Time and space are properties of our mind. This statement needed a lot of build-up in order to understand it. I will start with the concept of perceiving an object. We can only know an object that we observe directly. The knowledge of an object from indirect observation is not the knowledge of the object, but the knowledge of our senses and our mind reacting with said object because the information that we perceive is the modification of chemicals in the body in correlation with changes in our sensory organs. So we are perceiving a phenomenon of the object captured by our senses before even processing this input in our minds. In the end, what we perceive may have little to do with the actual object.

Then why are we generally perceiving the same things (as far as we know) ? It’s because we are kind of the same creature: the difference in DNA between different humans amounts to, on average, 0.1% and some studies claim that there is high similarity between the DNA structure of various species. Knowing that DNA contains the “data” of every potential characteristic, from the more “aesthetic to the more structural”, we are bound to possess pretty much the same sensory organ structure. We can conclude that we all have virtually the same sensory perception.

This leads to another concept. There are two ways to obtain knowledge: the first is analytic, the second is synthetic.

The first way is through the definition or sheer perception of an object, for example the notion/concept of a triangle. The knowledge that the sum of all internal angles adds up to 180 degrees is by its very nature incontestable.

This kind of knowledge is always right (insofar that the premise is true and that the analysis doesn’t involve anything outside the predicate), but extremely limiting, because no new concept can arise this way, only a refinement of the current knowledge by setting a more defined boundary on what the object is and what isn’t. This kind of knowledge is a priori because it does not depend on experience. (they are prior to experience, as there is no need to measure the angle of a triangle to discover the sum of is intern angle, with the emphasis on ‘need’.)

So let’s get into the second method available to the knowledge seeker, the synthetic way. This method associates two objects via something. Often this something is experience or empiricism. An example of that is the assertion that water always flow downwards in a river. The knowledge of water and the knowledge of a river in their concepts doesn’t contain the information necessary to claim that water must go down the river. It’s only through experience that such a statement can be made.

At first glance, the existence of a priori synthetic knowledge seem impossible but many concepts show otherwise, such as the conservation of energy. The concept of energy and the concept of conservation doesn’t imply each other intrinsically, yet as far as we know it applies to every closed system. It may seem as if this concept is a posteriori but experience cannot give us a concept that universal. Experience has a tendency to teach us clearly defined knowledge with clear boundaries, it’s not really reasonable to expect experience to teach us something totally universal and fundamental. For example, the claim that water always flows downhill is actually false: water can go uphill through siphon and other phenomena. A more factual claim is that water always flows down the river when gravity is the dominant force, with the correction being the boundary shown by experience. In short, we can say that the conservation of energy is a priori, because it’s true even if we have not experienced every case possible involving energy.It has been always proven right.

So there are two outcomes possible in this endeavor: first, absence of proof is not proof of absence and those claims are not universal, so no a priori synthetic knowledge is possible, and we will one day encounter “a black swan”. Secondly, a priori synthetic knowledge is possible, and we can study why this is the case, that the side of Kant and the beginning of its proof is the analysis of the perception of space and time.

We can never perceive “the space object”, we only perceive objects inside of the space. So the knowledge of space cannot be analytic, it also can’t be synthetic, because there is nothing we can associate with space in the sense that space is everywhere. We can’t imagine a “place” without space, just a “place” without object. If the knowledge of space is synthetic it would be a synthesis with one object without experience or any mechanism of association. Our perception of space is just a pure sensory input that we receive from our consciences. Another pointer to this theory is that space is only significant in relation of something else it really seemed unlikely that a property of an object is only significant in relation to something else.

Why it’s called a pure sensation ? It’s because the “sense of space” is independent of our physical senses. Some researcher (here too it’s shorter and from the Matlab fellow) study how blind perceive space, so space is not bind the visual sense. Even blind and deaf person have a sense of space through touch (less scientific article). To fully prove the pure sensation theory of Kant we would need to analyse a deaf, blind and with no sense of touch human and verify that they have a sense of space somehow but I didn’t find any study about those persons.

So what are we perceiving in the world ? We are perceiving phenomena of objects and our mind wrapped around it space. The same as when we perceive the color of a flower only that we can identify in some way the source of the object, but we absolutely can’t identify a “space object”. (We can perceive that the flower is the cause of the color, but we can’t perceive the framework of space, I know the explanation is blurry, it’s simply because I don’t fully understand the difference between space and any other perception but it’s easy to see that space is more fundamental and universal in our mind than any other perception. Space and time are the beginning of any perception. )

The demonstration is quite the same for time, but it showcase that the passage of time is probably not a property of time itself because every event seemed to be deterministic through causality. We can extrapolate that time is maybe a constant state, and we would be able to perceive it as it probably is if we were living in a “higher dimension”.

A geometric analogy can also explain the nature of our senses and mind in interaction with objects. We can imagine a complex function in multiple dimension, when we have a perceptive in one dimension of this function we will see a very simple representation of the function, and we will not be able to predict accurately the next step because we are forced to observe the other variables as constants. From a two-dimensional perspective we see more of the function, and we can draw it more accurately and even create a model to predict the way the function will progress on the following step, but since the function is very complex some irregularities will arise. Maybe they will be barely not perceptible in a small interval, but the greater the interval the greater the irregularities to a point that the behavior of the function will seem totally unpredictable. The more we will add dimensions the more precision we will get.

To illustrate, let’s suppose the function z = sqrt(((1 -(x^2/16) + y^2/25))/49) (it was chosen arbitrarily). If we graph it it look something like figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 : Accurate graph in 3 dimensions

If we lose one dimension by applying y = 2, the equivalent of having one less sense than what is required to be able to know the whole object, we still get the curve characteristic on one axis, but we lose a lot of information like the curvature in many other axis. This graph at figure 1.2.1 is still an idealization of our situation because our senses can be fooled and our mind interpreted the input receive. So this graph is the maximum information that we can get, in a more accurate graph of our situation is more like figure 1.2.2.

Figure 1.2.1 : Accurate graph in 2 dimensions

Figure 1.2.2 Graph in two dimension with noise

On the last graph at figure 1.3.1 we bind x to the value of 1 and y with still the value of 2 . We can predict barely nothing in comparison of the original graph and if we add noise to this graph like in figure 1.3.2 we can see that the only thing we predict are properties of the noises.

Figure 1.3.1 Accurate graph in one dimension

Figure 1.3.2 Graph in one dimension with noises

What conclusions can we draw from those propositions? Sadly it means that we will never be able to perceive reality. The farthest we will be able to get is the understanding of OUR OWN representation of the world. This also means that science is not the study of nature but the study of man’s perception of nature, it really reminded a part of the verse 52 of the Tao Te Chin (translation by Jonathan Star).

That which created the universe is the Mother of the world By knowing the Mother one knows her children By knowing her children one comes to know her