You offer only two possible motivations. I have been arguing the limits of such a division, not whether it is the case.

The argument is based upon being able to completely separate the self from what is not self. You defend the thesis by an appeal to solipsism as a given condition. But you give the world back to yourself when proposing a different one.

It is not a matter of challenging your thesis but from where the new models will come in the conditions you have set for yourself that make me think that you have had your cake and have eaten it too.

I fail to see where that's my problem. — Copernicus

It is a problem with your dichotomy. You enlist La Rochefoucauld for your purposes but are unable to replace his model with equal perspicuity.

Reality is subjective, dependent upon stimulus reception and intellectual perception. — Copernicus

"Stimulus reception" is the language of behaviorism. Reductions to a pure set of external inputs is not the foundation for solipsism.

By excluding all senses of "self-less" or not-for-yourself as a motive for action, there is no way to model particular behavior as relative to others. It makes La Rochefoucauld's observations useless because he was mainly interested in the differences of motivations behind similar appearances, not turning them into one goo.

The claim that all moral claims in the past were based upon this proposal of the single motivation of selflessness is taking a presumption for a fact. That kicks a lot of moral philosophy of the past to the curb.

If one grants your solipsistic bubble, how do we get to the model you present here:

Every act of kindness, every moral code, every love story is a negotiation between biology and meaning, desire and discipline, self and other. — Copernicus

Solipsists don't usually let themselves out for weekends on the town.

Framing the matter as either selfish or selfless, there is no way to compare behavior that involves a range of values. In La Rochefoucauld, for instance, demonstrates the scope of self-love and the influence of organic disposition but does not make it the last word on human experience. Our virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses are measured against the ubiquity of self-love as a condition. So, for example, Maxims like these are prominent in the text:

339.—We only appreciate our good or evil in proportion to our self-love.

336.—There is a kind of love, the excess of which forbids jealousy.

267.—A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime. — La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections

The problem with your bubble is that the generality of the explanation renders any particular instance useless for inquiry. Distinctions without a difference.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, a form of epiphenomenalist dualism, in which there are two distinct kinds of things: physical processes occurring in the brain and an associated array of conscious experiences — tom111

There is a logical problem here. Attempts to reduce everything not evidently physical to the physical is not an argument for two different kinds of being. The "physical alone" argument is "monist" without qualification.

A lot of Kierkegaard's testimony takes the form of an intervention. Philosophical Fragments counterposes the Socratic view of 'recollection' that says we have the grounds for knowing truth within us to the Christian view that the condition for knowing truth must be given to us. That follows Pascal who said that Christianity is a scandal for reason but closer to the truth of the human condition than what reason provides.

The Concept of Anxiety lays out how that difference relates to a person's experience through a contrast between original sin and the emergence of an individual through their sins. By this means, he draws the limits of psychology and the beginning of the theological.

Works of Love is one very long sermon on the difference between Christian love and every other kind.

I don't know how that relates to your paradox, but Soren K definitely intended to turn over tables in the temple.

Which other insurrections?

Yes, a typo.

It is off topic to this OP, but I often wonder about self-identified schools of thought and the range of vocabulary shared amongst different views represented through them. I won't try to talk about that in this thread.

Kant's terms can be said to move across the background of their Aristotelian versions.
— Paine
I didn't know that. It isn't a surprise, though. — Ludwig V

I am surprised by your lack of surprise. The shared use of terms by the two authors is clearly evident in comparisons of their texts. That includes the term 'experience', that invokes what is called empria by Aristotle which led to the word "empirical."

I'm bit preoccupied with his concept of the a priori. — Ludwig V

The term comes from Aristotle. a priori is Latin for what comes earlier or first. a posteriori is what comes later or behind. The Greek words are πρότερων (proteron) and ὕστερων (husteron).
What is primary is what is sought throughout Aristotle. In Metaphysics he says:

Now things are said to be primary in many ways. Nonetheless, substance is primary in all of them—in account, in knowledge, and in time. For of the various things that are predicated none is separable, but only this. And in account too it is primary, since in the account of each thing its account is necessarily present as a component. — Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1028a34, translated by CDC Reevey

I am not a Kant scholar who knows all the places Kant mentions Aristotle but his intellectual milieu in Konigsberg is said to have been steeped in the tradition. Kant's terms can be said to move across the background of their Aristotelian versions.

There is a book I plan to read concerning this topic: Kant and Aristotle: Epistemology, Logic, and Method By Marco Sgarbi

I need to get more chores off the honey do list first.

In Kafka's reflections and maxims, there is provided a glimpse of how to proceed in a dark world. Maybe it could be described as a kind of stoic or gnostic vision. Contact with it requires meeting it on its own terms. So, a failure of description is accepted as description.

The stories are sharply different from each other. The one's depicting an account given by a person do not match what is given purely through the third person. It all gives the impression of an epistemology just out of reach.

I will pursue my Buddha nature by not commenting on the SEP article.

The receptivity of perception in Aristotle can be seen as a parallel to that of the intuition of sensibility. But where Kant directly rebukes Aristotle is over his use of logic at A268/B324. The disparaging remark occurs in the section titled: On the amphiboly of the concepts of reflection through the confusion of the empirical use of the understanding with the transcendental at A 260/B316. This topic concerns your question:

Put the question this way, what determines whether a given object is treated in accordance with sensibility or in accordance with pure speculative reason — Ludwig V

Kant demonstrates how the categories and grounds are different for the two. The sources for the difference has already been established by previous deduction. The "conformity to objects" of Bxvi is the issue at the quote provided previously:

Now there are only two ways in which a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects can be thought: either the experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make the experience possible. — CPR B165 to B167 underlined emphasis mine

The confusion Kant works to undo in the amphiboly is achieved by defeating Leibniz and Locke with one sweeping roundhouse kick:

The conditions of sensible intuition, which bring with them their own distinctions, he [Leibniz] did not regard as original; for sensibility was only a confused kind of representation for him, and not a special source of representations; for him appearance was the representation of the thing in itself, although distinguished from cognition through the understanding in its logical form, since with its customary lack of analysis the former draws a certain mixture of subsidiary representations into the concept of the thing, from which the understanding knows how to abstract. In a word, intellectualized the appearances, just as Locke totally sensitivized the concepts of understanding in accordance with his system of noogony (if I am permitted this expression), i.e., interpreted them as nothing but empirical or abstracted concepts of reflection. Instead of seeking two entirely different sources of representation in the understanding and the sensibility, which could judge about things with objective validity only in conjunction, each of these great men holds on only to one of them, which in his opinion is immediately related to things in themselves, while the other does nothing but confuse or order the representations of the first. — CPR A270/B326

If you continue reading to B344, the object of the Preface has been put in its transcendental place:

The concept of the noumenon is therefore not the concept of an object, but rather the problem, unavoidably connected with the limitation of our sensibility, of whether there may not be objects entirely exempt from the intuition of our sensibility, a question that can only be given the indeterminate answer that since sensible intuition does not pertain to all things without distinction room remains for more and other objects; they cannot therefore be absolutely denied, but in the absence of a determinate concept (for which no category is serviceable) they also cannot be asserted as objects for our understanding. — ibid B344

*Paine checks his pockets to see if he still has enough left over to buy lunch*

Correction noted. Explanatory parsimony rules the day. I may use that tight wad in other shops.

On other words, the Critique does teach the twofold aspect, but not of the object. It is the two-fold aspect of the human intellectual system as laid out in transcendental philosophy. It is by means of that system that an object is treated as an appearance in accordance with sensibility on the one hand, or, an object is treated as a ding an sich on the other, in accordance with pure speculative reason. — Mww

That points to the structure of the Critique establishing limits as starting places before building upon them to introduce new thinking. For instance, the conditions described at B132 to B138 are observed but qualified by B165 or the Result of this deduction of the concepts of the understanding:

We cannot think any object except through categories; we cannot cognize any object that is thought except through intuitions that correspond to those concepts. Now all our intuitions are sensible, and this cognition, so far as its object is given, is empirical. Empirical cognition,
however, is experience. Consequently no a priori cognition is possible for us except solely of objects of possible experience.* But this cognition, which is limited merely to objects of experience, is not on that account all borrowed from experience; rather, with regard to the pure intuitions as well as the pure concepts of the understanding, there are elements of cognition that are to be encountered in us a priori. Now there are only two ways in which a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects can be thought: either the experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make the experience possible. The first is not the case with the categories (nor with pure sensible intuition; for they are a priori concepts, hence independent of experience (the assertion of an empirical origin would be a sort of generatio aequivoca [spontaneously generated]. Consequently only the second way remains (as it were a system of the epigenesis48 of pure reason): namely that the categories contain the grounds of the possibility of all experience in general from the side of the understanding. But more about how they make experience possible, and which principles of its possibility they yield in their application to appearances, will be taught in the following chapter on the transcendental use of the power of judgment.

From the footnote at the asterisk:

* So that one may not prematurely take issue with the worrisome and disadvantageous consequences of this proposition, I will only mention that the categories are not restricted in thinking by the conditions of our sensible intuition, but have an unbounded field, and only the cognition of objects that we think, the determination of the object, requires intuition; in the absence of the latter, the thought of the object can still have its true and useful consequences for the use of the subject's reason, which, however, cannot be expounded here, for it is not always directed to the determination of the object, thus to cognition, but rather also to that of the subject and its willing. — CPR B165 to B167 underlined emphasis mine

The reference to epigenesis separates this view from Descartes and Berkeley who only offered versions of the real as reductions to a single ground for experience.

I believe the briefest explanation provided by Kant on the role of intuition as a possibility for experience is where he distinguishes intuition from thinking. In the section titled: On the original-synthetic unity of
apperception (at B132). The terms used there are related to one another and thus given definition.

At B137, the term object is introduced:

Understanding is, generally speaking, the faculty of cognitions. These consist in the determinate relation of given representations to an object." An object, however, is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united. Now, however, all unification of representations requires unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently the unity of consciousness is that which alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, thus their objective validity, and consequently is that which makes them into cognitions and on which even the possibility of the understanding rests. — CPR B137

It is in the context of this unity where the dual aspect referred to by comes in to play. The passage continues to show how space is not just a concept:

The first pure cognition of the understanding, therefore, on which the whole of the rest of its use is grounded, and that is at the same time also entirely independent from all conditions of sensible intuition, is the principle of the original synthetic unity of apperception. Thus the mere form of outer sensible intuition, space, is not yet cognition at all; it only gives the manifold of intuition a priori for a possible cognition. But in order to cognize something in space, e.g., a line, I must draw it, and thus synthetically bring about a determinate combination of the given manifold, so that the unity of this action is at the same time the unity of consciousness (in the concept of a line) and thereby is an object (a determinate space) first cognized. The synthetic unity of consciousness is therefore an objective condition of all cognition, not merely something I myself need in order to cognize an object but rather something under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me, since in any other way, and without this synthesis, the manifold would not be united in one consciousness. — ibid. B138 underlined emphasis mine

The writer of the article is assuming that things-in-themselves are present whether we experience them or not. That is not what Kant says in the quote given in the preceding section:

What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. — A42/B59–60

When the writer says in section 3,

In some sense, human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves. — ibid

experience is taken to be a matter of contact with either one or the other kind of object. The narrowness of that reading is what I argued against in my comment to you here. There is a ground where the inner and outer are thought to be in one world, but it is not presented as only things outside of us. The writer is unknowingly presenting a two-object interpretation: Objects in the world and our representations of them.

The writer continues the misunderstanding in 3.1. What is being called a "two object interpretation" by the "so-called Göttingen review by Christian Garve" is what Kant vehemently denounced in the Prolegomena passage I quoted previously

We could strip Berkeley's dictum "To be is to be perceived" of its metaphysical weight about foundations and consider it as just a dictum about existential/social relevance. — Nils Loc

Kafka gets that part. We are the dice in the game.

Thank you for the report. I will work on painting a picture.

Space and time are big issues in philosophy, and I'm not an expert. But I do agree that we do not experience space as a phenomenon. I wouldn't say that it is a condition for sensibility, but rather a principle of interpretation of the phenomena.
I'm afraid, though, that I simply have no grasp of what he means by saying that it is an intuition. Is it something like a brute fact? — Ludwig V

Before trying to respond to that, it would help to know which thinkers you are well versed in. Kant was using the language of his contemporaries. I know some things about them and their differences but studied Ancient Greek philosophy before and more rigorously than turning to Kant's time. I am still a stranger in a strange land.

All the thinkers Kant responded to had different ways of framing what is intuition, phenomena, ideas, logic, and categories. They were arguing within a set of parameters. The problems we have looking in from outside is that we cannot share that set without problems of translation.

With that said, where are you coming from?

Quite right about the 'a' being a footnote and not an indefinite pronoun. One of the hazards of copying and pasting text here. I try to clean those up as a rule. With Kant, it is like herding cats.

Your points about how the use of appearance became more strictly expressed through later works is well taken. Thank you for connecting the A379 language to that of B157. The corresponding pages of the Editors Notes are 739 and 727. For others following the linked edition. It is from those notes that I remembered the passage from Prolegomena above.

I have been reading what is said in A379 through the lens of the Refutation of Idealism given in the B edition. I was thinking that the specificity is still focused upon the difference between what is given through inner and outer intuitions when the Theorem states:

The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me — B275

That also, as you said:

tacitly supports Descartes’ sum while not being quite so supportive of the “problematic” idealism explicit in the cogito ergo… part — Mww

I will have to mull over whether the Theorem is "not so supportive" or a thumb in the eye to the other part. I have been leaning toward the latter.

One element in both the A and B editions that is fairly consistent is the term 'transcendental object.' It is used 28 times in the text (according to my find-in- page function). The meaning as the "unknown ground" for both the inner and outer seems to be preserved at each passage.

I will continue to think about the role of the "I am" that you illuminate.

I started using the phrase from reading:

I, represented through inner sense in time, and objects in space outside me, are indeed specifically a wholly distinct appearances — CPR A379

That gives me confidence that the door I am painting today is the same one I was painting yesterday.

But I like your interpretation. That I might be starting to pun in a Prussian manner is food for thought.

It seems I've been headed off. But I still need to ask how appearances can be appearances of things-in-themselves and things-in-themselves be completely unknown. — Ludwig V

The things-in-themselves are, by definition, what is not experienced. The appearances do not represent the things-in-themselves ala Aristotle. We investigate the appearances without knowing how they are made or how we came to know them. That is expressed as an unknown ground:

The transcendental object that grounds both outer appearances and inner intuition is neither matter nor a thinking being in itself, but rather an unknown ground of those appearances that supply us with our empirical concepts of the former as well as the latter. — CPR A379

The various stances taken by the psychologists and the spiritualists in the passage would try to give an account of what objects are in general but do not get us closer to the unknown ground. As the Prolegomena passage emphasizes:

The principle that throughout dominates and determines my Idealism, is on the contrary: "All cognition of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer
illusion, and only in experience is there truth." — Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, page 374, or page 69 in the linked document

While this statement is challenging to understand next to those about what is "beyond experience." It does not involve the questioning of experience as related in your pulsar example.

I should not have used a spatial metaphor while discussing space. I meant to say that taking intuition of space and time as a process of my perception raises the question of how "objective" it is. That ties into Kant's beef with Berkeley who treats space as an experienced phenomenon. Kant argues that it is, rather, an a priori condition for sensibility:

The dictum of all genuine idealists from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in this formula: "All cognition through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion, and only, in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason there is truth."

The principle that throughout dominates and determines my Idealism, is on the contrary: "All cognition of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer
illusion, and only in experience is there truth."

But this is directly contrary to idealism proper. How came I then to use this expression for quite an opposite purpose, and how came my reviewer to see it everywhere?

The solution of this difficulty rests on something that could have been very easily understood from the general bearing of the work, if the reader had only desired to do so. Space and time, together with all that they contain, are not things nor qualities in themselves, but belong merely to the appearances of the latter: up to this point I am one in confession with the above idealists. But these, and amongst them more particularly Berkeley, regarded space as a mere empirical presentation that, like the phenomenon it contains, is only known to us by means of experience or perception, together with its determinations. I, on the contrary, prove in the first place, that space (and also time, which Berkeley did not consider) and all its determinations a priori, can be known by us, because, no less than time, it inheres in our sensibility as a pure form before all perception or experience and makes all intuition of the same, and therefore all its phenomena, possible. It follows from this, that as truth rests on universal and necessary laws as its criteria, experience, according to Berkeley, can have no criteria of truth, because its phenomena (according to him) have nothing a priori at their foundation; whence it follows, that they are nothing but sheer illusion; whereas with us, space and time (in conjunction with the pure conceptions of the understanding) prescribe their law to all possible experience a priori, and at the same time afford the certain criterion for distinguishing truth from illusion therein. — Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, page 374, or page 69 in the linked document

This view of intuition is at odds with your statement:

Thinking about this, it seems that Kant's (and Berkeley's) conception of space seems to be that it is something that exists as a vessel or a medium in which objects have their existence. I don't see that. The existence of objects in space and space itself are not two separate discoveries. Each depends on the other, conceptually speaking. — Ludwig V

The "objects in space" appear to us through the function of the intuition. What makes the experience possible is what makes it a priori. The possibility for experience is not experienced. That is why it is said to be "beyond experience." This is the language Janus was objecting to upthread.

In the sequel therefore we will understand by a priori cognitions not those that occur independently of this or that experience, but rather those that occur absolutely independently of all experience. Opposed to them are empirical cognitions, or those that are possible only a posteriori, i.e., through experience. Among a priori cognitions, however, those are called pure with which nothing empirical is intermixed. Thus, e.g., the proposition "Every alteration has its cause" is an a priori proposition, only not pure, since alteration is a concept that can be drawn only from experience. — CPR, B2

In the Prolegomena quote above, this corresponds to:

whereas with us, space and time (in conjunction with the pure conceptions of the understanding) prescribe their law to all possible experience a priori, and at the same time afford the certain criterion for distinguishing truth from illusion therein — ibid.

I, too, am learning from this discussion.

I will try to respond to some other of your comments but need to get back to painting a specific appearance.

Berkeley is, in fact, mentioned by name at the beginning of the Refutation of Idealism:

Idealism (I mean material idealism) is the theory that declares the existence of objects in space outside us to be either merely doubtful and indemonstrable, or else false and impossible; the former is the problematic idealism of Descartes, who declares only one empirical assertion (assertio), namely I am, to be indubitable; the latter is thedogmatic idealism of Berkeley, who declares space, together with all the things to which it is attached as an inseparable condition, to be something that is impossible in itself, and who therefore also declares things in space to be merely imaginary. Dogmatic idealism is unavoidable if
one regards space as a property that is to pertain to the things in themselves; for then it, along with everything for which it serves as a condition, is a non-entity. — CPR B274

Kant figures his refutation of both is one stop shopping if he can prove the Theorem:

The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me — B275

One question is how far outside of myself have I gotten if it is my intuition of space and time that allows for the possibility for the experience. To argue on behalf of Kant, I think that question gives the Copernicus analogy a job. It is to say you cannot jump back and forth between standpoints. The conditions for objectivity in one cannot be used as grounds in the other. Kant's position reverses the imagery of Copernicus. He is the one standing still while the objects revolve around him. He describes the problem of switching back and forth between views as a misunderstanding of specificity:

I, represented through inner sense in time, and objects in space outside me, are indeed specifically a wholly distinct appearances, but they are not thereby thought of as different things. The transcendental object that grounds both outer appearances and inner intuition is neither matter nor a thinking being in itself, but rather an unknown ground of those appearances that supply us with our empirical concepts of the former as well as the latter.

If, therefore, as the present critique obviously requires of us, we remain true to the rule established earlier not to press our questions beyond that with which possible experience and its object can supply us, then it will not occur to us to seek information about what the objects of our senses may be in themselves, i.e., apart from any relation to the senses. But if a psychologist takes appearances for things in themselves, then as a materialist he may take up matter into his doctrine, or as a spiritualist he may take up merely thinking beings (namely, according to the form of our inner sense) as the single and sole thing existing in itself, or as a dualist he may take up both; yet through misunderstanding he will always be confined to sophistical reasonings about the way in which that which is no thing in itself, but only the appearance of a thing in general, might exist in itself. — CPR A379

I do think that these issues relate to Wittgenstein, especially his different discussions of solipsism. But I have chores to do. I have to paint a very specific appearance. Maybe later.

You are putting a lot of theories in my mouth. I am not trying to defend what Kant said but clarify what I heard he was saying. Neither was I trying to defend what Aristotle said.

I am guessing that Kant introducing a new standpoint is neither here nor there from your standpoint.

As a matter of textual interpretation, it is clear that reason is being closely tied to the limits of empirical knowledge. That our judgement is, to some extent, a result of our nature established before our particular experiences is not, by itself, an observation given through experience. Kant calls that part thinking about what occurs "independent of all experience."

So, it is not a claim to a noetic hinterland but a parallel to Aristotle trying to understand the relationship between potential and actual beings.

Kant agrees with that in the first section of the Introduction to the Second Edition, titled:
On the difference between pure and empirical cognition. Experience is prior in time to knowledge but the possibility for experience is prior as a condition.

In the sequel therefore we will understand by a priori cognitions not those that occur independently of this or that experience, but rather those that occur absolutely independently of all experience. Opposed to them are empirical cognitions, or those that are possible only a posteriori, i.e., through experience. Among a priori cognitions, however, those are called pure with which nothing empirical is intermixed. Thus, e.g., the proposition "Every alteration has its cause" is an a priori proposition, only not pure, since alteration is a concept that can be drawn only from experience. — CPR, B2

In the Preface, objects of experience are either made present to us through an intuition that has to
"conform to the constitution of the objects" or by means of our processes of reason.

I am unfamiliar with Gould. I am better acquainted with dead French writers. Please point to a sample of what you are referring to. Sounds interesting.

If every human ever is always and only a first-person, doesn’t that make the first-/third-person dichotomy false?, — Mww

In what I have read in Chalmers, it is not so much of a dichotomy as a replacement. Successful reduction can dispense with other explanations of causes of the event. In that register, the attempt to completely map consciousness as a neurological process is similar to the behaviorists who argue for the exclusion of the "self" as a cause.

I believe Kant thought he had uncrossed those wires when he refuted both Descartes and Berkeley with a single blow:

The proof that is demanded must therefore establish that we have experience and not merely imagination of outer things, which cannot be accomplished unless one can prove that even our inner experience, undoubted by Descartes, is possible only under the presupposition of outer experience. — CPR, B275

That supports the statement at B159 that we can know things in the world better than we can know ourselves.

The need for the a priori is to explain why we are built that way. The need becomes necessary by the "altered method of our way of thinking." Otherwise:

If intuition has to conform
to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori — CPR, Bxvi

The analogy with Copernicus is to demonstrate how mutually exclusive the two standpoints are.

How some of us went from this location to reading "things-in-themselves" as "mind independent" is a long and winding road through perilous terrain. Time for lunch.

I read Chalmers to be questioning whether what is referenced through the first person can be reduced to the third. The issue concerns what is reduction as much and maybe more than any particular model of consciousness.

Neither side of the divide is presented as a given. The frames of reference are incongruent.

Kant's terminology is intimidating. I think the way Kant speaks in the Preface to the Second Edition is a good outline to his intentions and what he means by experience, intuition, and cognition:

Hence let us once try whether we do not
get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the ob-
jects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the
requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to estab
lish something about objects before they are given to us. This would
be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not
make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he as-
sumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried
to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer re
volve and left the stars at rest. Now in metaphysics we can try in a sim-
ilar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform
to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know
anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses)
conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very
well represent this possibility to myself. Yet because I cannot stop with
these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them
as representations to something as their object and determine this object
through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which
I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then
I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything
about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same
thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given ob-
jects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an
easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cog-
nition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in
myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is ex-
pressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must
therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. As for
objects insofar as they are thought merely through reason, and neces-
sarily at that, but that (at least as reason thinks them) cannot be given
in experience at all - the attempt to think them (for they must be capa-
ble of being thought) will provide a splendid touchstone of what we as-
sume as the altered method of our way of thinking, namely that we can
cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.* — CPR, Bxvi

The text is linked through the citation. The footnote to this passage speaks of being "imitated from the method of those who study nature." Observe how most of the other footnotes in the Preface make similar parallels.

"Difficult" is a very mild description for this situation. It suggests that you think that "representation" is not really an inappropriate concept to apply here. But you also (seem to) accept that there is no real evidence for such an object "in the unexperienced bush". So I'm rather puzzled what to make of this. — Ludwig V

I figure a representation happens when what is given through sensible intuition becomes an object one can have knowledge about:

The synthetic unity of con-
sciousness is therefore an objective condition of all cognition, not
merely something I myself need in order to cognize an object but
rather something under which every intuition must stand in order to
become an object for me, since in any other way, and without this
synthesis, the manifold would not be united in one consciousness. — CPR, B138

The intuitions are given sensations without which there would be no objects. The things-in-themselves are the result of our activity of thinking about objects. They are not representations of what is beyond experience. They do reflect the given aspect of objects. In that sense, they point to a cause that AmadeusD is calling for. But I cannot refer to the noumena as a cause even if we speculate about it:

The pure concepts of the understanding are free from this limitation
and extend to objects of intuition in general, whether the latter be sim-
ilar to our own or not, as long as it is sensible and not intellectual. But
this further extension of concepts beyond our sensible intuition does
not get us anywhere. For they are then merely empty concepts of ob-
jects, through which we cannot even judge whether the latter are pos-
sible or not - mere forms of thought without objective reality - since
we have available no intuition to which the synthetic unity of apper-
ception, which they alone contain, could be applied, and that could thus
determine an object. Our sensible and empirical intuition alone can
provide them with sense and significance.

Thus if one assumes an object of a non-sensible intuition as given,
one can certainly represent it through all of the predicates that already
lie in the presupposition that nothing belonging to sensible intuition
pertains to it: thus it is not extended, or in space, that its duration is
not a time, that no alteration (sequence of determinations in time) is to
be encountered in it, etc. But it is not yet a genuine cognition if I merely
indicate what the intuition of the object' is not, without being able to
say what is then contained in it; for then I have not represented the pos-
sibility of an object for my pure concept of the understanding at all,
since I cannot give any intuition that would correspond to it, but could
only say that ours is not valid for it. But what is most important here is
that not even a single category could be applied to such a thing, e.g., the
concept of a substance, i.e., that of something that could exist as a sub
ject but never as a mere predicate; for I would not even know whether
there could be anything that corresponded to this determination of
thought if empirical intuition did not give me the case for its applica-
tion. But more of this in the sequel. — ibid. B148

Reading on from here through B159, these limits upon representing things beyond experience are shown to apply to experiences of ourselves:

In the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in
general, on the contrary, hence in the synthetic original unity of apper-
ception, I am conscious of myself not as I appear to myself, nor as I am
in myself, but only that I am. This representation is a thinking, not
an intuiting. Now since for the cognition of ourselves, in addition to
the action of thinking that brings the manifold of every possible intu-
ition to the unity of apperception, a determinate sort of intuition,
through which this manifold is given, is also required, my own existence
is not indeed appearance (let alone mere illusion), but the determina-
tion of my existence* can only occur in correspondence with the form
of inner sense, according to the particular way in which the manifold
that I combine is given in inner intuition, and I therefore have no cog-
nition of myself as I am, but only as I appear to myself. The con-
sciousness of oneself is therefore far from being a cognition of oneself,
regardless of all the categories that constitute the thinking of an object
in general through combination of the manifold in an apperception. — ibid. B159

Errors of perception, like the one you describe, are a common theme in Aristotle. Dysfunctions caused by illness or old age are brought up in De Anima. Imagination is described at DA 428b in distinction to other kinds of false appearances.

Deciding what is a mistake in Kant is more difficult. We don't have the object of representation in hand to compare with another supposed object in the unexperienced bush.

If these representations are false, it may be the case that the person is not actually perceiving objects, despite believing oneself to be perceiving objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

That error comes up a lot in Aristotle. Perhaps you could point out where that happens with Kant.

It seems clear that such an appeal to the base is still high on the agenda.

The role and value of analysis is at a shifting border with other means of other learning methods.

My set of skills are a motley bunch. Most have come from learning from mistakes (thus my original comment about losses), many have come from repeating some things that I never got quite right and never will, some are methods that are rule bound and should just be accepted. I learned all of that mostly in service to others. I have met artists who work a different way. A pretty big fork in the road. I only have my fork.

It won't answer your question but I will observe the following:

I employ a method of work at home that would get me fired at a real job. Oh, wait, I have been fired for that. Analysis is not a thing by itself but happens in the context of working with other people. It is how I learned to be analytical by myself. Ultimately, that becomes another method of work. With the right eyes, you can see who is doing that or not in real time on a job site.

Back to other people. If it is three, the division suddenly introduces what being alone does not require. If is a hundred, you have entered a different space. But you are still there, trying to connect the missing dots.

I see my little boat floating in the Gaant chart.

The fact remains, Kant's system *does not work* unless there is an assumption that something causes our sensations. — AmadeusD

I don't think Kant was ever saying that our experiences came only from our minds. The issue I see is how many of the properties we develop in our judgement of appearances can be applied to the things in themselves. Things in themselves are an inevitable outcome of our judgement. He says that in the quoted passage, adding that they are "problematic." The issue of "mind independence" as a cause does not come up for Kant. What Strawson and Allison were debating {in the link I provided} concerns:

It therefore has subjective real-
ity in regard to inner experience, i.e., I really have the representation of
time and of my determinations in it. It is therefore to be regarded re-
ally not as object but as the way of representing myself as object But
if I or another being could intuit myself without this condition of sen-
sibility, then these very determinations, which we now represent to our-
selves as alterations, would yield us a cognition in which the represen-
tation of time and thus also of alteration would not occur at all. Its
empirical reality therefore remains as a condition of all our experiences. — CPR A36/B53

The "physical objects" we experience in our sensations and judgements are representations made possible through combinations of our intuitions of space and time. That space is consistently called the "outer" intuition and time the "inner" demonstrates that Kant was not disavowing a difference between the two. The correlation between what happens beyond our experience and the way we map the world as space would, of course, never work if it did not work. That points back to the repeatability factor central to Hume. What gets Strawson's knickers in a twist concern how time is excluded from what we can ascribe to whatever is beyond our experience.

Note in the quoted passage how Kant confines the issue to whether or not he or others "could intuit himself" by some other means. That does not make our judgements to be without a cause beyond our experience but forces us to include the absence of other "intuitions" into the set of our limitations.

I did not mean to make my question a rebuttal to your statement. Your reply is interesting. I won't try to respond to the whole of it now but will address a portion of it.

I have worked in construction for decades as a foreman or a project manager. The attempt to reduce the different factors to a set of calculations has long been at odds with how successful collaboration happens in real time. Everything I have worked on so far has been a messy collision of those incompatible approaches. I used to think of it as a kind of cultural war. It is that but other things as well. Those other things are not easily placed in frank juxtaposition.

It seems that you have turned away from your question about loss that I responded to.

That is not a complaint but an opportunity to ask you how the two subjects introduced are connected.