As far as subjectivism is concerned, Kant was indeed concerned to avoid the charge of “subjective idealism,” but that’s why the Critique insists that the forms of sensibility and categories of understanding are not personal idiosyncrasies but universal structures of human cognition. — Wayfarer

Of course Kant was wrong about that. We all have unique brains and it is the regularities to the world and language use that allow our idiosyncratic brains to be (somewhat) on the same page.

Sure, our brains differ, and language use varies, but within bounds. What Kant is pointing to are the universal structures that make a shared, law-governed world possible in the first place — space, time, and the categories of the understanding. Without those a priori forms, no amount of neural regularity or linguistic convention would secure the very notion of “objectivity.”

Kant allows things in themselves, which Schopenhauer takes him to task for, because it is inconsistent with his claim that space and time are only forms of intuition and have no other existence, and you can't have things without differentiation, space and time. Schopenhauer then posits that there can only be a 'thing in itself', and that this is a consequence of Kant's own contentions. — Janus

Differentiation need not be spatial nor temporal. We have differentiation of meaning, intention and value. This is the basis of "order", "hierarchy", a differentiation of value. Spatiotemporal differentiation is dependent on, and derived, from this more basic form of differentiation based on value.

the point at issue is whether it follows logically from the accepted fact that differentiation is required for perception to occur, that there is no differentiation absent perception. — Janus

If the one is required for the other, and the other is not required for the former, then we can conclude that the one is prior to the other. In this case, since differentiation is required for perception, and perception is not required for differentiation (as explained above, differentiation may be based purely in order), we can conclude that differentiation is prior to perception.

I want to hear an actual argument for why space, time, differentiation, form, matter and all the rest cannot exist beyond the context of perception. And I should note, I acknowledge that if there is space, time, differentiation, things in general outside the context of perception, we should not expect them to be just as we experience and understand them. That would be naive realism, and I'm not arguing for that. I have in mind something along the lines of Ontic Structural Realism. — Janus

Above is an argument as to why the act of differentiation exists beyond the context of perception. It is prior to perception. This act of differentiation is intentional.

As I said, I simply want any kind of argument clearly laid out that demonstrates that space, time, differentiation etc. must be confined to the world as cognized. — Janus

Differentiation is necessarily an intentional act. It involves selection. Understanding what "differentiation" means is all that is required to demonstrate that it is confined to "the world as cognized". Differentiation is an intentional act carried out by cognition. Furthermore, differentiation in its basic form (order) as explained above, is necessarily prior to spatial or temporal differentiation. Therefore cognition is prior to spatiotemporal differentiation, and perception in general.

we cannot be certain that space and time and differentiation exist in the in itself, but nor can we be certain that they do not. There is no such thing as any definitive "misuse of concepts". That is purely stipulative. There are no "concept police"―we each decide for ourselves what makes most sense to us. It is just here that I see dogma creeping in―in notions of "philosophy proper" and "misusing concepts" and "cannot be applied beyond them". — Janus

We can be certain that these things, space, time, differentiation, do not exist "in the in itself". This certainty is supported by an understanding of what it means to differentiate, and subsequent form, "differentiation". To differentiate is an intentional act. Any attempt to portray it as something other than this ought to be immediately arrested. I am a self-declared member of the "concept police", and I hereby give you warning that you are in serious violation of the 'dogma of philosophy proper'. Without stipulation, dogma, any field of study loses all dignity. Without stipulations as to how words will be used, logic is impossible, and discussion rapidly degenerates into nonsense.

If you refuse to uphold a proper definition of "differentiation", as an act which requires selection, just so that you may equivocate, then you make philosophical discourse impossible.

When Kant says “there must be something corresponding to sensibility as receptivity,” he isn’t smuggling in a cause; he’s pointing out that appearances can’t be appearances of nothing — but beyond that, no determinate claim is possible.

But that's precisely what critics say he is doing, and I think they have a point. If an appearance is not caused by what it is an appearance of, if it bears absolutely no intelligible relationship (even a hidden one) to what it is an appearance of, then in virtue of what is it appearance an "of" anything? Even if Kant isn't strictly speaking denying any intelligible relationship between noumenal reality and appearances (a point of contention) that this relationship is wholly unknowable would itself imply that Kant has absolutely no grounds for claiming that appearances are appearances of anything prior to them (particularly since he seems to deny that appearances are posterior to noumena in any coherent way). In virtue of what then does he claim positively know that appearances are appearances and not realities themselves? To simply say, "well to be appearances, they must be appearances of something," is simply begging the question here. What is the evidence that supports that they are appearances?

This is precisely Hegel's charge in the Logic, that Kant is a dogmatist who has dogmatically presupposed that phenomena are "appearances of" noumena. On Hegel's analysis, when Kant dismisses the whole of past metaphysics as "twaddle" he appears to be a very charred pot pointing out that a kettle is black.

But this is also problematic in that Kant does appeal to the noumena for many things. He hides free will in there for instance. But if this freedom has never, will never, and can never relate to experience as cause, it's completely meaningless. Indeed, I find it questionable to posit an existence at all and then to claim that, strictly speaking, it bears no clear relationship to anything that is conceivable. Which of course, Kant doesn't do. Instead, he oscillates on this (I am pretty sure that "cause" in the prior passage is "grund," or "ground"). A more charitable reading is that he is engaged in something like apophatic theology, but this doesn't hold up. Apophatic theology works because the transcendent isn't absent from what it transcends. The super rational is not arational. But Kant has denied himself the understanding by which apophatic theology is anything more than simple contradiction.

What Kant is pointing to are the universal structures that make a shared, law-governed world possible in the first place — space, time, and the categories of the understanding

Ok, and how does he support that this is true for all minds? "Kant says it is thus," is not a particularly convincing rejoinder to the accusation of solipsism. Kant, by his own admission, knows absolutely nothing about other people in-themselves. Any appeal to shared biology or culture is an appeal to the phenomenal to explain a noumenal connection by which discrete phenomenal perspectives are the same. You said earlier that other species might have different minds. But I don't think Kant can say this. "Other species," and "species," or even "individuals" which can have different minds, all exist only in the phenomenal world, or at the very least are only ever known as phenomenal, which says nothing about the noumenal. Indeed, as critics have often pointed out, Kant has no grounds for supposing noumena, plural (the application of quantity and measure) in the first place. Of course he says, "but thus it is so,' but the criticism is that his epistemology has cut away any warrant for claiming that other minds exist or must be the same as his mind. He can only know the appearances of other minds (or apparent other minds). Other mind's experiences are private, and so the fact that they are "phenomenal" does nothing to resolve this problem. All that can be known is that other minds appear to exist and that they appear to work similarly to ours. But when the solipsist says, "it does not appear so to me," what counter argument is left open?

The other difficulty is the idea of "knowledge of things-in-themseleves," as a sort of epistemic standard in the first place. Pace Kant, this is not what past metaphysicians thought they had. The category is itself modern. To hold that sort of knowledge up as a standard is to say something like: "things are most fully known when known without any mind," which is analogous to "what things truly look like is how they appear when seen without any eyes." This has to presuppose that we deny the premise: "the same is for thinking as for being" or that truth is the adequacy of thought to being (or else, there is being that is not truly being). I think the charge here would be that the "things-in-themseleves," are just an inappropriate reification of being, and that even if they were coherent, they would be, by definition, epistemically irrelevant.


Of course, some readings of Kant resolve these issues. I've even seen Kant read as Shankara or Nagarjuna. But these seem like a stretch to me. Doctrines like emptiness would suggest that the things-in-themselves are simply a sort of error (but of course, readings of Kant do dispense with noumena, I just don't think he does).

In support of your observation, Kant went as far as rejecting Descartes' grounds for confirming his own "thinking" as an experience.

From all this one sees that rational psychology has its origin in a mere misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given; and thus the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied to it, and hence this subject cannot be cognized at all. Thus the subject of the categories cannot, by thinking them, obtain a concept of itself as an object of the categories; for in order to think them, it must take its pure self-consciousness, which is just what is to be explained, as its ground. Likewise, the subject, in which the representation of time originally has its ground, cannot thereby determine its own existence in time, and if the latter cannot be, then the former as a determination of itself (as a thinking being in general) through categories can also not take place. *

* The "I think" is, as has already been said, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition "I exist." But I cannot say "Everything that thinks, exists"; for then the property of thinking would make all beings possessing it into necessary beings. Hence my existence also cannot be regarded as inferred from the proposition "I think," as Descartes held (for otherwise the major premise, "Everything that thinks, exists" would have to precede it), but rather it is identical with it. It expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e., a perception (hence it proves that sensation, which consequently belongs to sensibility, grounds this existential proposition), but it precedes the experience that is to determine the object of perception through the category in regard to time; and here existence is not yet a category, which is not related to an indeterminately given object, but rather to an object of which one has a concept, and about which one wants to know whether or not it is posited outside this concept. An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real, which was given, and indeed only to thinking in general, thus not as appearance, and also not as a thing in itself (a noumenon), but rather as something that in fact exists and is indicated as an existing thing in the proposition "I think." For it is to be noted that if I have called the proposition "I think" an empirical proposition, I would not say by this that the I in this proposition is an empirical representation; for it is rather purely intellectual, because it belongs to thinking in general. Only without any empirical representation, which provides the material for thinking, the act I think would not take place, and the empirical is only the condition of the application, or use, of the pure intellectual faculty. — CPR, Kant, B421

What is the evidence that supports that they (phenomena) are appearances? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn’t that utterly simple? Going back to the original post: the contention is, simply, that “the world” (object, thing) is not simply given but is constructed by the mind/brain. That’s what the brain does! In humans, the brain is an enormously complex organ which absorbs a very large proportion of the organism's metabolic energy. What’s it doing with all that power? Why, it’s creating a world! A very different world to that of cheetahs, otters, butterflies and divas, but a world nonetheless

This is Kant’s basic point - not that Kant has the last word on all the implications, not that Kant is correct in every detail. But his ‘Copernican revolution in philosophy’ is the factor which was a fundamental turning point in modern philosophy. It was arguably the origin of all such later developments as phenomenology and constructivism, and why Kant has been (rightly) designated the ‘godfather of cognitive science’. Hence also the amount of content devoted to cognitive science in the original post and the implied convergence of Pinter's 'gestalts' with the 'ideas' of classical philosophy.

In respect of the in-itself, Emrys Westacott puts it like this:

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble. — The Continuing Relevance of Immanuel Kant

Kant, by his own admission, knows absolutely nothing about other people in-themselves. Any appeal to shared biology or culture is an appeal to the phenomenal to explain a noumenal connection by which discrete phenomenal perspectives are the same. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But he knows how we appear! And we appear to have uniform abilities and faculties across populations, although of course with outliers and exceptional cases and those with anomalous skills. This charge of solipsism is often levelled at the kind of phenomenological idealism I'm advocating - but the response is, we are members of the same species language, and culture. Cultural worlds are vastly different, its inhabitants see things in completely different ways to what we regard as 'normal'. Again this is because we as a species and a cultural type construe the world in characteristic ways.

(When I did a unit in cognitive science, there were many examples of culturally-determined behaviours in response to situations. One I recall was an individual from a forest tribe in Africa, who was taken to a mountain lookout by an anthropologist, from where there was a vista of sweeping plains dotted with herd animals. The forest-dweller seemed to be looking at the view, but after a short time, he squatted and started drawing his fingers through the dirt in front of him. The translator explained that he was trying to 'touch the insects' - the insects being the distant herd animals. As this individual had lived his whole life in a forest, his sensory horizon could not encompass the idea of a 'distant view'.)

There's an enormous range of analogous data from anthropology, ethnology etc. The inhabitants of other cultures live in very different worlds to our own. Of course, it's all the same planet, but a world is more than a planet. It’s the structured field of meaning and perception we share through our faculties, language and culture - and that’s exactly what Kant was intuiting. That, I contend, is also the source of the later phenomenological concepts of 'lebenswelt' and 'umwelt' (also mentioned in the original post.)

And don’t forget that Kant, typical of academics of his day, also lectured in geography, anthropology, pedagogy, logic, physics, and mathematics — as well as philosophy.

Pace Kant, this is not what past metaphysicians thought they had. The category is itself modern. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which is the point I'm driving at in Idealism in Context. That is about the decline of the 'participatory ontology' that characterised scholastic realism via the absorption of Aristotle's hylomorphism.

Thomist critics like Maritain would say that Kant misses the “intuition of being” — a direct grasp of existence itself that grounds metaphysics. Without that, they argue, Kant seals us off from reality - something other critics also point out. There’s force in that critique. But even granting it, Kant’s basic insight remains: the world of experience is constituted through the mind’s forms and categories, not simply received as a mirror of things-in-themselves.

I've even seen Kant read as Shankara or Nagarjuna. But these seem like a stretch to me. Doctrines like emptiness would suggest that the things-in-themselves are simply a sort of error (but of course, readings of Kant do dispense with noumena, I just don't think he does). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've mentioned before I first read Kant via T R V Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (c 1955). This book is nowadays criticized by more current Buddhologists as being overly Euro-centric and too influenced by European idealism, but his comparison of Kant and Nāgārjuna really connected a lot of dots for me. Apropos of which:

Descartes mistake is to treat the cogito as if it delivered a determinate object — a existent entity. But Kant’s point in B421 is that this is a category mistake. The “I think” is the condition of experience of objects; it cannot itself be grasped as an object under the categories. That’s why Kant says the 'I' is not an appearance, not a noumenon, and not a substance — it’s simply the formal unity of apperception, which we can never convert into a determinate object without confusion. But Kant is also justly circumspect about the real nature of the self.

As Nāgārjuna has been mentioned, there's a short verse in the early Buddhist texts in which the Buddha is asked whether the self exists by 'the wanderer Vachagotta' (this character representing the type of seeker who asks philosophical or metaphysical questions.) Asked 'does the self exist?' and 'does the self not exist?', the Buddha declines to answer both questions, instead maintaining a 'noble silence'. Asked later by his attendant, Ananda, why he didn't answer, he replies that both answers would be misleading - saying 'yes' would 'side with the eternalists', those ascetics who maintain there is a permanently existing self, and 'no' would only confuse the questioner, as he would wonder where his self had gone (ref.) This is one of the origins of madhyamaka ('middle way') philosophy of later Buddhism, which designates the two views of 'existing' or 'not existing' as the errors of eternalism and nihilism, respectively. (Most commentators agree that contemporary culture tends towards the latter.)

:up: I agree with what you say there and you've covered the issue more throughly than I had, so I have nothing further to add at this point.

Differentiation need not be spatial nor temporal. We have differentiation of meaning, intention and value. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do we know of any meaning, intention and value outside the context of this spatiotemporal existence?

we can conclude that differentiation is prior to perception. — Metaphysician Undercover

No argument from me about that conclusion.

If you refuse to uphold a proper definition of "differentiation", as an act which requires selection, just so that you may equivocate, then you make philosophical discourse impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

Now you are contradicting what you said earlier. Differentiation just refers to the existence of more than one thing. So "selection" on our part is not logically required for there to be more than one thing.

Well, putting religion and spirituality to one side, no. But is there a good reason not to? — Punshhh

Religion and spirituality are not really discursive endeavors. Is there a good reason not to put religion and spirituality aside when doing philosophy?

I don’t see what belief has got to do with this, surely if something is cogent, it’s not a question of belief. — Punshhh

Cogent means clearly (and thus clearly expressible) and convincing, so I asked whether you had a clearly expressible and convincing reason to believe in a demiurge. Are you suggesting you have experienced the demiurge? When we experience (perceive) an ordinary object, we know what we have experienced because it is most times there, and we can go back and check, and we check with others if we are in doubt, and confirm (or disconfirm) that they also perceive the same object there.

That gives us cogent reason to believe in such objects, but I don't think the same applies with a demiurge. If we have what we think to be such an experience, what it is an experience of remains a matter of interpretation, and I think that should give us pause. If we feel an unshakeable conviction regarding what it was an experience of, it will be enough to non-rationally convince us, but it will not be enough to non-rationally convince others unless they have a will to believe as we do.

the world of experience is constituted through the mind’s forms and categories, not simply received as a mirror of things-in-themselves. — Wayfarer

As usual you go too far―you forget the role of the body and the world. "Co-constituted" would be a better term. Even if our minds were all exactly the same, which as @Wonderer correctly points out, they are not, that alone cannot explain the commonality of experience, even between us and the animals. This is a point you have repeatedly glossed over.

Well, Kant was a committed Lutheran who puzzled in the Critique of Judgement how Spinoza could carry on without the belief in the continuance of his personal soul.

Descartes reformulated the reasoning of Augustine in his pitch of the experience of himself. I agree that the "self" is a sticky wicket in Kant's model. But I think his concern was decidedly not Buddhist in it's character.

Of course, Kant knew nothng of Buddhism but they share some common ground. Kant's statement that the 'I' cannot be made an object of thought is an insight fundamental to Indian philosophy generally.

Strictly speaking, Kant is saying that the "I" cannot be experienced as "real" the way other things in life can be. That follows a way of thinking about reason itself such as performed by Anselm, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, etcetera.

Or if you prefer, Wittgenstein speaks of solipsism as manifest but not expressible. But then he stopped doing that later, realizing what he was not saying.

The instances make me wary of comparing one set of ideas against another.

Strictly speaking, Kant is saying that the "I" cannot be experienced as "real" the way other things in life can be. — Paine

The way I put it is that the 'I' or self cannot be said to exist in the same sense that the objects of cognition exist. There being an observer (a subject of experience) is the condition of existence of objects of cognition. Hence the 'transcendental unity of apperception' in Kant, or the transcendental ego of Husserl, or Schopenhauer's 'no object without a subject'.

But that is not Kant's complaint against Descartes. The limits of intuition do not inform us as to what is possible or not. There is no phrase in Kant that says:

There being an observer (a subject of experience) is the condition of existence of objects of cognition. — Wayfarer

He says

The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all. That representation that can be given prior to all thought is called intuition. All manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the ‘I think’ in the same subject in which this manifold is found. — (B132)

It might be better to say that the 'I think' is 'the condition of the possibility of experienceable objects'. And that conforms with the passage you quoted earlier:

The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given — CPR, Kant, B421

Here Kant warns against mistaking the unity of apperception itself (a formal, transcendental condition) for an intuition of a subject (as if the self were some object among objects). The “unity of thinking” grounds the possibility of objects as given in experience, but is not itself an object of intuition.

I concede the way that I put it (i.e. that there being a subject or observer...) is not strictly correct if that is taken to imply that 'the observer' is an existing thing.

The “unity of thinking” grounds the possibility of objects as given in experience, but is not itself an object of intuition. — Wayfarer

Which permits the thinking about the soul excluded in your previous argument.

Which permits the thinking about the soul excluded in your previous argument. — Paine

The basic idea is that the self or soul is unknowable. We ourselves are, in reality, the in-itself. That, I understand to be the wedge that Hegel used to build his dialectic (although I don't want to venture too far in that direction as my knowledge of Hegel and the other later idealists is cursory.)

Now you are contradicting what you said earlier. Differentiation just refers to the existence of more than one thing. So "selection" on our part is not logically required for there to be more than one thing. — Janus

Probably stepping in it a bit, but this seems clearly wrong to me. If differentiation is literally just things existing aside from one another (at all), then our perception does logically require selection into categories of those things. Otherwise, we would not perceive any differentiation. We select for object types, within the confines of a priori time and space. That seems pretty uninteresting or controversial if you take the premises on (I get that you may not, I'm just saying within the framework, this does seem required).

If I can address this topic, I will try it in the Rödl thread. It is a difficult conversation when you make certain claims and then disqualify yourself from opining upon them.

Do. But bear in mind, that I'm making these comments in the context of the original post, which is not directly about Kant and German idealism. It says only that it 'draws on insights from philosophical idealism which have been validated in some respects by cognitive science'.

If differentiation is literally just things existing aside from one another (at all), then our perception does logically require selection into categories of those things — AmadeusD

In the longer version of the original post (linked from it), there are references to a book called Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter, an essay in the philosophy of cognitive science. He starts by saying:

Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies — but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life — and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

Pinter goes on to argue that what the observer brings to the picture is ‘the picture’. He says that when we gaze out at our surroundings, we don’t see featureless space. Instead, our perception registers distinct entities, arrayed in spatial relationship with each other. We recognize these entities, can identify and name them. This act of apperception interprets the world as a collection of distinct items. Without the instinctive ability to make these distinctions, comprehension would be impossible and we couldn’t think or act.

Many will insist that those shapes, features and appearances were there all along - but that is not really the point. Certainly what we cognise was there all along, but it is not until they are re-cognized that they become meaningful to us (and for other animals likewise - Pinter by no means confines this to humans).

So, the Gerson argument? There is only the possibility of a made world against whatever one might propose?

I do understand that my approach can be difficult to understand. Like many others here, I've been reading this philosophical project for a lot of years. To me it doesn't seem idiosyncratic, but I can see how it appears that way to others, but I'm still confident that the essay on which this post is based is coherent and can stand up to scrutiny.

I am not arguing that it (the essay) means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

That is what I take as the meaning of the 'in-itself'.

Do we know of any meaning, intention and value outside the context of this spatiotemporal existence? — Janus

Yes, I told you, "order" itself. It is value not restricted by spatiotemporal context. It provides the foundation for mathematics upon which spatial temporal concepts are constructed.

Now you are contradicting what you said earlier. Differentiation just refers to the existence of more than one thing. So "selection" on our part is not logically required for there to be more than one thing. — Janus

For some reason, you have a tendency of stating things backward. You reverse the order of logic, presenting illogical statements. Here you say that the existence of more than one thing is required for differentiation. In reality though, the act of differentiation is an act that divides, thereby producing more than one thing. So you have the logical order reversed, to produce the illogical statement you make. In reality, for there to be more than one thing requires an act of differentiation, and this is an act of selection, the act which divides according to selected principles. Without this, your proposed "more than one thing" is an unintelligible infinity of divisions already made. An infinity already accomplished is illogical.

So "selection" on our part is not logically required for there to be more than one thing. — Janus

Selection on someone's part is required for there to be more than one thing. Someone has to choose by what principle one part is to be separated from another part, making more than one thing. How else could there be more than one thing, without assuming the infinity of divisions mentioned above?

Does your approach amount to:

Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind.

I propose that there is/was a strong countervailing movement against this idea;

…which is?

:ok: Good encapsulation

Selection on someone's part is required for there to be more than one thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

This too.

The idea of the person.

Sorry, but I don’t understand what you mean.

Yes, I told you, "order" itself. It is value not restricted by spatiotemporal context. It provides the foundation for mathematics upon which spatial temporal concepts are constructed. — Metaphysician Undercover

As far as I know mathematics exists only in the spatiotemporal world. There can be no order without things to be ordered.

It seems reasonable to think that, for example, the visual field is already differentiated for infants n terms of areas of different tones and colours, before they learn to recognize anything as anything. Also they would be aware of different sounds, smells, tastes and tactile "feels" and bodily sensations. Otherwise how could anything stand out for them in the first place?

Selection on someone's part is required for there to be more than one thing.
— Metaphysician Undercover

This too. — AmadeusD

I think this is arse-about. If there were not already more than one thing no selection could ever occur.

In reverse:

That's true and entirely uninteresting and changes nothing about what Meta and I have said. You're right - there could be no differentiation. But if there were no differentiation, we(acknowledging the absurdity of 'we' in this context) wouldn't know different. So it's irrelevant.

I'm not quite understanding the import of the first bit directed at me. I understand, and I think I agree. But as above, that doesn't change anything being noted here.

Remember, our perceptions of, and the actual world are not the same. In the world of a perceiving being, the outside, un-perceivable world means nothing at all.

The problem is that we have every reason to think there is a world prioir to perception, and because it seems impossible to imagine how a perception of vast differentiation could emerge from a featureless mass or from nothing at all, then I see it as most plausible to think that the world was already differentiated long before humans or even percipients arrived on the scene.

Not that I think the question and the answer to it matter that much, at least not to those who just accept that we live in a material world consisting of many, many things which don't depend on us for their existence.

That view would obviously be more bleak, and hence more significant, to those who wish there to be more than just this life.