“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” – George Orwell

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face.” – George Orwell, 1984

“Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” – George Orwell, 1984

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” -― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“No… Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” – Terry Pratchett

Kant and Hume by Emily Fitton

David Hume and Immanuel Kant were almost contemporaries, but they reached radically different conclusions on the nature of reality and our ability, or lack thereof, to access it. Hume cast doubt on humans’ ability to ever really know the reasons or fundamental truths behind our experience. Kant, in response, proposed a revolution in our understanding of our relationships to ourselves and to the outside world, and in doing so offered a way to maintain knowledge of the physical world.

The concept of causality (that some event, x, is directly responsible for some other event, y) might seem so integral to our experience of the world that it is difficult to imagine a world without it. But when we try to point to something in experience that makes a series of events causal, this something remains elusive. We can’t see the causal relationship itself, but only two events: one that we take to be the cause and the other that we take to be the effect.

It’s true that we could point to the fact that certain events are usually or always followed by certain other events. But causality is something more than this: there is a sense that when one event happens, the other is in some way inevitable, and that the first event is the reason for the second. So where does this concept come from? Hume proposes that it is a product of psychological processes: If we experience event A followed by event B enough times, we will begin to expect event B whenever we encounter event A. It is this feeling of expectation that forms the basis of the concept of causality.

But this presents us with a problem. If the concept of causality were something that we could arrive at through logic alone, then we could make some sense of its relationship to real objects in the physical world: logic arguably provides us with some direct access to objects because it establishes what is and isn’t possible. Alternatively, if we believed that causality could be directly perceived in objects, then it is clear to see how the concept might resemble the world as it really is. But if the origin of a concept is psychological, we have no way of knowing whether it bears any resemblance to the world as it really is. In fact, more than that, it is difficult to imagine how it could.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant borrows some terminology from law to help him to distinguish between two kinds of questions. A quaestio facti (“question of fact”) is the kind of question that in law might be answered by a jury; it is about gathering evidence to draw conclusions about the world. The more evidence we gather, the more confident we can be in our conclusions. A quaestio juris (“question of law”), on the other hand, is the kind of question that’s answered by a judge. Its subject matter is much less tangible: supposing the facts alleged are true, what laws apply? Importantly, the way of answering these two questions is fundamentally different. No amount of examining the facts of the case can, on its own, tell the judge which laws apply. Instead, they must attempt to interpret the law to establish under what circumstances it might apply.

So why draw our attention to this distinction? Kant thinks that it provides a useful framework for thinking about the kind of questions that Hume poses: questions that relate to our knowledge of the external world. There are a set of questions, analogous to the quaestio facti, that have to do with matters of fact in the physical world. These are the kinds of questions that can be answered by science.

But there is a separate set of questions, analogous to the quaestio juris. These questions have to do with the legitimacy of certain concepts (our “right” to apply them to objects), especially where there is nothing obvious that we can point to in experience to distinguish cases where the concept applies and cases where it doesn’t. By way of example, Kant points to the concept of “fate”. The idea that there is some greater plan behind events in the world is not uncommon, yet there doesn’t seem to be any perceptible difference between a world that’s governed by fate and a world that’s not. We might ask “quid juris?” about this concept—“what right” do we have to use it?

If we fail to satisfy the quaestio juris, the skepticism that results is very different from the skepticism that results from a failure to satisfy the quaestio facti. It’s not just that we can’t be confident in our use of a concept: we have no justification for using the concept at all. Hume’s concerns about whether the concept of causality can apply to objects in the physical world, given its apparent psychological origins, transforms the nature of his investigation from a quaestio facti into a kind of quaestio juris.

But Kant points out that the division is also not an “in itself” or something that we have immediate access to: it, too, must be constructed. And if we know the principles through which it is constructed, then we can know something about the outer world. It’s true that the object that we know doesn’t exist entirely independently of this framework. But neither is it a product of the inner self as the skeptic imagines, since the inner self comes about only through this process of division. A successful transcendental argument establishes that the concept in question applies to objects in the physical world because it’s somehow intrinsic to this framework of knower and objective world to be known.

Kant argues that the concept of causality is necessary to distinguish a world that changes—a world extended in time. Our perceptions are in constant flux, yet we only attribute some of this to changes in the object we are perceiving. The rest, we attribute to a change in ourselves, or our perspective. On what basis do we make this distinction? Kant argues that we take change to be objective—something happening in the object we’re observing—when we think that there’s something necessary about the order of our experiences. As a tree grows, for example, my perceptions of it are necessarily ordered from small to large. But if a tree appears smaller as I move away from it, I don’t think that the tree itself has changed: the tree could just as easily increase in size again once I move closer to it. In other words, it is in some sense the irreversibility of experiences that determines a real change in the physical world. Kant thinks that this irreversibility is what underpins our concept of causality.

In a strange way, then, we come full circle: by taking the skeptic’s premise to its logical conclusion, Kant arrives at a radical kind of realism about the physical world: existence or objective reality is already necessarily governed by the concepts and principles that make the distinction between inner and outer sense—subjective experience and an objective world—possible at all. If it were not, then we would not be in a position to encounter it. In fact, Kant thinks that we would not be in a position to encounter ourselves.

So why should we care about all of this? Whether or not we accept Kant’s position on causality, the distinction he draws between quaestio juris and quaestio facti is helpful in avoiding all kinds of intellectual knots. For the vast majority of questions we have about the external world, we can get by without ever thinking about the quaestio juris. The world already does exist, and our job is usually to try to make sense of it as it is.

But the enormous success of the scientific method can make it tempting to treat every problem as though it were a quaestio facti—to expect, in other words, that science should be able to provide an exhaustive explanation of reality, including the framework of science itself. The result of this can be skepticism: when it becomes clear that science can’t explain how mind and world could coincide, it can be tempting to conclude that they don’t, or at least that there is no way that we can know that they do. Kant’s attempt to respond to the quaestio juris shows us at least the possibility of an explanatory power external to, yet consistent with, science.

There are also implications for what it means to have, or to be, a mind. The “hard problem of consciousness” arises in part because we take the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, mind and world, to be primary, and then attempt to explain one in terms of the other. The Kantian position recognizes the distinction as emergent and so allows for alternative conceptions of the relationship. What Kant offers us is not just a response to skepticism, but a profound reorientation. Instead of seeing mind and world as separate realms in need of a bridge, conceptual understanding is itself the process through which reality becomes articulated into both self and world.

investing

  • 20260625 (Thursday)

there are moments or periods when the mode of investing is changing. for example, after the peace negoriation started last week (MOU signed that Thursday) and the debut of Walsh’s first Fed meeting, the hawkish mode was coming. the anticipation of stronger dollar leads the price of gold down (now hovering aroun $4,000). due to the stop of Iran war, the oil price is down for sure and the stock prices of many oil companies. however the inflation is still high and the odd of rate hike is higher. then people start the reckoning of AI bubble. One example is that MU (micron) is up about 17% pre-market and changed to up 10% after opening and 17% up again due to the very good quarterly report. SpaceX (SPCX) is back to around its debut price of $150. Now the price of Apple stock is down 6% to $274 after announcing price hike. That is rare for Apple. this is the continuition of tech sell-off since this Tuesday. so I called this period of mode transition. all the participants are re-evaluating the stock price of AI-related companies, oil-related company, and many others. Be cautious during this kind of transition in mode switching.

  • 20260626 (Friday):

CNQ

CNQ is falling after the Iran peace negotiation since last week. On 2026-06-24, there is a recent low point of US$39.02.

TOU.TO

Tourmaline is falling too but not that dramastically as CNQ. It has a recent low of C$58.97 on 2026-06-24.

WEN

Wendy is becoming a Meme stock now.

NFLX

Netflix has a recent low of US$70.86.

PFE

Pfizer has a recent low of US$23.62.

MAGS

MAGS02

some writers

records

tsalesdate
wb742026-06-30
nw712026-06-30
nd572026-06-30
so132026-06-30
a2p02026-06-30
ok02026-06-30

notes

metafilter imagined as fiction, presented as fiction, and accepted as fiction

Flannery O’Connor said that a good story “resisted paraphrase,” by which she meant that a simple summary of a plot or story line would not have the same emotional impact as the whole story… To understand what she means, think about trying to paraphrase, or describe, a Chopin sonata without actually playing any music. It simply cannot be done. The music stands for itself. Nothing can substitute for it with the same effect-not the notes on the page, not a verbal description of the melody and harmony, not even a playing of a simplified version of the main theme. This is also true of the kind of fiction and creative nonfiction we are trying to write: simply stating what the piece “is about” should not be able to convey the complexity and subtlety of the piece as a whole. Some essential mystery, or emotional subtlety, will be lost in the paraphrase.

SMPTE stands for Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers

  • imperfection is the heart of perfection

the illusion of culinary precision: To someone already anxious in the kitchen, a recipe that refuses to give you exact measurements is daunting. Because I couldn’t always measure her ingredients for her, she had no choice but to learn how to feel them. Week after week, we would mix the dough together. She learned to add a handful of flour, knead, and wait for that specific, tacky resistance. She learned the rhythmic, meditative motions of a six-strand plait (“end to the center, replace with the second-from-the-end on the other side” we would repeat together). I came to deeply love making challah with her, watching her gradually realize that she didn’t need a rigid recipe to make something delicious. This philosophy — trusting your senses over a strict set of instructions — extends far beyond the oven. It is the core of how we actually cook. A recipe is a wonderful place to start. But eventually, you have to close the laptop, put your hands in the flour, and see how it feels.

In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) centers on the acceptance of transience and imperfection.[2] It is often described as the appreciation of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”.