Never once did I agree to that. A skin cell absolutely cannot be cloned, and then magically is a zygote. Think about how patently incoherent that is praxis: you are saying that an exact duplicate of X which is not Y is Y.

What has been your experience with stoicism, or what do you think is the issue here? Thoughts and comments welcome.

Stoicism is about eradicating suffering by detaching from things outside of one's control; and it makes a really good pragmatic philosophy for normal life. However, it is worth noting that you must self-reflect on what you should be doing with your life (rationally) and then utilize any irrational emotions you have as fuel (if applicable) to achieve it: so, technically, the best approach is not always to eradicate the pathos.

Ultimately, I would say that Stoicism is about living a life guided by rationality and reason; and to only use emotions when it suits them.

If you are struggling to implement Stoic principles in your life, then try reading (and re-reading) the meditations and implement a robust lifestyle-structure to build self-discipline and self-integrity. Then move from continence to temperance.

Nietzsche does have a good point that it is essential to the human condition to have irrational emotional responses to things; and it is seems kind of wrong to completely eradicate that. E.g., do you really NOT want to shed a tear at your mom's funeral?

So? It is uncontroversially true that a zygote is dependent on the mother to nourish it into viability. Are you suggesting that a person that is dependent on another human to survive is thereby no longer a human being---or never was?

Agreed. But what exactly are we proving? All we can prove is that there is something mind-independent. That's it. And we can only prove there is something mind independent because we have experiences that contradict what our mind wants to believe about reality. We only know that there have been contradictions and that there may continue to be contradictions. We don't know what's causing it.

I am not following how we only know through contradictions (between our experiences and reality). I can imagine perfectly fine a person who infers correctly, without contradiction, that their conscious experience is representational; and then proceeds to correctly identify that there must be a thing-in-itself which excites the senses which, in turn, begins the process to construct the conscious experience which they are having.

Where does the contradictions come into play, there?

Can you cite something we could say is knowledge that did not require any experience to gain it?

The most basic example that comes to mind is mathematical knowledge. Your brain necessarily has to already know how to perform math to construct your conscious experience; and this is why mathematical propositions, in geometry, are applicable and accurate for experience: the axioms of geometry reside a priori in our brains, and so does the standard operations of math (like addition, subtraction, etc.). Mathematical knowledge, insofar as it pertains to how our brains cognize, is independent of any possible experience.

Of course, as I noted before, our self-reflective knowledge of math is learned (usually in school).

And if you can, how is it knowledge and not a belief?

Mathematical propositions are valid in virtue of being grounded in how our brains cognize; and they are only valid for human experience. They are true, justified, beliefs about experience—not reality.

Perhaps that’s where the confusion was: the a priori knowledge we have is not knowledge about reality, but about how we cognize it.

So what is a flower apart from any observation

I would say that we merely say that there is some thing which is exciting our senses, and of which we represent as what we normally perceive as a flower.

And that's all the 'thing in itself' is. Its an unknowable outside of the mind existence.

Agreed; but that’s not a purely abstract thing, then. It is a concrete—unknown.

A skin cell can be cloned and I think you'd need to be a biologist to distinguish a skin cell from a zygote, so it's amusing that you say a skin cell is not a human.

You don't understand, without the help of a biologist, that a skin cell isn't a human being?

Whether or not you can distinguish a zygote from a skin cell is a separate and completely irrelevant point: a skin cell is not a human being. You don't need to be an expert to put that together.

I am unsure as to what exactly you are asking here: are you asking if (1) the doctor should have to wait for approval to pull the plug (in the event where the doctor needs to in order to prioritize other patients) or if (2) the parents can simply decide when to pull the plug (even if it isn't a matter of limit resources)?

Euthanasia is a topic that would be interesting to tackle: I am not sure if in every case it is immoral to kill someone out of respect for that person. It's an interesting pickle; but disanalogous to abortion: an abortion is a total disregard of that innocent life.

C’mon, Bob

I sincerely am not trying to straw man nor misrepresent your view: I just don’t get it (: .

You distinguish between the Real and the Existent; and that makes no sense to me. Traditionally, as far as I can tell, the term ‘real’ refers to the same thing as ‘existent’. If it is real, then it exists; and if it exists, then it is real. This clearly does not hold in your schema.

I’ve never denied the existence of things-in-themselves, for to do so is to question the very existence of real things, insofar as the mere appearance of any such thing to human sensibility is sufficient causality for its very existence, an absurdity into which no one has rightfully fallen.

How is this not the same thing as saying “I’ve never denied that things-in-themselves are real, for to do so is to <…>”? I don’t get it.

Do you really believe that all objects in reality are possible objects of sense for humans? — Bob Ross

Why would you not?

Two reasons:

1. Sensibility has an a priori structure for sensing; so it follows that any given sensibility may be limited such that it cannot sense a particular object; and
2. We are scientifically aware of many objects which are real (i.e., exist) but cannot be sensed by certain species. E.g., humans cannot hear certain wavelengths that dogs can, dogs and humans cannot sense the atoms that comprise a chair, etc.

I don’t understand why one would limit reality to what we or (more generally) any sensibility can sense. Don’t you agree that we have knowledge of things which we cannot sense? Do you think we can sense electrons?

Hmmmm. Might this be backwards? If, instead, you take existence as the totality of reality, there remains the possibility of existences that are not members of reality, hence not members of that which is susceptible to sensation in humans, i.e., dark energy. Quarks. And whatnot.

I think it would help if you elaborate on your distinction between the Real and the Existent; because I don’t see how quarks, e.g., are not real—just like electrons. Are you saying that anything that we can’t sense, but of which we know exists, isn’t real?!?!? Is an electron not real to you?

Ehhhh…not so sure about that. According to spatial-mathematical relations is a form of knowledge, which flies in the face of what was already given as the case, re: there is no knowledge in regard to representation in space.

Objects are already represented in space by intuition, and are called phenomena. The in order, then, for these first two, is for the possibility of empirical knowledge, or, which is the same thing, experience.

Don’t you think that cognition has to play a role in mathematically mapping and constructing objects to have particular relations to each other within our spatiotemporal (outer) experience? I don’t see how intuition could intuit all that without the faculty of understanding. E.g., to represent this particular cup with these particular dimensions on a table, the brain would have to make judgments on how to do that—no?

And a minor supplement: justified true beliefs…assuming one grants such a thing in the first place….are given as stated, but in relation to a priori principles and conceptions is close to overstepping the purview of understanding, which, as afore-mentioned, is for the behoof and use of experience alone.

What do you take a priori knowledge to be then? If you were to explain it to @Philosophim, what would you say?

You already asked this question here, and I responded here.

1. I don't believe we have souls.

2. You are conflating the adjective 'human' insofar as it relates to something being a part of a human with the noun 'human' insofar as it relates to something being a human. E.g., my human skill cell (which is a redundant way to put it btw) is not a human.

No, we don't know what it is. We don't know if its an object, if its physical, if it many things, or something beyond our imagination or comprehension. All we know is there is some 'thing', and 'thing' in only the loosest and most abstract sense. All of those words you used to describe it are words formed from physical sensations, or interpretations.

Agreed, to some extent. By physical, I do not mean material: I mean mind-independent.

Even if we could not even know that it is mind-independently existing; the thing as it is in-itself is not purely logical (in that case): we are talking about some ‘thing’ which exists—we are talking in concreto.

No, our brain does not have to know how to intuit and cognize objects in space independently of any experience it has. It has the capacity to do so.
Just like our minds have the capacity to take light and concentrate on aspects of them. We have the ability to discretely experience, but that ability is not knowledge.

Correct me here @Mww. I would say that my example was bad insofar as the intuition aspect of representation in space is non-cognitive (so there is no knowledge in that regard), but that our faculty of judgment, understanding, and cognition must formulate justified, true, beliefs in relation to the a priori principles and conceptions in order to actually represent the objects in space, according to spatial-mathematical relations.

Think of it like this. A newborn has the capacity to be able to walk one day. Does it know how to do so apart from experience? No

A newborn does not have the capacity to walk: the biological structures required are not there (e.g., muscle, bone density, etc.). Now, once it has that capacity, of course, I agree it still has to learn how to walk; but this is disanalogous.

When you speak of knowledge without experience, you must speak of a newborn

Everything described in the transcendental analytic applies to newborns. E.g., newborns know how to cognize objects in space and time, to cognize in accordance with logic, to cognize in according with math, etc.

Obviously, the newborn doesn’t have the self-reflective knowledge about it (that would be needed to solve a math problem at school).

This is the part I disagree with. A child does not know how to construct things in space. I

This is an equivocation. We are talking about the child qua its representative faculties; not its self-reflective reason.

Skimming over a couple of the other replies here, I think its the term 'thing' that's throwing people. We can rephrase a 'thing in itself' to 'the unknowable reality' Its not a 'thing' like an 'object'. Its just a logical conception that we always interpret reality, and we cannot know reality as it is uninterpreted. That's all.

Edit: I just realized there's other simple ways to explain it. The brain in the vat. An evil demon. The matrix. All of these are 'things in themselves' that we could never know. Its just the same type of argument.

True.

I didn't say that the living human being was a person during the entirety of gestation; and I've already noted that I ground rights in the nature of a being such that if their nature sets them out as a person, then they deserve rights even if they aren't currently a person.

A sperm and egg are alive: no one disputes that. The fact is, also, that a human being begins to exist upon conception of those two. A sperm is alive, but is not a human; an egg is alive but is not a human, but a fertilized egg is a human.

I am getting closer to understanding what you are saying, but I am still not quite there.

Here’s the core of our issue:

By definition the real is that which is contained in reality, and by definition reality is that of which the susceptibility to sensation is given.

I understand better now why you deny the existence of things-in-themselves: you are operating under a false understanding of what reality is. Reality is not itself the totality of that which is, at least in principle, capable of being sensed—that’s what’s called our limits of sensing reality.

Do you really believe that all objects in reality are possible objects of sense for humans? I find that obviously and patently false. There’s absolutely nothing about reality that entails that there isn’t an object which we are incapable of sensing.

If you take that reality is the totality of existence, on the contrary, then you find that things-in-themselves, as properly understood, are the things which comprise that totality.

but it's based on the assumption that a mind is not a continuous entity but a series of unrelated instances

I am not a bundle theorist; and nothing I said entails that. The mind persists as long as its underlying physical constitution is preserved through processes and storage; but this is not the same as claiming that a malfunctioning brain, which may still be a means of preserving a mind, is currently producing a person.

Personhood, as I take it, is a property that a thing has when it currently has a rational will; and this is not found in unconscious humans.

Uh, what is absurd about that? Why would dead human beings have rights?

Imagine there’s a person who just died and all their family members or loved ones are dead. A stranger wants to have sex with their corpse: if that dead person has no rights, being dead, then there is nothing, per se, immoral about having sex with their corpse. Are you willing to bite that bullet?

A response one could give is that some actions are immoral and yet don’t violate a right of someone else—e.g., torturing a pig. They would then point out that, similarly, the dead person has no rights but it would still be immoral to have sex with their corpse.

To that, I respond that it is disanalogous; for the actions which are immoral but don’t directly violate a right (of a person) can be morally permissible per accidens (e.g., having to torture a pig if it were to prevent a major societal catastrophe), whereas it is always wrong to have sex with a dead person's corpse (no differently than it is always wrong to kill an innocent person). Persons, given their nature qua rationality, marks them out as absolute objects of respect.

This is fine if we're talking about subjects where there's no disconnect between what the teleology says it's natural and what individuals usually want

That, and everything you commented, is completely anti-thetical to everything I said. When a person says that their arm is not working properly, they usually are saying it in the Aristotelian sense and not this post-humean sense that you described. Viz., they are saying something is actually wrong with their arm, and not that it is wrong hypothetically relative to their subjective tastes.

On the subject of abortion, that brings us back to the familiar question: does a fetus have a presumed interest to become a person?

Your problem is that you are thinking about this like a Humean. This question makes no sense for an Aristotelian.

But what do the biologists mean when they say life?

They mean that a new member of the human species has been created and is alive.

(2) For all series, having no 1st term implies having no nth term.

This premise is patently false, and is the denial, implicitly, that the concept of infinity is coherent. Viz., you are getting this argument to work by denying that infinity, in principle, is internally coherent.

Let's take set theory as an example: an infinite set has no first member but has a infinite amount of members such that wherever we start enumerating, n, there is a n+1, n+2, etc. and n-1, n-2, etc.

The fact that an infinite set has no last nor first element, does not mean that it does not have an nth member. There's nothing internally incoherent with the idea of an infinite series of causal events (for example).

By denying "an nth term", you are denying that an infinite set has any members.

"Life begins at conception" is an imprecise short-hand for "a human life begins at conception". Stop picking the low hanging fruits: obviously a sperm is alive and so is my skin cells---we are talking about when a human being is alive.

Yes fair enough, but I would still argue that even an unconscious mind is a mind. The neuron firings of an unconscious person don't turn into a random jumble and then spontaneously reassemble into a mind when that person wakes up. There is continuity.

What you are describing is a capacity to deploy a mind, and not having a mind. Therefore, you must agree that a knocked out human being technically isn’t a person when they are knocked out; and re-gain personhood when they re-gain consciousness.

This is not a minor point: your whole argument relied on personhood grounding rights, not the capacity to acquire personhood (because they have a fully developed brain). You are starting to morph into my view: the nature of that being sets them out as a person, because they can and will, if everything goes according to the proper biological development, develop personhood.

Also, if you go the capacity route; then you end up with the absurdity that dead human beings have no rights...just food for thought.

Ok, then what part of that biology are you calling nature

I am talking about how a healthy member of a species is supposed to develop and become. People think of “teleoglogy” as a dirty word these days, or a vacuous concept, but we use it implicitly all the time in the medical industry.

When you go into the doctor’s office and complain about your hand not acting properly, or when a child is born without an arm and you take pity on them, you are talking necessarily in teleological terms: your hand, e.g., was supposed to, according to what a healthy human hand normally does, behave such-and-such instead of so-and-so.

You have a nature which is set out by your biology which is set out by the species which you are a member of. Zebras are supposed to have stripes: a zebra which doesn’t have stripes is an abnormality—a defect.

That's interpretation, not fact.

There’s a huge consensus in biology that life begins at conception; so it’s, quite frankly, not worth my time to argue about it. Here’s a good article on it: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3211703 .

Experience is not sensations. Sensations are the raw data which is intuited, judged, and cognized into a representation which, as a result, is your experience. E.g., a ball excites your senses by "impact" of whatever it is in-itself exciting your sensibility, and then sensations of that excitation are passed to your brain to interpret...there's nothing contradictory going on here.

The thing in itself is the thing considered by reason alone. As the referenced quote says.

I guess I didn’t follow it: can you elaborate more on this?

I am thinking that we use reason to determine that there must be a thing-in-itself which is the ground for our experience of some thing; and that this is a claim in concreto about the thing as opposed to in abstracta. I think, now, you may be saying vice-versa.

Yes, and no. Limits, but not as relates to rationalism vs empiricism.

That was the whole underlying context of the CPR. Kant was addressing philosophers like Descartes, Wolf, etc. and Locke, Hume, etc. with respect to their long standing disputes about knowledge.

The limitation is proof for the impossibility of an intelligence of our kind ever cognizing the unconditioned.

So, the thing-in-itself to you is not real? The thing as it is unconditioned isn’t real?

There is a living human being that is created upon conception; so that is where it begins as a living being. After birth is not at all when it becomes a human being: that makes no sense.

This is helpful: I am also wondering if this is what @Mww is talking about. I am viewing the thing-in-itself as the thing as it really is. What is your interpretation, then, of the ding an sich?

No they are not. That's not how biology works: they are separate living beings of which one is dependent on the other.

The thing as a whole excites such that we perceive, but it isn’t the whole thing we intuit from that perception. The thing as a whole is not the same a a thing in itself.

I am still not understanding what you are claiming the thing-in-itself is: I am saying it is the thing which excites our senses. Can you put in simple terms what you think it is?

What do you think the thing-in-itself actually is, what concept is being represented by those words?

It represents an object in reality as it is in-itself—i.e., qua itself—i.e., independent of any experience of it—…

As far as that goes, what do you think the Big Picture is for CPR?

Kant is outlining the limits of reason; especially as it relates to rationalism vs. (british) empiricism.

And why, exactly, is it that the thing-in-itself ends up as one of the necessary limitations proved for this particular, albeit theoretical, method of human cognition and empirical knowledge?

Because something representational requires something which was not representational which grounds it.

And make no mistake: by his own admission, but in modern venencular, Prolegomena is “CPR For Dummies”, so if one wishes to critique the one, he must set aside the other.

Haha. I also read the CPR: I’ll try and pull some quotes sometime this week for you.

Yes, because I am a person.

That’s not how it works...at all. A ball doesn’t know what a ball is.

And? I didn't claim any brain makes a person. Some brains do though.

My point was that just because neurons are firing in a brain, that does not necessitate there is a person.

Personhood is mindhood: it is having a mind, not having a brain that could produce a mind or “house” a mind.

You are conflating a capacity for personhood with personhood.

I did not claim evolution is arbitrary. The concept of "nature" is arbitrary.

Nature is defined by evolutionary biology.

It's a scientific fact that, at conception, two cells fuse to become one, combining their genetic material.

Thereby creating a new life, which thereby begins its continual-development process until death.

??? . I can't tell if you are joking.

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.