The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Applied Kant

Immanuel Kant is known among philosophers as the All Destroyer. He undermined most of the philosophical systems which preceded him; and more or less set the agenda for those which followed - either to confirm, deny or modify what he had to say.

One of the things Kant had to say was that human intellect has a severe limitation. Because our physical make-up operates using certain ‘categories’ - space, time, cause/effect among others - we inevitably apply these to not just interpret what we see, hear and feel, but to see, hear and feel anything at all. We are therefore unable to distinguish what is in the world from what we bring to the world. Whatever we perceive is always in some way ‘corrupted’ by our sensual construction.

Thus things in themselves are, according to Kant, permanently beyond our comprehension. And the implication is that if we had different built-in categories of perception, the world would be a rather different thing than we perceive it to be. Einstein’s conflation of space and time into an entirely new category of spacetime is an example of how altering a perceptual presumption has a profound on perceptions by scientists. Phenomena like black holes and quantum entanglement may appear paradoxical only because we're perceiving them within inadequate categories.

But Einstein’s new category doesn’t get us any closer to Kant’s thing-in-itself. Spacetime is still a perceptual filter applied to whatever is actually ‘there’ in the universe. So Roberts’s novel poses an interesting ‘what if.’ What if artificial intelligence had advanced sufficiently to get itself beyond the need for perceptual categories? Or at least the ones human beings need to exist in a comprehensible reality. Would such an advance get us any closer to the thing-in-itself, if only by triangulating through various non-human perspectives?

Roberts suggests a number of possibilities brought about but such AI which are actually rather prosaic and tired (as well as unKantian): time travel, inter-galactic teleportation, the experience of additional dimensions, alien beings, inter-temporal quantum ghosts, etc. But he also alludes to one of Kant’s most important conclusions: the existence of God as the ultimate and universal Thing-in-itself. This was important for Kant because one of the ideas he did not want his philosophy to destroy was the theological concept of God. By putting limits on the abilities of human reason, his intention was in a sense to insulate theology from science and vice versa.

In this Kant succeeded, but not in the way he imagined. Science and theology went their separate ways - science into the vanguard of 19th century human thought, and theology into the intellectual dustbin of sectarian preachers and neo-scholastics. And that status quo has prevailed since in various guises. Evolutionists vs. Creationists; materialists vs. spiritualists; rational thought vs. religious faith. Straw men become the norm in the antipathies of the resulting debate. Ultimately a Richard Dawkins becomes as unpalatable as a Billy Graham. Those of us with any taste at all prefer to avoid these conversations.

It is nonetheless crucial to remember that Kant’s metaphysical point remains as valid as his scientific point: Intellectual investigation must not be impeded by religion; nevertheless the object of that investigation, what exists, is a permanent mystery - not merely where what exists comes from but what that which exists is at all. Kant’s categories may have been incomplete or mistaken, but his assertion that there are such categories is irrefutable. That these are to some degree a matter of choice and not inherent in the universe was demonstrated by Einstein. This recognition has not and should not lead to intellectual despair; but it is most certainly a reason for intellectual humility - for everyone. Scientism and fideism are parallel evils.

“[A]ction and passion are the will and the soul, the two always in dialectical connection. Separate one from the other, and it is hardly surprising that science becomes disconnected from God,” says one of Roberts’s time-travelling ghosts. But what would happen if the will and soul are fully integrated in order to perceive the Thing-in-itself? What sort of God would be found, if God there be? A beneficent, empathetic protector? A self-obsessed demon? An androgynous, somewhat sex-obsessed deity? An ecstasy-producing light? Love? Madness? Given that the harder one looks, the more like oneself the universe appears, perhaps what is to be found is merely oneself writ large.

At one point Roberts’s protagonist is admonished, “... let’s say, you’ve lived your life wearing space-and-time coloured spectacles, and this is a moment with the spectacles removed.” The moment in question could well be that instant before death, when the body - through age, or illness, or injury - gives up its dependence upon the categories of perception entirely and disappears into itself as the thing it always was. Perhaps, that is, only in death is the thing-in-itself attainable. So Roberts suggests. And who am I to disagree?

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