Dekanting fluid thought

“In the land of the blind, the man with the one eye rules all”

This quote was one that stuck out from the movie Minority Reports (and due to Tom Cruises horrible acting it is one of the few things I remember). It sheds light on the argument by Kant, we can recognize restrictions on what we will be able to know. Like the quote above, Mason feels like we would not be able to put an objective barrier to what we can or cannot understand. We would not be able to tell that we are blind and that the man with the one eye will never know what experiences the blind will go through. However although the one eyed man doesn’t see the whole picture, he knows that others can see nothing, and this is why I feel like Kant’s argument has some merit.

To some degree I do believe Mason, but I also feel justified in accepting some points that Kant makes. Kant’s philosophy has solid ground in saying that everything that we understand is what we perceive to understand by using the building blocks of experiences that we think is objective. If we are to say that there is a dog in the window. We define dog by certain rules and we define window by another certain rules.  These blocks of knowledge are put together to form what we understand to be in the window.  The example which was used in class about how if we all jumped on a magic school bus and flew to mars, we would only define those items by the terms that are natural to earth, and make new terms with relation to our experiences on earth.

Another example would be if we weren’t born on earth but instead in a virtual machine in which we saw and felt nothing. We could probable not define anything since we have no building blocks to build relation from. If all of a sudden there were three dots and that is all you could see, everything that you could think about would revolve around those three dots. To give mason credit there is no way for them to realize that they won’t understand the world in the same way we do because they only were exposed to a certain world.

                So the question then comes, if people couldn’t realize they could not understand anything above the three dots, then isn’t Mason right in saying that we cannot say that there is ever a barrier to understanding because we can never see it? My theory is that we have come to an understanding that we have built worlds from blocks of what we understand, the mere fact that we continually are building experiences from other experiences make it seem that there is never one concrete static box that can be filled and defined, but instead an ever fluid mixture that swishes around and we just choose to be justified in certain solid beliefs because we had the ability to find an undefined X and took the opportunity to bring it into terms of known Y’s and Z’s.

                When Kant states that nothing can be completely understood, Mason refutes him by stating that it is a circular argument that you are saying “you cannot understand what you cannot understand”. However if you recognize that you define the world by what you understand, you are dependent on what you understand being in some way be true. Since that can never be proven, your ability to understand will have a barrier.