Although many empirical illusions have been gradually identified, comprehended and incorporated into our cognitive architecture in the past three centuries (such as why the heavens only seem to revolve around the Earth, or why those in the Southern Hemisphere don’t fall off the bottom of the Earth, or why we don’t see the blind-spot in our retinas), many metaphysical illusions remain entrenched in our ways of thinking, resurfacing today in such guises as the simulation hypothesis, the time travel fiction, and the big bang theory. 

Each of these three “theories” are rooted in the elimination of the difference between space and time which Einstein adopted from Minkowski, and which now dominates scientific thinking as well as popular imagination. 

In this paper I consider the ways in which each of these three “theories” contradict themselves and so remain unable to achieve the satisfaction of the metaphysical imperative to see the whole to which they aspire. 

I then attempt to explain the way in which Kant’s transcendental idealism presents a less frustrating understanding of time, space and subjectivity, able to indicate the possibility of a new level of satisfaction of the metaphysical imperative to see the whole. 

Along the way I consider Bertrand Russell’s critique of Kant in “An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry” with which he began his career in 1894, and Einstein’s work with Kurt Goedel, “Some observations about the relationship between the theory of relativity and Kantian philosophy” with which he ended his in 1949.

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