#taggart

We know that Taggart gets the little green Buddha statue from his partner before Peter Livingston, and that after his death Michael Jardine came into possession of it, but after that we never see it again, even though it had been a pretty important reoccurring theme.

Well imo Jackie Reid got it after Michal Jardine died. She would have kept it on her desk or maybe on her mantle, and maybe on particularly difficult cases, she’d look at it and think “what would Jim do? What would Michael do?”

GQ FF 3.1415 TUD episode 01 The first episode of Farthest Frontier https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/GQ-FF-3-1415TUD-episode-01-1316533222

Kant and Black Holes

Black holes are a reason for Kantian transcendentalism, but not at all for the reason most people think. Black holes are not evidence that time and space are properties of the mind. That’s the wrong direction of explanation. Kant does not need astrophysics as confirmation, and astrophysics does not suddenly turn transcendental philosophy into empirical psychology.

Kant’s claim is a priori, namely, space and time are the forms through which any possible experience must appear to a human mind. This is true regardless of whether black holes exist, were ever discovered, or are ever understood. Kant is talking about the conditions under which anything can show up for us at all.

Black holes do something much more modest and much more interesting. They show that our everyday spatial and temporal intuitions break down when physical conditions exceed the scales our cognition evolved to handle. That is a cognitive limitation, not a metaphysical revelation. You understand cars, houses, bodies, tables because the perceptual and conceptual machinery of your mind was evolutionary shaped to deal with mid-sized, slow-moving, thermodynamically stable objects. Kant already knew this, minus the astrophysics. What modern physics adds is a dramatic stress test.

When physicists say that “space and time break down” at the event horizon or the singularity, they do not mean that space and time cease to exist. They mean that our mental models, which presuppose classical spacetime structure, stop yielding coherent predictions. This is an epistemic breakdown, not a cosmic confession.

From a Kantian angle, black holes are not showing you that space and time belong to the mind. They are showing you that no intuition we possess can smoothly represent what is happening there. The phenomena outrun the representational capacities of human cognition.

Saying however that time and space are “properties of our consciousness” is dangerously loose. Kant does not say they are psychological features like emotions or habits. They are structural constraints, that is the way any object must be given to us, not features floating inside the mind.