Squidgers wrote: ↑Wed Jul 14, 2021 11:39 pm Is your principle at all similar to Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)?
There would, by it's own criteria, need to be a sufficient reason why this principle exists in nature.
But in this way it is circular.
Kant asked the following:
‘How is it possible in general to cognize a priori the necessary conformity to law of things as objects of experience, or: How is it possible in general to cognize a priori the necessary conformity to law of experience itself with regard to all of its objects?’
In other words, how can we know independent of experience the manner in which our experience conforms to precise, general laws? Concerning objective validity, Kant says further that,
‘Objective validity and necessary universal validity (for everyone) are therefore interchangeable concepts, and although we do not know the object in itself, nonetheless if we regard a judgment as universally valid and hence necessary, objective validity is understood to be included.’
In other words, if we knew something as logically necessary, we would know that it is also going to be objectively valid for everyone. If we knew the laws of nature by some way of necessity, we would be able to know that the laws of nature are valid for everyone. Anything that we know by way of necessity would have this property.
This entire reasoning of Kant stems from a simple error - assuming there is a subject separate from the objects of its experience. The error is going from polarity of formlessness-form (subject-object), which makes distinctions, to duality, which manufactures divisions. Once the latter is assumed, then Kant asks how the subject can recreate the world of objects, assumed to be external to itself, from within itself. He says that cannot be done for various valid reasons (assuming false S-O division), and therefore concludes human perception-cognition must impose a priori judgments on the world-in-itself to structure that world before we become aware of the imposition. Of course there are many more details and formulations of these things, but the simple fact is that Kant created a problem which never needed to exist in the first place and then proceeded to solve his own problem by dividing the world-in-itself from the world as it always appears to our perception-cognition.
Kant was correct to reject or modify PSR to the extent it tried to explain essence from outside of human experience, but he was incorrect to assume human experience was forever veiled with illusory judgments of phenomenon. He ended up relying on the same non-existent perspective he was critiquing to explain the shared world of appearances. And all of these people basically fell into these traps because they demoted the realm of human ideas to mere illusory and personal concepts. We can see easily how such a demotion naturally follows from Cartesian mind-matter dualism. We are mistaken if we think this dualism only led the materialists astray, because it most certainly led the idealists astray as well. They both arbitrarily limit the power of human Thinking and human ideas to penetrate into the essence of an objectively ideal Reality.
Once we realize S-O are the same in essence, and that the realm of ideating activity is transpersonal, these arbitrary limits of materialism and idealism alike fall away. That spiritual activity of Thinking is how the world of phenomenon is revealed, from within itself, to be continuous with the noumenal world and to naturally flow forth from it. Most of all, we should never assume we cannot "objectively" study these things if we are also accounting for our own participatory role in bridging phenomenal and noumenal realms. There is no reason why empirical study must leave out ideational activity - if such studies ever want to speak to essential relations, they must include that ideational activity. That is exactly what the anthropic principle is pointing towards - the participatory role of our ideating activity in (re)-making sense of the appearances. What Barfield called, "Saving the Appearances".
