/lit/ - Literature

>>11864374
>>11864447
>>11864503

...We can reason about fictional worlds and a different course of historical events, but we cannot reason about anything that violates or abandons the laws of reason; we can understand if an event is not the effect of the cause we first believed (the ripples in the pond were not caused by an acorn from above, but by a bubble from below), but we cannot understand if an event is not an effect of any cause at all; we can imagine space and time being filled by all varieties of color and flavor and sound and touch, but we can't imagine spacelessness and timelessness.

That's one way Kant does it.

> Formulas are only provable in your mind once you have experienced external relations, so of course those proofs relate back to the world.

That's a perceptive response, but if Kant's method had tautologically attributed to our innate mental structure everything that he first noticed in the world, then he would be unable to account for the dispensability and variability of sense data. But he can account for them.

> Why does he tend to treat consciousness and reason as binary states, and not as potentials that develop in continuity with sensation? He didn't establish the certainty/a prioricity and hard boundaries that he imagined.

I think maybe you're the one grasping to assumptions. Very interestingly, Kant wrote that states of consciousness can vary in intensity and clarity, and I believe he uses the analogy of how sensations of light can very from very dim to extremely bright: think of a scale of intellectual intensity that ranges in infinitesimal degrees from idiocy to temporary confusion to the mundane awareness of routine-following to the close attention of a craftsperson to the eureka-moments of insight. Different people will have different strengths of intellect, and may wander along sections of the scale depending on their education or their medical history, but all of these conscious minds will operate by the bare minimum of a priori structure described above; maybe not everyone is as sharp at discovering exact causes to explain events, but everyone is conscious that there is *some* cause for each event, and is aware of this in tandem with all the other a priori forms of consciousness - or else they are so mentally impaired that they aren't conscious.

Also, depending on the different types of objects a mind can be conscious of, the mind's a priori functions can interact in differing ways, producing different states of consciousness; an artistic object can stimulate the aesthetic consciousness of contemplation, while a criminal event can stimulate moral consciousness of blame, and a natural phenomenon can stimulate the theoretical consciousness of scientific inquiry. But again, there must be a minimal threshold of conscious functionality if there is to be consciousness at all - consciousness can't be uncategorizably fuzzy or amorphous.