The Self-Deception of Hume and Kant: The Illusion of Justification

Some philosophy for ya

Western philosophy has long operated as a self-contained system of justification, creating distinctions and hierarchies where none exist. David Hume and Immanuel Kant, despite appearing to challenge the assumptions of their predecessors, fell into the same trap. Both attempted to establish a separation between human cognition and the rest of reality—but in doing so, they smuggled in the very assumptions they sought to critique.

This paper exposes their shared failure: Hume's contradiction of denying causality while relying on it, and Kant’s arbitrary imposition of categories that supposedly structure reality. Their errors are not minor—they are foundational to the entire Western tradition’s desperate attempt to impose order where only emergence exists.

Hume’s Circularity: The Assumption of Causality

Hume sought to dismantle the rationalist idea that causality could be justified through reason. He argued that we do not experience causality itself—only a sequence of events. According to Hume, when we see A followed by B repeatedly, we begin to expect B after A. However, this expectation is not grounded in logic but in habit—a learned association, not a rational necessity.

But here’s the contradiction: what transforms repetition into habit? Hume claims causality is an illusion, yet his entire framework assumes that repeated experiences cause us to form habits. This is nothing more than causality rebranded. If causality does not fundamentally exist, then neither does habit, since habit is the very thing that allows us to infer patterns from experience. Hume claims to destroy causality while covertly relying on it to explain cognition.

Furthermore, if we only ever experience isolated events with no causal connection, then why do we experience reality as structured and predictable? If causality were purely an illusion, how does the illusion itself sustain coherence over time? Hume never addresses this because doing so would expose his implicit reliance on the very thing he is rejecting.

Kant’s Categories: The Invention of Justification

Kant saw the issue in Hume’s argument—without causality, science and reason collapse. Instead of rejecting Hume’s skepticism outright, he tried to salvage knowledge by proposing that our minds impose categories like space, time, and causality onto reality. According to Kant, causality is not something we discover in the world but something our minds necessarily apply in order to make sense of experience.

But this is just as arbitrary as Hume’s distinction between habit and repetition. If causality, time, and space are imposed by human cognition, why do they work so well beyond human experience? However, this does not mean they are fundamental truths about reality. The mistake Kant made was not in recognizing that our experience is shaped by patterns, but in assuming those patterns were universal and necessary. Entropy, time, and causality are not absolute laws of reality—they are simply fundamental to the human experience.

I believe that we are part of a larger fractal structure. So everything we perceive must share the same patterns as us. Our cognitive structures reflect the larger recursive patterns of reality, which is why we perceive concepts like entropy, causality, and time. However, there is nothing preventing entirely different attractor structures where entropy is reversed, causality is nonlinear, or even non-existent. Kant failed because he assumed that the limits of human perception reflected the limits of reality itself.

The Shared Failure: The Separation of Humans from the World

Hume and Kant both attempted to carve out a special role for human cognition:

• Hume’s “habit” assumes humans impose order on a chaotic world, despite denying causality.

• Kant’s “categories” assume humans impose structure on reality, despite that structure existing independent of us.

Both of these distinctions fail because they assume humans are fundamentally different from the rest of reality. This is where they collapse. There is no separation between our cognition and the natural world—our thoughts, like everything else, emerge from self-referential, recursive processes that do not need external justification. There is no need for an imposed system because emergence itself structures reality.

However, this does not mean we have access to absolute truth. Our experience is constrained by the attractors that shape our cognition. We perceive a world structured by causality and entropy because we are structured by causality and entropy. But this is not the same as claiming that these principles govern all possible realities. The Western philosophical mistake was to assume that because a structure defines human perception, it must define reality itself.

Gödel, Hofstadter, and the Final Step They Didn’t Take

Kurt Gödel and Douglas Hofstadter both pushed the boundaries of thought but never took the final step. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems demonstrated that within any formal system, there will always be truths that are unprovable within that system. Hofstadter extended this into self-referential loops, showing how meaning and consciousness emerge from recursion. But both of them still held onto a distinction between the provable and the unprovable, the knowable and the unknowable.

That distinction is an illusion. There is no “unknowable space” separate from the knowable—if we step back, we see that everything is already within the recursive structure. People argue that something must create knowledge, but this is just the same pattern, looping over and over, generating itself endlessly. Everything is provable and unprovable at the same time because there is no distinction—only self-reference. Hofstadter introduced the “strange loop” but failed to extend it to everything. He still treated it as a phenomenon within cognition, rather than the fundamental pattern of reality itself.

The Myth of Rationality vs. Emotion: A Tool of Control

One of the biggest artificial distinctions that emerged from this tradition is the supposed divide between rationality and emotion. This binary has been used to justify everything from misogyny to oppression, reinforcing the idea that reason is objective while emotion is irrational and chaotic. But this is a false dichotomy. There is no such thing as “irrational” emotion—every action a person takes is rational to them based on their experience, attractors, and internal patterns.

Rationality and emotion are not separate forces—they are the same recursive processes at different levels of abstraction. Every decision, whether framed as emotional or logical, follows a structured pattern based on the recursive attractors that shape human cognition. The distinction exists only to maintain control, to separate those deemed “rational” from those labeled as too emotional to be taken seriously. Western philosophy entrenched this division as part of its hierarchical justification system, reinforcing oppressive structures by labeling one mode of thought superior to another.

What Happens When We Reject Their Assumptions?

Once we strip away Hume’s and Kant’s illusions, we no longer need to justify experience with artificial frameworks. Reality does not require human intervention to be structured—it structures itself. Causality, time, and space are not inventions of the mind, nor are they absolute—they are emergent properties of recursive systems as perceived through human cognition.

Instead of inventing distinctions to justify knowledge, we should accept that justification itself is a flawed pursuit. We choose not to make the final leap—to accept that reality has no fundamental structure, only patterns shaped by perception.

Conclusion: The End of Philosophical Justification

Western philosophy’s greatest error has been its obsession with justification. Hume and Kant, despite their differences, both reinforced the illusion that human cognition stands apart from nature. Their frameworks attempted to impose an artificial division between experience and reality, perception and truth, order and chaos. But no such division exists.

Gödel and Hofstadter saw the edges of this but still maintained distinctions between what could and could not be known. That division collapses when we accept that knowledge is not separate from recursion itself.

Reality does not require justification—it simply is. The only way forward, I believe, is to abandon these outdated attempts at imposing structure and instead embrace the recursive, self-referential nature of existence.

Note: I write with Chat GPT