenomenon, how do we know that we're all doing it the same way?

How do we know that culturally, all cultures are doing the same way? Are you saying that the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Greeks, they all perceive the world in the same way? So these are the three major unresolved issues in Kant. Nomina, what is it? In Kant says, we can never know, right? Because we cannot imagine ourselves outside of space and time. What is the source for our minds? And Kant says, we don't know.

It's just there. And the third is uniformity. How do we know what we see is consistent with each other? And Khan says, we don't know, but we have to believe it. Okay, otherwise the world doesn't make any sense. is it possible that without uniformity you can have mathematics and science okay but it doesn't but again the problem of Kant is this is not satisfying right so Hagell is going to come along and he's going to provide a fear of everything he's

going to resolve these three issues for Kant and create an entire system of thought that encompasses everything okay so so let's now go on the Hagle so Hagle's major um insight is what if as we're perceiving the nomana the nomana is projecting back onto us so it becomes a source for our ability to perceive the nomana okay so in other words the nomana is really a source which creates the uniformity all right and so what is this nomana and the word that Hegel uses is geist the geist okay and this is a word that we translate into mind or spirit okay so hego's major work is

called the the phenomenology of the mind which can also be translated into the the homology of the spirit okay so translators argue about what the translation is the problem is mind and spirit don't really explain that much okay so imagine Geis as and this is a bad metaphor okay but imagine Geis as the internet and we are individual computers. We're always interacting with this internet. So that would give you a basic framework to understand what Geis is.

It is a collective consciousness almost. But that's not accurate, okay? To fully understand what Geist is, we need to go into the etymology of the word. What words were influenced English by Geist? And there are three words that were influenced by Geist. The first word is ghost. ghost. So, ghost is the idea that the geis is coexisting with us, right? The geis is not separate

from us, it is coexisting with us. It's here and now. Second word is geyser. Geyser, an expansion are spawning up, okay? So the geist is always growing. It wants to grow and expand. The third English word that comes from Geis is, the gist of an argument, the essence of our argument. So what Hegel is saying is, the geis is the essence of reality. The geist comes first. It's a source for who we are.

So again, to understand Geis, think of it as an internet, but the internet that is coexisting with us, that is always expanding forward. and which is the essence of all life itself. That's why we say that Hegel is an idealist, right? He doesn't care about the material world, he doesn't think it really matters. What matters to him is the geist itself, the ideas,

because that's what drives human history. All right. Okay, so let's talk about how he perceives the geyser. How does the geys actually move? And for him, what matters are not the things. What matters is not the ideas. What matters is the movement of the geyser. things and so for Hegel the main thing that moves is the dialectic okay and and

this is famous because obviously from the dialect we have the thesis which moves into antithesis which moves into the synthesis and this is the movement of human history and the way to understand this is we all seek self-knowledge But the way to seek some knowledge is by asking who we are not, which creates the antithesis. And then when we have the idea of who we are not, this comes to a conflict with who we are, which then creates new knowledge. Okay? All right.

So in order to understand this idea, let's do a thought experiment. Hey, the thought experiment is this. Okay, let's go back to the island, and there's a hundred of us, okay? And we all sleep in different corners of the island. And again, during the night, when we sleep, our minds are wiped clean. We're all now Tabla Raso. We have no more memory, okay?

We wake up and forget that there's other people there. We don't even know who we are. When we wake up, what we see is the universe, the space and time, and we think that we are the universe, that we are space and time. And there is a reconciliation between us, and the world, okay, and we're really happy. But as we move along on the beach, we see someone else.

And this other person threatens us because it's like us, but it's not like us. And now this person has destroyed my conception of the universe, which is like, I am the universe, or I am God. And this creates conflict, okay? We fight. We might actually physically fight. We might argue. But over time, we create a synthesis, which is like, okay, the two of us are now the universe. Problem is we walk along and we meet another person, another person, okay?

So this is a constant process. But over time, even though there's conflict, even though it's violence, it's all a natural part of enlightenment. It's all part of the process of reconciliation where eventually all 100 of us, we rediscover who we are through conflict and differentiation and we form a collective consciousness. we become what Hageo says is the absolute spirit. Absolute spirit. And that is the progress and the purpose of our lives. So let me frame it in a different way. So what Hagell is saying, okay?

And again, these are not his words. These are my words. So be careful. But I think this is the best way to explain what he's really saying about the movement of history. has two forms God is the geist okay but God is also the universe does that make sense okay so why would God do this why would God be both the universe and be the geist because the because God is trying to create reconciliation between

itself and all the things in the universe it's trying to come to peace a reconciliation an awareness between itself and us. Okay? So the geist through the dialect, it is growing and growing until it becomes the universe itself, and that is the end of history. All right, and this is what we call

a theological movement of history, where things are moving towards their purpose. So what Hegel says is, the world is becoming. Okay? Do not think of the world as being, but becoming. as constantly in a process of transformation of growth of expansion why because it once become being the being is when we are completely reconciled to God all right that's the end of the world that's the end of history the the

rick the reconciliation between us and God when we become when we become God and God become us there's no more differentiation there's no more conflict we are moving towards this because the world is theological. Every single thing that we do is moving towards the one reunion with God. The Geist, so to prove this, Hegel discusses the Geis. How do we know the Geis? Well, in culture, we know the guys through art, philosophy, and religion. And when you study these three things, historically, what you will discover is they're all progressing.

Okay. So in terms of art, right now we are on the Romantic period, which is the highest period of art, because it is synthesizing all previous periods of art. Religion, the highest religion is Christianity, because it is the beginning of reconciliation between us and God. Jesus was the great democratic force. allow us to now all in our own way access God before God was captured and imprisoned by the priest and Jesus freed God from the priest and now and so Christianity is the highest religion and of course philosophy what's the highest philosophy hey go right

because this theory of the guise is the end point of all knowledge from the guise we can now finally reconcile we can move towards reconciliation okay and so from This, there are some major influences, okay? So let's talk about the three major influences, legacies of Hegel. By far the most influential, of course, is the creation of Marxism. Because what Karl Marx will do is he will take

this theory of Hegel, the movement of history, the dialectic, and he will create something called dialect materialism. He will invert Hegel, because Hegel says, it's only ideas that matter. And what Marx will say is that, nope, only material things matter. And he will invert

Hegel, but he will also adopt a lot of Hegelian thinking. So that dialect because a very important part of Marxist ideology, which we will study next class. So that's the first major influence. Second major influence is in the idea of God is dead. So it was that Nietzsche, actually, who introduced this term. It was Hegel. And by God is dead, what Hegel is saying is,

was saying is we need to change our conception of God okay before we thought God was aloof distant and absolute and now I'm presenting you a more advanced version of God which is a God that is moving in us towards itself okay so God is of course the third major influence which we will discuss later on is the idea of the nation state because this fear of guise becomes part of the nation state and so now because of Hegel we can believe that the nation state can have a soul Okay, and this will lead to a lot of problems which include imperialism World War I and other really fun things okay, but we cannot understate the influence of

Hagell all right, so That's Hague, all right, so Any questions before I move on to the legacy of Kant and Hague? Was this clear? What was this clear? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good, good, good. Yep, yep.

And I'm not sure about Hegel. Right. It seems a little bit more of a . Yeah, so that's a great point. Yeah, I mean, how, I mean like, I mean, Kant is very logical. Hegel is very abstract. So if you read the creating of pure reason,

if you spend enough time on it, you will get through it. Okay, you will be able to master. Whereas if you try to read Hegel, especially the phonology of spirit, it's just impossible. It's like everyone who reads it will have a different interpretation. And the reason why is what Hegel is trying to do, he's just synthesize all human knowledge. He's trying to take everything that's happened, everything that we know, and he's trying to synthesize it into a system, which Kant just basically said we can't really do. Okay, so I mean, I'm not expert on Hegel,

and I don't want to be an expert on Hegel actually, because I think I will go crazy if I read too much Hegel. So, but I do know there's a lot of controversy around Hegel. He's actually gaining, he's actually regaining popularity in our age because of the idea of the geist, right? Because we live in a two-metallistic world. But yeah, so, so, so, so, so, Sorry, but I'm rambling on.

Okay, all right, let's move on to the legacy, because the legacy will give us further insight into Conan Hagell, as well as help us better understand the world, okay? So, Emmanuel Codd. So remember, Emmanuel Cod, for him, he was really aware of what it was doing. And his argument was that the critical peer reason,

it marks a radical new stage in human history. It is like Copernicus. Remember Copernicus, his major contribution was, before we thought we were at the center of the universe, right? And then Copernicus banished us to the margins of the universe. So it's a new way of perceiving the world. And so, Cod's trying to do the same thing, okay?

So pre-Cod, the philosophers that there was an objective reality and that we were just observers of this objective reality, but through a logic and experience, we could ultimately access this objective reality, And Kahn says, no, no, no. The world is entirely subjective. We project our imagination, our ideas, on to the universe.

We are active participants in the world. And this will give rise to the idea of romanticism, okay? Which is that the human imagination is the highest ideal. It is, in many ways, participates in God itself. So that is Kahn's major revolution. This is Frederick Hegel, and let's remind ourselves the difference between Kant and Hegel. So what Kant would say is there are limits to reason. We can never know the mind of God.

And what Hegel says is, no, the mind of God is a dialectic, okay? And therefore, we can know the mind of God. All right. Kant will say, the world is what we will it to be, meaning we have free will. And then Hegel will say, we are moving towards the end of history. which we were progressing, but this means we have no free will. Everything has been planned from the beginning. All these conflicts are part of a process of eventual enlightenment.

And Khan will say, we must believe in God for morality to exist. This is a really important point. So, Con is extremely logical. He's very honest. And he says, there's nothing I can do to prove God exists. But we must believe God to exist. Otherwise, we have no morality in this world. He also says, we must believe free will exist.

even though there's no logical proof of free will, otherwise, what's the point of existence? Hagell says, God is dead. I've created a new god and is a theological god that is forcing us towards him. So these are the three major differences between Kant and Hegel. All right, so now let's look at the legacy of Kant, okay? So what's amazing is the more science progresses, the more content. is proving right so neuroscience is telling us today that we hallucinate the reality all right and there are lots of experiments that prove this so let's go

with some really quick examples we see a triangle right guess what guys it doesn't exist okay it's this part of our imagination these lines exist the triangle doesn't exist but the first thing we see is this triangle that does not exist all right this thing moves okay but we we know it doesn't really move okay so so our mind's playing tricks on us we see this as slanted okay when we actually take them side by side together you'll see them as parallel another mind trick that's being played which is bigger well there's a same but because of the circles we think this is bigger than

that okay another mind trick that's playing that's being played on us A and B are different colors, right? They see, it's obvious they're different colors, right? But actually, they're the same color. Another than my trick that's being played. So, neuroscientists have done all experiments and they've proven to us that we constantly participate in reality, we hallucinate reality,

which is what Kant they originally proposed. All right, let's move on to artificial intelligence, okay? Art of intelligence shows us the limits of the blank slate theory. So let's imagine you actually had a blank slate in your minds. Well, that would be extremely problematic, and we know because of how artificial intelligence works.

All right, let's look at supervised learning. So when we talk about artificial intelligence, it doesn't actually exist. What exists is the idea of supervised learning. And the idea is this. We're trying to teach a machine, an algorithm, to recognize a picture. So what we do is this.

we feed a lot of training data into the algorithm. And we're talking like millions and millions of pictures. And then we label this data so that the machine is able to using its own analysis, figure out the differences. It basically turns every picture into a mathematical concept. And then if you train it well enough, then it's able to differentiate between a triangle and a circle. Okay, that's the idea of machine learning.

Same concept here, okay, you have to feed it millions of pictures, and you have to label these different pictures, and then the machine will mathematically be able to figure out which is which, okay? How the machine does that, we're not really concerned about, but we need to train the machine. And the problem with this is, it's very expensive, it's very time consuming. All right, now let's compare this with how a human does it, right? human if I just give you a picture of a sheep you're able to know what a sheep is

and what what does that happen okay so um a machine is able to tell you this is sheep okay but what a machine is not able to tell you is is this sheep wheel or fake right is it is this a real or fake sheep well we think it's fake right but what the machine says it we don't know and the machine is correct real fake are categories of a mind right what how do we know this is a fake sheep and not a real sheep you understand so the machine is saying you know if I don't know anything if I have no a person that acknowledge then I cannot differentiate between fake and real but a child anyone can know this is a fake sheep because obviously we

have categories in our minds okay a machine could not tell you what this is why because this has become a schema a concept but any child can tell you this is a sheep. Okay? And again, so this is artificial intelligence is showing us that Kant was correct. All right, as I mentioned, Kant inspired Einstein to dream up the theory of relativity.

All right, so Einstein read Kant when it was 16. It had a huge influence on Einstein. Space-time curvature is influenced by it, but also the theory of relative And the theory of relativity, it's fairly straightforward. Let's just say that I'm sitting on a platform, a train platform, and you are, and you guys are across from you, okay? Now, we're not moving, right?

We know we're not moving. But let's just say that for a reason, simultaneously, both platforms are moving at the same speed. From our perspective, we're still not moving. And that's the idea of relativity, where the philosophy are relative to where we are. at the moment. And this again is influenced by Khan. What's really fun is something about quantum mechanics.

So quantum mechanics confirms things in the cells, no matter, are not knowable to us. So this is a major argument between Khan and Hegel. And so quantum mechanics, so we looked at light. We want to know what the essence of light is. What are photons? And we discovered something really problematic, which is we discovered that photons are both wave-like and particle-like.

They're both wave movement and particle, something static. And what's even more problematic is, what we discovered is you're not able to figure out the state of the light if it's a wave or particle until you actually measure it. So in other words, before you measure light, before you measure particles, they are simultaneously occupying many different possibilities, something we call a super precision, okay? And this idea of wave function. A wave function is all the probabilities

of its position in space. When you measure it, it collapses into one data point, okay? Does that make sense? All right. So, you know, in school we teach you the bore model of the atom, but it really it's a cloud, meaning we don't know where the electrons are at a certain. we can only know the probability of where it could be okay and so that's a problem

here all right so this idea of quantum mechanics Einstein hit it this theory he thought this was disgusting there's too much random randomness it's ugly he hated it okay he thought that God as an architect had an elegant mind and we come with these theories like quantum mechanics which actually makes absolutely no sense you're insulting God so to disprove Quantum mechanics, Einstein wrote a paper on something called quantum entanglement. The idea is this, okay, things cannot be measured, sorry, things, we cannot know the state of things of atoms until they are measured, right? Well, in quantum mechanics, things also exist

in opposition towards each other, okay? So, so these two, so maybe two atoms are aligned together, and they have two states or mirror images of each other. So what you can do is this, if you split these two and you send them often in different corners of the universe according to quantum mechanics the moment you measure the first atom the second atom must also review itself even though you have not measured it and also has to be simultaneous even though these two atoms could possibly at a different ends of the universe okay quantum and tenement and Einstein says this can't possibly be true this is a stupid idea and this proves quantum mechanics doesn't work the problem is this the

problem is we've done experiments to prove chronic quantum entanglement actually does work, and this is true. Not only that, but quantum mechanics has proven itself to be the most successful theory in physics of all time, because it's given rise to the transistor. The idea of the transistor is, if you don't understand electrons, then you can manipulate electrons in a way

that allows you to manipulate it, which allows you to make calculations on it, okay? So the transition has given rise to the computer, has given a rise to the internet. Basically create the world that we live in today. So about quantum mechanics, we cannot have the world we live in today. Okay, so, but again, even though we know quantum mechanics

to be true, we don't know why it's true. There are lots of mysteries in quantum mechanics. One of the biggest problems in quantum mechanics is something called Shrarnanger's cat. So Shranger created a thought experiment to show you how problematic problem mechanics is. Let's just say that you have a cat inside a box and there's radioactive material inside this box. And you don't know, you can never know if this cat is dead or alive.

So the only thing you can say is it is both dead and alive, which is, again, it's problematic. But that's not it. It's even more problematic because another physicist, Wigner, said, okay, let's do another experiment. just say okay I'm a scientist I open the box then I know the state of the cat now right I didn't know it before was I opened the box I can see the cat is alive or dead now I know but let's just say that there's a friend in my laboratory who is observing me okay and he doesn't he has not himself open the box so when I open the box and I find the cat is dead what happens to him

Okay? Well, there are different possibilities. The first possibility is he now knows. So reality has changed for him once he has this information. The other possibility is he doesn't know, but he thinks he knows. So this shows you how problematic quantum mechanics is. You can keep on going like this to the nth degree. In other words, the question that they're trying to deal with,

The question that quantum mechanics doesn't really, isn't really able to resolve is, is reality subjective or objective? Can there be a one reality in which we all live in, or is reality constantly multiplying subjectively? In other words, whenever we make a decision, whenever we act, it changes reality for us, but not for others. Is it possible like we all live within our own universe that is unique to us? That's a question quantum mechanics cannot answer. And it creates a huge problem in quantum mechanics. But if we go back to Kant, well, the answer is obvious. It is true that we do create our own individual reality, right?

The nominomina is something we can never see. This is quantum mechanics. The mind, when it interfaces with the thing in itself, it creates the world that we, live in okay so this brings back to the point that the imagination is the animating force of the universe when we use the imagination we create our own reality that is distinct from other realities okay so does that make sense okay so okay okay another way of framing this is what is happening here is kind describing the world we live in or did he

this reality that we live in. Okay? And so this, another saying this, saying that then is, rather than artificial intelligence, neuroscience, quantum mechanics, all confirming what Kant first argued, another state of saying this is

Kant gave them the intellectual capacity come up with these theories by themselves. Another thing of saying this is this. Philosophy creates the boundaries of the human imagination. And science, all science is doing is playing with these boundaries to confirm what is known within these boundaries. Okay? That's the radical statement that I want you to think about. Is science capable of come up with new ideas by itself?

And the argument I would make is no. Because you can have data, what matters is your interpretation of this data. This interpretation of data comes from the geist. the geist okay the the the collective mind that philosophers like Kant and Hegel created and this is problematic because we live in a world today that is undervaluing philosophy and arts and overvaluing stem engineering technology okay and so what my my argument to you is if that is the case if we just put spend all money on science it's all going to be useless

Because in the Dante world real, Dante talks to God, writes the divine comedy. Divine comedy then inspires Khan to write the critique of pure reason, which inspires Hegel, and the two together will inspire neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and quantum mechanics. Okay? So in other words, it's imagination that creates all reality, not this individual reality. There are some of us who are geniuses who are able to imagine a new reality in which we can now inhabit and participate in. Right? And evidence for this is, you know, ever since the Germans, so Khan also conceptualized the United Nations, okay?

Ever since Connorsburg fell, ever since the Germans lost World War II, we have not made major advances in science. Remember, the transition is not a major advance, it's just technology, it's just taking a science and then expressing it in the world that we live in today, okay? So without culture, what the geist is it possible to contribute to advance science? And I think the answer is no. I think we're stuck where we are because we've abandoned culture, we've abandoned the geist. So Emmanuel Kant was a citizen of Connorsburg. In fact, he was called the Connestburg clock. Why?

Because he was so regimented. He took, he made sure at a very specific time, he took a time, he took a, he would take a walk somewhere, okay? And so by observing where he was at a certain time, the residents of Connestburg would know what time it is. All right, so you can make the argument that Kant created Connestburg, because Connestberg would after Kant become the In the Central Scientific Center of Europe,

but Connestbrch also created him, okay, which is very, an idea which would be very familiar to Hegel. All right. So that is it for Kant. We now, we will now move on to Marx and Freud. Okay. But was this clear? Any questions? Okay, great. So next class, we will do Marx.