This seems silly. An unconscious person isn't brain-dead.

Do you know what personhood is? Just because a brain is firing neurons doesn’t mean that that being, which has that brain, is a person. E.g., a dog is not a person (traditionally).

must instead rely on arbitrary "nature".

Evolution is not arbitrary: that is a myth invented by some evangelical religious people.

Obviously "life" does not begin at conception, since all the cells involved are already alive before they fuse.

It is an undisputed scientific fact that life begins at conception: it is the clear beginning mark of the ever-continual development cycle of an individual human being (until death).

Notice in the text it’s “objects which affect our senses”, not thing-in-themselves. Which is to say things-in-themselves are not that which affects our senses.

But it clearly said it in the Prolegomena! Quite frankly, I am pretty sure it also says it outright in the CRP; but I don’t have time right now to skim through and try to find it—so take that part with a grain of salt.

Then I’d love to know, for you to inform me, what sensation I would receive from a thing-in-itself.

You would receive sensations from your senses of what it sensed of the thing as it were in-itself. I don’t understand how this is controversial. Viz., the ball hits your arm, your neurons fire, intuiting & judging & cognizing & … happen, and then you experience the feeling of getting hit.

You are talking about a thing-in-itself as if it never excites our senses—what then, is the point? That seems like a noumena in that stricter sense of an object which is not a possibly sensed or/and represented by our faculties.

If I receive a sensation in conjunction with the sensory device being impacted, then I should be able to smell, hear, taste, etc., a thing-in-itself. How, then, do I distinguish it from a thing?

Why would that be the case? If the ball hits your arm, you end up experiencing the sensations of the ball that were interpreted by your brain into some sort of perception: the ball as it is in-itself doesn’t get perceived—it gets sensed.

I am not following what you are arguing: are you saying that the thing as it is in-itself does NOT excite our senses such that we perceive something?

Its because it is an abstract. There is nothing to observe.

Hmmm, I disagree with this inference here: an object which is not a possible object of experience is not thereby no object at all. We are not talking about some abstract thing, like a Platonic form, that exists in a supersensible realm nor are we merely talking about a concept in our brains nor minds—we are talking about a real object, a physical object, which simply is not cognizable by us. See what I mean?

The point that I disagree with in apriori is that we can have knowledge without experience.
…
“You cognition must have more than a mere belief to know how to do what it does. E.g., your cognition has a priori knowledge on how to construct objects in space because it clearly does it correctly (insofar as they are represented with extension). The necessary precondition for the possibility of experiencing objects with extension is that your brain knows how to do that.”

Correct, and this aspect of apriori I agree with

I am not following. If you agree that your brain has to know how to intuit and cognize objects in space independently of any possible experience that it has, then you cannot disagree with the idea that some knowledge our brains have are without experience.

Whatever "rational" grounds you might have for believing in naive realism, it is incompatible with physics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology.

I don’t think direct realism is per se incompatible with science: it depends on the view. Personally, I’ve never heard a good argument for direct realism, but I see no inherent incoherence with it conjoined with science.

Also, Leontiskos is absolutely correct to note:

Besides, the belief that science can adjudicate the Kantian question just belies a misunderstanding of the Kantian question, not to mention the science.

Scientific investigations of how we perceive already, to some extent, presuppose the a priori modes by which we intuit and cognize objects, being that we must study the intuited and cognized version of our own representative faculties, and so the Kantian question is still very much alive and puzzling.

All else being equal, we would expect the doctors to do everything they can to rehabilitate them and keep them alive. Circumstances matter, though, as, e.g., the doctors may have to prioritize one sick patient over another; but this is a reflection of limited resources and not a disrespect for human life.

Come on, Bob. Yes, a foetus is not a cyst. A blastocyst is a cyst.

Banno, I know you are a very intelligent person. You cannot possibly think that a blastocyst is a cyst—is the word ‘cyst’ in blastocyst throwing you off?

A zygote is never a cyst: that implies it is a liquid sac that developed abnormally and should be removed. A blastocyst is, even according to your own link, a “hallow ball of cells...[which] implants in the wall of the uterus about 6 days after fertilization”. What you are describing is a stage of the process of development of an alive human being.

A cyst is not a person.

Correct. As I noted in my last response, personhood does not begin at conception; and the best way to ground rights in the nature of the being in question—specifically whether or not its nature sets it out as a person. This is not the same thing as saying that a living being is currently a person.

E.g., a human being that is knocked out on the floor does not have personhood; has the capacity for personhood; and has a nature such that it sets it out as a species which are persons.

Even if we agree that "a human being acquires rights that a person gets because their nature sets them out as being a member of a rational species", the question arrises as to when the cyst becomes a member of that rational species.

The blastocyst is an alive human being: it is a scientific fact that life begins at conception. I am not sure why you would argue the contrary.

A fetus is not a cyst: that is scientifically and blatantly false.

To your point though, and of which I purposefully left out, my view does raise the question of when exactly does a human being acquire rights? If it is personhood, then it clearly doesn't begin [having rights] at conception.

The two basic views is the personhood vs. animalism style arguments, but I think both fail for reasons I will skip over for now. I think that the Aristotelian view works best: a human being acquires rights that a person gets because their nature sets them out as being a member of a rational species. Trying to dissect rights in terms of when a being currently has personhood vs. merely being alive doesn't really work; whereas analyzing the living thing in terms of its substance works great.

Let me give this a crack.

First and foremost, in order for this argument to work, we must agree (at least as a mere stipulation) that the end(s) does (do) not justify the means—viz., I cannot do a bad action for the sake of a good end (e.g., I cannot kill and harvest the organs of an innocent, healthy person to save a sick person’s life).

A person (i.e., a living being with a proper will—i.e., with a mind capable of rational deliberation—or, more generally, a part of a rational species) has certain basic rights; and they have rights, which are not mere privileges, because each person must respect, equally, each other person because they are a person. Two of these rights are the right to bodily autonomy and the right to life.

It is important to note that the right to life is NOT the right to anything required to live, and the right to bodily autonomy is the NOT the right to do anything required to preserve or enforce one’s own will about their own body (i.e., autonomy); exactly because the end does not justify the means. I cannot violate your right to bodily autonomy EVEN IF it would result in the upholding of my own (e.g., forcing you to be my slave and work on a plantation to produce goods that help me maintain my health) because I would be performing a bad action for the sake of something good—which is always wrong.

So here’s why I am pro-life: killing an innocent person is to violate their right to life, and so any action which incorporates killing an innocent person as a means towards a good end, such as upholding the bodily autonomy of a pregnant female, is always wrong. I cannot do something bad to do something good: I must find another way that is permissible, or abstain from interjecting (i.e., let something bad happen).

Does that help?

Sure thing. I don't have time right now to skim back over the whole thing to pull a quote, but the introduction seems to obviously allude to it:

That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience?

--- CPR, p.1

In the Prolegomena, section 32, he also clearly explicates this as well:

In fact, when we (rightly) regard the objects of the senses as mere appearances, we thereby admit that they have a thing in itself as their ground—·namely, the thing of which they are appearances·. We don’t know what this thing is like in itself; all we know is its appearance, i.e. how this unknown something affects our senses. I

If you think about it, it makes no sense to say that the thing-in-itself is not the object which impacted our senses: that's the whole point of the idea of having a representational system based off of sensations.

something has to exist for me to question it. You must demonstrate why that something must be an 'I' which is me---a valid critique from Nietzsche.

I didn't follow that: there's no such thing as a "noumenal a priori concept".

Have you read the CPR? In modern times, the idea that we cannot know anything about the things-in-themselves has been largely left behind; and the vast majority of people are naive realists. Even the indirect realists do not tend to be as strong in their position as Kant was: they tend to still think that how we perceive reality is predominantly a reflection of reality in-itself.

The problem is that you are not making any real objection to the idea that we cannot know the things-in-themselves: you are just sidestepping it by noting the uncontroversial fact that we can infer things from other things.

You have to remember, Kant divides the world into the phenomena and noumena (roughly speaking): propositions acquired through empirical observation are only valid as universally true for human experience. The inferences you are talking about are things Kant would place squarely in the phenomenal---not noumenal---world.

I am going to condense our conversation into one, to keep track of it better.

t’s affect is called sensation and its representation is called phenomenon, but the particular object itself, hasn’t yet been exposed to that part of the system which assigns conceptions. Which is to say, we don’t know yet what to think of that particular object impacting our senses.

This part is where you lost me. How is “its representation” not the end result of the judgments, concepts, and reason?

So even though the conscious subject to which experience belongs has no need to call the particular object that appears to the senses anything, insofar as he isn’t even conscious of the synthesis producing phenomena anyway, and to which Kant gives the term “…the undetermined object of empirical intuition…”, the system itself does need to call it something, in order for that which follows from it, to be a valid logical inference. As far as the system itself is concerned, then, to which being conscious or not has no meaning, that thing is called a transcendental object.

From my reading of CPR, the thing-in-itself is what impacts the senses.

Try thinking of phenomena as the signal traveling along nerves, say, output of the eye to the input to the brain. There is a signal, we have no awareness of it, but it is something, which we call intuition, and the information the signal carries represents whatever it was that impacted the sensory device to which the nerves connect, and that is called phenomenon.

This doesn’t seem coherent with Kant’s schema: Kant refers to what we end up seeing, hearing, etc. as phenomena. This is why I am trying to get you to answer what you call the end result which is a part of one’s experience; and I still have yet to hear an answer.

The whole idea of having, the only reason to have, a concept, is to represent that thing perceived, by a name. The name apple merely indicates how the thing perceived is to be known, which is called experience.

This is peculiar to me, as, then, the brain does not know the concept of quality; nor any of the twelve categories of the understanding—nor does the “understanding” if you want to avoid using the term “brain”.

I may be misunderstanding, but assuming I do, no, I would not agree. Faculties are function-specific members of a system described in a metaphysical theory. There’s no possible method by which those faculties can be found in a brain, they being merely logical constructs, and by the same token, there’s nothing empirically provable, hence nothing falsifiable, in a metaphysical theory. All that can be said, insofar as empirical verifications for non-empirical theories are out of the question, is the brain has nothing to do with abstract conceptions authorized by such theory.

Wouldn’t you agree, though, that the brain is the representation of the thing which has those faculties? It’s two sides of the same coin.

Why do I have to presuppose that objects effect my senses, when my sensations apodeitically prove my senses have been affected? If I can see a mosquito bite me, if I can smell the bacon I hear frying, why do I have to presuppose either one of those objects?

Because none of that is about things-in-themselves. If you agree that seeing a mosquito bite you indicates there is a mosquito, whatever it may be exactly, in reality in itself which impacted your senses; then you don’t believe we cannot know anything about things-in-themselves...for you just admitted that a mosquito is an animal which exists in reality in-itself.

And on the other hand, why subject myself to the absurdity of supposing what just bit me, or that stuff I’m about to consume, wasn’t an object at all?

Because the material world you experience is material because of the a priori way that you cognize it—re: space and time.

A thing in itself is not 'an object'. Its a logical concept.

A thing-in-itself is the concept of an object which we cannot know anything about: so it necessarily is an object. You make it sound like it is purely abstract: it is no more abstract than the concept of an object, which refers to a real object.

It seems like you agreed with me, so I am not following why you do not believe in a priori knowledge. If your representative faculties must already know how to do certain things and already has certain concepts at its disposal, then it must have a priori knowledge. Perhaps it has to do with:

Belief is a requirement for cognition. Knowledge is a potential result of cognition.

To keep things simple, let’s assume the traditional interpretation of knowledge: a justified, true belief.

You cognition must have more than a mere belief to know how to do what it does. E.g., your cognition has a priori knowledge on how to construct objects in space because it clearly does it correctly (insofar as they are represented with extension). The necessary precondition for the possibility of experiencing objects with extension is that your brain knows how to do that.

Or referring back to my original example, your reasoning would entail that it is irrational to believe that there is something moving under my bed covers.

No it would not. I was trying to entertain your analogy to help further the discussion, but it is technically a bad analogy: it is already littered with phenomenal knowledge and requires no knowledge of the things-in-themselves. You would have to give an example which posits inferred knowledge of a thing-in-itself from phenomena to demonstrate your point: it is uncontroversially true that we can infer about phenomena, or possible phenomena, from given phenomena (such as a ball being under the bed without seeing it).

The epistemic dualism that inevitably arises in indirect realism is exactly because the very idea of a bed, covers, and something being underneath them is phenomenal; and once you strip away the a priori means of cognizing them, there is no intelligible “bed” nor “covers” left.

What you are trying to do, mistakenly, is claim that you can infer the things-in-themselves like how you can infer something phenomenally from other phenomena: these are not the same at all.

I have no problem with saying that I can infer about things as it relates to phenomena; but inferring about things-in-themselves from phenomena is a contradicto in adjecto.

Your reasoning as it stands applies to believing in anything that one cannot directly perceive, and so would call into question almost all of science (especially particle physics).

In the CPR, an object which our sensibility is incapable of sensing, or which our understanding is incapable of cognizing, are noumena: they are sub-species of things-in-themselves. Noumena are equally unknowable as any other things-in-itself: your sensibility, intuition, and cognition are only capable of knowing things as it is a priori structured to.

Now, if by science you are smuggling in scientific realism, then, yes, I think a transcendental idealist would have to be a scientific anti-realist of sorts; but this does not mean that science isn’t applicable to phenomena. In fact, that’s exactly what Kant argued—viz., science is grounded in a priori principles and of which are only universally true for human experience. That’s kind of the whole point Kant is trying to argue for: the synthesis of rationalism with British empiricism.

Even the direct realist (if also a scientific realist)

You are equivocating: one can be a direct realist without being a scientific realist. Every direct realist must be an empirical realist—albeit it rare, they could reject the scientific process of study. EDIT: Ignore this part: I read it wrong.

How can you know that you exist at all? That you exist itself also requires inherent trust of one's experience: we experience in a way where there seems to be an 'I' vs. 'other'.

Let's go down this path which you are describing: I think that will be beneficial. What about your perceptions do you think gives you accurate enough information to make an inference about reality as it is in-itself?

Sorry for the belated response!

I do not believe 1+1=2 is apriori for example.

The metaphysical underpinnings for “1 + 1 = 2” is that our brains construct our conscious experience according to math insofar as the plotting of objects in space is inherently mathematical.

Of course, the other alternative would be just say that math is a way that our over-arching faculty of reason nominally parses our conscious experience—which is the strongest version of mathematical anti-realism.

IE, that people are capable of doing logic is innate, but the practice of classical logic specifically must be learned.

That logic is a priori does not entail that we can perform, intellectually, logic properly since birth. These are separate considerations: the former is about how inherently logical our conscious experience is, the latter is about how logically sound our over-arching reason is at argumentation and reasoning.

Close, but not quite. A dog can experience a thing as well, but it cannot come up with the idea of "a thing in itself". That requires language, thinking, debate, etc. It is not an innate conclusion, but one of applied reason.

The point is that a thing-in-itself is the thing as it is in-itself: of course, it is a separate note that one may not have any self-reflective knowledge of it. Knowledge is, though, a requirement for cognition: your brain has to know how to do things and how to apply concepts and what not in order to construct the conscious experience you are currently having.

Since we can only observe representations, how do we know there's something under those representations? We only know because sometimes, the world contradicts our interpretations. Therefore the only logical thing we can conclude is that there must be something beyond our perceptions and interpretations that exists. Its not a proof of "I see the thing in itself" its a proof of, "Its the only logical conclusion which works."

Nothing about what we think is going to happen, self-reflectively, nor its contradiction entails that there is an object which impacted our senses (and of which we are experiencing). You seem to be conflating the faculties which produce our experience with our self-reflective knowledge of that experience. Viz., I may be wrong that this object next to be is red, but that my experience contradicts me is not the same as reality contradicting me.

To me, I would agree that the best explanation, given experience, is that there are objects impacting our senses: but that is derived from empirical data from (ultimately) our experience itself. E.g., I experience getting knocked out by a ball, I experience an optical illusion, I study biology, etc. This is not inherently a process of reality contradicting me: it is me confirming hypotheses through empirical study.

Its not necessarily about trust, its about experience. You and I have both had instances in our lives where our perceptions and beliefs about the world were contradicted in unexpected ways. Thus we conclude that there is something that exists apart from our understanding and perceptions.

Wouldn’t you agree that you have to trust your experiences, to some degree, to even posit that reality sometimes contradicts your perceptions?

Good discussion as usual Bob! I always like how you drill in. I'm heading out on vacation this week to Yellowstone park with some friends, so I won't be available to reply for a while. I'll read your reply when I get back for sure. Until then, stay great and I hope the discussion is interesting!

No worries at all!

The problem is that you have hidden the paradox, but it is there in your example. Either you trust the evidence you are using to infer whether or not there is such a thing under your bed, and what it is, or you do not. If you do, then you are trusting that evidence to give you accurate information about the "under the bed as it is in-itself": if you deny that have any such trustworthy evidence, then you have not reason to believe you can infer, other than blindly and absurdly, what is under there.

There is no doubt in my mind that this visual experience has been caused by something external to the visual experience itself
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It seems part of the a priori structure of the brain to expect that everything that happens has a cause. This cause may be called the thing-in-itself.

Assuming by thing-in-itself we mean the object qua itself (independently of our experience of it), it sounds like you are denying that you cannot have any knowledge of the things-in-themselves; which cannot be true if there is an a priori structure by which your brain intuits and cognizes objects (which you equally affirmed).

This doesn’t seem coherent to me.

In other words, the conception alone is not knowledge.

Hmmm, I don’t buy it. The concept of an apple is knowledge of what an apple is—that’s part of the whole idea of having a concept of an apple.

If I see a ball, I don’t call it either of those you mentioned. I call it a ball iff I already know it as such, or, if you inform me that’s what that thing I see, is.

That’s fair. Again, as I noted in your DM: that’s besides the point.

And I didn’t say whatever our brain says it is; I said whatever our understanding says it is, insofar as the faculty of understanding, in its full procedural operation, thinks, judges and cognizes….all those systemic artifices which are grounded in logic as opposed to being grounded in external reality and externally affected physiology, and internal reproductive imagination, re: intuition, the sum of which is called sensibility.

I get why you went that route, but wouldn’t you agree the brain is the representational knowledge of those faculties?

but does presuppose nonetheless, that the human individual is of such a nature as to have representational faculties imbued in a system by which any knowledge at all is possible.

But, then, you have to concede that you have to trust your conscious experience to derive that that experience is representational—no?

Otherwise, you are just blindly presupposing that objects effect our senses—there’s nothing, without the aid of experience, that can be used transcendentally to determine that.

I do not see all these claims as being about the world as it is in itself.

I can see that to some extent—e.g., the faculty of understanding is not a comment on what such exists as in reality as it is in-itself.

Could it be that the biggest problem for indirect realists, is being called indirect realists?

What would you call it, then?

Kant doesn't speak of brains, neuroscience, genetics, etc. when making his case.
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Kant's arguments are based on "what must be necessary for thought to exist as such."

That’s fair, I use those terms to explain it because it is easier to convey to other people. Most people have never heard of transcendental approaches to truth.

this is why the "paradox" shows up—it's the result of mixing Kant's conclusions with empiricist arguments about the way perception is shaped by biology, physics, etc.

Could you elaborate on this part? I still think there’s a paradox even if you speak in purely Kant’s terms. We only know that objects are a necessary precondition for our experience IF we trust our experience to some extent—which he then turns around and denies is possible. I think this might be, although I am not familiar with Hegel’s critique, what you are referring to with Hegel:

Now, the other thing you get at is that Kant does seem to dogmatically assume that perceptions are of objects. That's Hegel's big charge, worked out in the Logic. Hegel agrees that perceptions are of objects, but he thinks that starting out by presupposing this is how Kant ends up with the noumenal and his dualism problem.

This sounds like Hegel identified the paradox as “dualism problem”. How does Hegel resolve this issue then? That might help resolve it here.

I apologize for the belated response! My schedule got hectic.

The way in which we know our own being, and the way we know the existence of other objects, is
different.

Correct. But:

I think that Kant agrees with Descartes that knowledge of our own being is apodictic i.e. it cannot plausibly be denied, as it is a condition of us knowing anything whatever (cogito ergo sum)

Kant clearly denies the cogito ergo sum argument, and argues in the CPR that we cannot know anything about the self as it is in-itself because our self-consciousness, albeit it different, is still representational. It is important to remember that Descartes was arguing for the self as a simple substance; and Kant was arguing for the self as the unity of apperception, which has transcendental validity insofar as it is necessary for constructing our conscious experience:

The proposition, “I think,” is, in the present case, understood in a problematical sense, not in so far as it contains a perception of an existence (like the Cartesian “Cogito, ergo sum”), ["I think, therefore I am."] but in regard to its mere possibility – for the purpose of discovering what properties may be inferred from so simple a proposition and predicated of the subject of it.
…
That the I or Ego of apperception, and consequently in all thought, is singular or simple, and cannot be resolved into a plurality of subjects, and therefore indicates a logically simple subject – this is self-evident from the very conception of an Ego, and is consequently an analytical proposition. But this is not tantamount to declaring that the thinking Ego is a simple substance – for this would be a synthetical proposition. The conception of substance always relates to intuitions, which with me cannot be other than sensuous, and which consequently lie completely out of the sphere of the understanding and its thought: but to this sphere belongs the affirmation that the Ego is simple in thought. It would indeed be surprising, if the conception of “substance,” which in other cases requires so much labour to distinguish from the other elements presented by intuition – so much trouble, too, to discover whether it can be simple (as in the case of the parts of matter) – should be presented immediately to me, as if by revelation, in the poorest mental representation of all.

– CPR: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/reason/critique-of-pure-reason.htm#:~:text=That%20the%20I%20or,mental%20representation%20of%20all.

If all you are noting is that Kant believed that there must be something which exists which is producing the conscious experience which I have, then that is true; but this is not the same as the cogito argument (in its original argumentation).

This is critical because nothing I said that you quoted denies the ‘I’ as the unity of apperception; and Kant is denying any knowledge of the self as it is in-itself. So, the paradox again arises such that I cannot trust even my own internal sense to give me information about what I am in in-itself and yet I can trust it enough to know that I am at all—seems problematic, no?

An object with no definite properties is not an object at all. To be an object is to have properties.

My point was that that we could say there is an object, but nothing about what it is—nothing about its properties. I just worded that confusingly.

Again, the key difference about knowledge of objects, and knowledge of your own faculties

Hopefully the above helps clarify why this does not resolve the paradox. Viz., if you can trust your internal sense enough to give you accurate enough information to know you exist [with representative faculties], then you necessarily can know some information about how the world really is.

No worries! Just let me know if you decide to tap back in!

I just realized I forgot to note that the acceptance of the material world being identical to the subjective world (of conscious experience) does not entail ontological idealism. Realism is still on the table.

Correct. A 'thing in itself' is a logical limit. If we observe some 'thing', there has to be something to observe. But if we are observing it, we realize we are observing it by interpreting things like light, sound, touch, and nerve firings. Logically, we cannot see the thing as it is 'in itself' because we are always observing it through another medium, and then creating one or many identities or discrete experiences out off it.
…
I do not believe in apriori knowledge apart from instinct.

Without admitting that there are a priori means by which your brain cognizes objects, then you have no basis to claim that our observations are limited—that they are not 100% mirrors of reality as it is in-itself. Direct realism would still be on the table.

To be fair, what you described is, in fact, a simplified statement of exactly what a priori knowledge is...so I am not convinced you actually disbelieve in it (;

This “logical limit” that you described is the same as saying, in philosophical jargon, “the thing-in-itself cannot be known, because we can only ever experience a ‘thing’ which was the result of a prior processes and of which pertain solely to the way our representative faculties are pre-structured to represent”.

So, likewise, I don’t really see how you are getting around the paradox either.

Even though I'm seeing a red ball in front of me, I'm really seeing the light and interpreting it. The light is bouncing off the ball, so something is there. But I can't understand what its like to see a ball without light bouncing off of it.

The ball which you see, and any experimental investigations of the light and how it reflects off the ball, is conditioned by the a priori means by which your receptivity senses and your brain represents; and so you cannot understand what the ball is like itself at all—not just what it would be like without color.

Viz., your understanding of the ball is fundamentally construed by the two pure forms of sensibility (i.e., space and time), riddled with a priori concepts (e.g., quality, quantity, relation, etc.), a priori mathematical relations (e.g., 3 ft diameter, etc.), a priori logical relations (e.g., principle of non-contradiction, excluded middle, identity, etc.), etc.; and so there is absolutely no way for you to know how that ball exists independently of those means of knowing it (re: just try to strip away the a priori means of understanding the ball, and you will certainly have nothing conceptually left but an object with no definite properties).

Thus the placeholder for this logical determination is a 'thing in itself'. And there is nothing more to know about them then that.

The paradox arises, and of which you have not really resolved, when you realize that you had to trust your experience to tell you that you exist in a transcendent world, you have representative faculties, and that those faculties are representing external objects—all of which are claims about reality as it is in-itself. You right to note that the ‘thing-in-itself’ is off limits if those claims are true, but that’s exactly why it is paradoxical: you had to accept that very claim is false to accept the original claims to begin with, and then by accepting those claims come to deny the other one. See what I mean?

The two elements of our cognitions I mentioned were phenomena and conceptions. I have yet to mention a priori knowledge for the simple reason at the juncture of phenomena and conceptions, in and of themselves alone, there isn’t any to mention, in that the faculty of reason which is the source of it, isn’t yet in the explanatory picture.

An a prior conception is a prior knowledge: that is knowledge which one has independently of any possible experience.

The end result of the unity of those two elements, phenomena and conception, is thought

So when you see a ball, you would call that the “thought” of a ball and not the “phenomena” of a ball? This doesn’t seem to cohere well with Kant’s semantics, but admittedly I don’t have the time to go back through the CPR and grab quotes—so take this comment with a grain of salt.

The object we experience is called, is expressively represented by, whatever name understanding thinks for it

This is cheating. I am asking what you call, generically, the thing which is the result of the intuition and cognition—of which we experience—and you just replied with “it’s whatever our brain thinks it is—e.g., a ball”. I would call it, most generically, a phenomena: I am still unsure what you call it.

To be fair, you may have a legitimate paradox in mind, but the expression of it herein, the conditions by which you promote its validity, cannot follow from the text in which you say it is to be found.

Do you not believe that transcendental idealism presupposes that one has cogent knowledge that the individual exists in reality as it is in-itself and is of such a nature as to have representative faculties which represents objects which exist in reality in-itself according to how it is pre-structured to sense and represent? These are all claims about the world as it is in-itself, and not merely as it appears to us.

I think you’re sensing it as a paradox because you have an innate conviction that the world is innately real - and yet Kant seems to call this into question. So it’s more a kind of cognitive dissonance. Isn’t that the source of the paradox you’re claiming to describe, in simple terms?

I am not following how you are avoiding the paradox described in the OP here. If one takes a realist or an idealist approach, they get the same problem.

The paradox is that the ‘thing-in-itself’, which Kant most definitely claims must exist as a transcendental truth, cannot be known if our conscious experience is representational; but to know that one’s conscious experience is representational requires us to trust that very conscious experience to know some aspects of the things-in-themselves (such as that we exist with a nature such that we represent objects which impact our sensibility).

What you are noting that Kant calls into question, is the material world’s existence; and depending on which version of the CPR you will find that part taken out. All it suggests, as Schopenhauer noted, is that Kant was entertaining (ontological) idealism at one point; but eventually swapped it for indirect realism.

This OP’s problem for indirect realism applies just as much to any (ontological) idealism which posits that our conscious experience is representational.

Why don't you see any paradox, now that you understand the OP?

For many indirect realists, arguments from illusion, dreams etc. are "grounds" for accepting representational experience.

You just quoted the OP out of context, and made an argument that does not even remotely attempt to resolve the paradox described in it.

Nice to see you again, Philosophim!

So in sum, we are limited to knowing there are things in themselves by contradictions to our representations by experience. That's it.

I see. Am I understanding you correctly to be denying the claim in the OP that we cannot know anything about things-in-themselves if we only have representational experience?

If so, then here’s the two “arguments” I gave @wonderer1 and @180 Proof:

Firstly, the phenomena are a result of the cognition of sensations and not things-in-themselves; and those sensations are limited by our sensibility. Our sensibility is incapable of migrating the properties of the things-in-themselves over to the understanding because they are limited to how they are pre-structured to sense (such as the two forms of sensibility: space and time). For you claim to hold, you would have to explain how it can be that our sensibility can migrate the properties of things-in-themselves to our understanding.

Secondly, any given phenomena stripped of the a prior means of intuiting and cognizing it is left perfectly unintelligible (viz., remove all spatial, temporal, mathematical, logical, etc. properties from the phenomena and you have nothing left to conceptually work with other than a giant '?'); so whatever the thing-in-itself is will be exactly what is unintelligible: it is the 'thing' stripped of the a priori means of cognizing it.

With all due respect, you didn't even attempt to address the OP at all.

None of these things can be established empirically.

As you noted, this isn’t a critique of the OP. All philosophical positions are like this: so I am failing to see how you are resolving the paradox or denying its existence. All you noted is that we cannot provide a strict empirical proof for any philosophical position.

Again, there is no paradox because the claims are neither true nor false.

You don’t believe that philosophical statements are propositional? E.g., you don’t believe that “two objects cannot be in the same place and time” is propositional?

Thanks for the nod, Bob. Hopefully whatever I contribute helps in some way.

:wink:

If he correctly concludes, how can a paradox arise? Isn’t a paradox only possible if he wasn’t correct with his conclusion, given the initial conditions?

The paradox was outlined in the OP, and arises out of Kant correctly concluding (from the stipulations) that we have no knowledge of the things-in-themselves.

Is it that a paradox is being manufactured from a misunderstanding?

You tell me!

The “phenomenal world” is only intuition itself, and, the “certain relations” are between the “undetermined object” and space and time. “Arranged and viewed” is merely a euphemism for cognized, which is clearly post hoc relative to the synthesis of the matter of sensation to the pure form in the mind a priori.

“Elements of our cognitions” are that which constitutes them, but are not them. Phenomena then, are one of two elements of our cognition, the other being conception, there being possibly a manifold of each for any given cognition.

All these were fair points. I was thinking of “phenomena” as the result of our cognition to keep things simple. Techincally, yes, phenomena are the intuitions which are, thereafter, cognized.

THAT there is an appearance of something is determinable from its sensation, but that an object appears, from which we know only the mode of its reception, re: which sensual device is affected, does nothing to facilitate the object’s relation is to our understanding, or, which is the same thing, how it is to be, first, cognized, and consequently, known, by us.

Shouldn’t it be “intuited”, since the, according to you, “phenomena” are the result of a priori intuition and not cognition?

Any given phenomena presupposes the a priori means of intuition, otherwise none would be given.

By “phenomena”, I was referring to the end result of intuition and cognition: we were just talking about two different things. What term would you use for such an end result which includes the two elements you described (namely phenomena and a priori knowledge)? Viz., what’s the object which we experience called then?

Sadly, I don’t think you addressed the paradox from the OP: what were your thoughts on it?

E.g., If you can trust the appearances of your experience to tell you that you exist with a brain which cognizes objects that are outside of it (and that this is true in reality as it is in-itself: not appearance); then this contradicts the notion that you cannot know the things-in-themselves and that you can only know appearances. Either you know you exist only facially or you know it as a matter of fact about reality in-itself.

If you can only know them as they appear to us then you cannot know them as they are in-themselves, but you have to claim certain things about things-in-themselves to begin with: namely, the five claims I noted in the OP. See the paradox?

I appreciate your response and quotations, but I don't think it addressed the OP whatsoever. I am not noting in the OP the implications of only knowing the "images of reality" but, rather, a paradox that arises for anyone who accepts that they have a brain and it represents objects which exist outside of it according to a priori modes and means. They must trust their experience to believe that indirect realism is true (in the sense of the commonly accepted version of it) which necessarily trusts their a priori modes of cognizing reality to give information about things-in-themselves, and then the theory necessitates (from this indirect realism) that we cannot now the things-in-themselves at all.

Both claims seem perfectly cogent to me and seem necessitated by accepting indirect realism in the sense of having a brain that represents reality; and so I am wondering if anyone has a solution or any useful comments on how indirect realism (or some sort of idealism) could salvage itself.

I'd suggest seeking scientific understanding of what the sensations are a result of

I don’t think you are fully understanding the OP’s proposed paradox yet, but I think we can get there.

Scientific understanding is a posteriori (i.e., it is purely empirical [besides the underlying philosophical presuppositions of it]); and so if we accept that scientific knowledge can tell us that we have representational experience (viz., that indirect realism is true) and about how we represent objects which impact the senses, then we are immediately and necessarily conceding that we can trust our representational experience to know about some things about the world as it is in-itself (namely, what was noted before). The paradox arises because when we accept it, because then we must also perform a transcendental investigation of it (which is philosophical, as opposed to scientific) and that investigation produces the conclusion that we cannot know things-in-themselves. Even on a scientific note, the science supports we cannot know the things-in-themselves with respect to the first reason I gave: if you accept that we have scientific knowledge that we have sensibility and that our brains cognize objects based off of the sensations therefrom, then you should also accept that the sensations cannot possibly a priori migrate properly the properties of the things-in-themselves (since they are preconditioned by the prestructured way by which the sensibility senses); and so the objects of our experience (i.e., phenomena) are really representations of sensations and not things-in-themselves.

The paradox arises because we had to trust that scientific (or more generally empirical) knowledge that we have sensibility and representative faculties to begin with (which is also mediated fundamentally by our a priori knowledge)—so we are trusting that our experience can give us knowledge of the things-in-themselves to some extent even though we thereafter must conclude we have no knowledge of the things-in-themselves.

Do you see what I mean?

Translating into wondererese yields, "If the functioning of a person's brain is disabled, the person won't have intelligible thoughts." My response to my interpretation is, "Right. And???"

If I were to take a jab at translating into “wondererese” I would say: “We accept we have a brain and that it represents objects which are outside of it and this brain is incapable of knowing the things-in-themselves because it represents sensations according to how it is [and its neurological receptors are] pre-structured, but this acceptance of all the previously mentioned required us to trust our experience, which is produced by that very brain, to know that we had a brain in reality as it is in-itself in the first place—thereby contradicting where we began”.

I am not merely pointing out that if our brains didn’t function properly, that they would function properly; which is all I understood your translation to say.

By claiming we have conditional knowledge of the things-in-themselves, you are denying that representational experience cannot afford us knowledge of the things-in-themselves (which I noted Kant had rightly pointed out in the CPR). So we would, then, have to discuss what reasons we have for thinking that the a priori modes by which we cognize objects can afford knowledge of a thing as it is in-itself. I will start the discussion with two "arguments".

Firstly, the phenomena are a result of the cognition of sensations and not things-in-themselves; and those sensations are limited by our sensibility. Our sensibility is incapable of migrating the properties of the things-in-themselves over to the understanding because they are limited to how they are pre-structured to sense (such as the two forms of sensibility: space and time). For you claim to hold, you would have to explain how it can be that our sensibility can migrate the properties of things-in-themselves to our understanding.

Secondly, any given phenomena stripped of the a prior means of intuiting and cognizing it is left perfectly unintelligible (viz., remove all spatial, temporal, mathematical, logical, etc. properties from the phenomena and you have nothing left to conceptually work with other than a giant '?'); so whatever the thing-in-itself is will be exactly what is unintelligible: it is the 'thing' stripped of the a priori means of cognizing it.

Has anyone yet mentioned that self-defense is nearly by definition a preventing of harm to one’s own self?

Self-defense is usually defined in a way to include the defense of other innocents as well.

On what grounds is allowing the murderer (whose intentions are most always deemed unethical to begin with) his desire of harming your own being to be deemed anything but bad?

Did you read the OP? The OP is exploring what justification exists for self-defense's permissibility given certain stipulations.