/lit/ - Literature

>>11867639
I'm not sure about that. Can we not imagine base existence as just being, with no cause itself and no beginning or end, and containing time so as to be timeless (it's abstract, but it seems conceiveable)? Can we imagine space prior to sensory content? Is sense data completely dispensable?

Quite likely I'm grasping at some assumptions, I think it's unavoidable to an extent, and you are definitely better versed in Kant's work than I.

It is agreed that our consciousness is a spectrum of potential experience but always spatiotemporal in nature. The issue still remains of where the hard boundary between that which senses and that which is sensed lies. Does my consciousness actually function without sensory content? If it does not, then how can I know to what extent experience has shaped those functions as opposed to vice versa?

>>11867671
>Because to grasp that causality and the rest of the external world are your mind at work, is to grasp that they are as intimately known to you as your own mind is; they are as orderly and understandable and secure as your very consciousness, which is the securest past of you - it IS you.

Isn't this an assumption of unlimited perception and a bit of composition fallacy? How do we now that there aren't crucial mental functions we aren't aware of, that consciousness is 'us' in a complete sense, and that casuality is only what we infer of it from our limited perception?

>That same potential could not, because the potential is what determines the universe it experiences to function as it functions. It's not that humans have an innate mental structure that corresponds with the structure of the human-independent physical universe; it's that there is no human-independent physical universe. For the physical universe to exist IS for it to exist as a representation within human minds.

Right, now this where Kant skips the rails for me (and probably most who have issues with his thinking). This seems like pure assertion with no certain way to establish precedence. It is entirely coherent to instead suppose that our minds evolved to sense in certain terms because those terms were actual properties of the environment and that our entire cognition has been shaped in response to stimuli. For a mind to exist is for it to exist as an object in a physical universe, and there is no necessary boundary between the two.

>But if we have innate functions that we are not aware of, it's not legitimate to fear that those powers oppose the functions that *are* discoverable in experience; we have no logical grounds to think, for example, that some undetectable faculty of ours might be infringing upon our own faculty of logical thought.

Agreed, but what does the 'purity' of intuition mean if it is not necessarily complete and the content of experience can't be neatly divorced from it?