The more I learn about the world, the more I believe in Kantian transcendental idealist philosophy. I promise you, one day the scientific paradigm will shift and espouse it.
Objective reality as conceptualised as "nuomenon" is fundamentally inaccessible to us. This is because the only reality we perceive arises epiphenomenally from the substrate of neurological activity. We perceive our reality. And perception is a form of creation. I really believe this is what Kant was getting at. We actively create reality by synthesising it. It's some motherfucking matrix shit.
The big question of The Critique of Pure Reason is this:
How are a priori synthetic judgements possible?
In other words: How can objective facts about the world exist? How can a truth be categorically true independent of experience? How can concepts have objective validity if they only exist in the subjective realm?
Take this category that Kant posited to be a priori & universally true: causality.
We know that if I kick a ball (cause), the ball would move a certain distance (effect) depending on the force of my kick. Given that no foul play is involved, we would certainly not expect it to stay still. Yet we cannot predict that the ball would move in the future – it might be the case that one day the ball would stay inert. It thus then seems like the phenomenon of causality is necessary and universal, and not purely derived from sense experience alone.
How can the phenomenon of causality be necessary and universal?? This was the problem that plagued Hume.
Kant presents the Transcendental Deduction as a solution, which gives an account of causality (and the other categories) in the context of transcendental idealism. We cannot understand Kant’s account of the self without first understanding the rest of the deduction.
It seems clear to me that the Transcendental Deduction unites the Transcendental Aesthetic with the Transcendental Logic. The crux of the Transcendental Aesthetic is that space and time are a priori forms of intuition . This is important because it means space and time “belongs to the subjective constitution of our mind”. The crux of the Transcendental Logic is that the categories, as the pure concepts of the understanding, are a priori abstractions of judgement , and are therefore fundamental for us to understand the objects given to us in experience. This is important because it states that categories precede experience in such a way that the concept must necessarily exist for one to perceive a possible experience. Yet how does Kant reconcile these two big ideas? How does he unify them to show that concepts can be objective? He does so through the idea of the self as an active synthesising subject.
The idea of the self and self-consciousness (apperception) forms the ground of the Transcendental Deduction. “The ‘I think’”, says Kant, “is the vehicle of all concepts”. According to Kant, there are two kinds of self-consciousness: empirical consciousness (which is a consciousness of oneself and one’s own inner sense) and transcendental apperception (which is consciousness of oneself through apperception). The unity of apperception is what combines the manifold of different constituents of the mind into a subject that is synthesising the objects of intuition. Through the act of the understanding on sensibility, figurative synthesis occurs by “drawing [a line] in thought”. My interpretation of this is that only when the active synthesising subject is self-conscious of the unity of the manifold, can the subject create the representations given to us in the intuition of space and time. This is what Kant terms the transcendental unity of self-consciousness – the manifold of representations given to us in intuition are “unified under a single consciousness”. He states, “The synthetic unity of consciousness is, therefore, an objective condition of all knowledge. It is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing an object, but is a condition under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me”. The self, then, is a multiplex of unified parts. It is not merely a bundle of perceptions, but an active subject that synthesises and receives representations under a single subjectivity.
What the fuck does this mean then??
The greatest scientific curiosity is consciousness. This is because in science & philosophy both, there is an "explanatory gap" in which our models and conceptions of reality fails to account for how consciousness really arises. We have billions of neurons that fire to produce conscious experience.
Right now science is trying to explain consciousness. The general consensus is that consciousness is when external sensory signals interact with neurological electrical impulses. It's the synthesis of the two. Anil Seth says: "we don't just passively percieve the world, we actively generate it". Science is beginning to see perception is an active process, not a passive one. See how this seems congruent to Kant's idea of figurative synthesis?
