Kant's Transcendental Idealism

[The Beast]

A simple question:
Is the acorn the Oak?
In Kant’s intuition of time and space, the applicable transcendental phenomenology via a descriptive method (dialectics) follows the acorn into an Oak. This way objects are still objects but part of a phenomenon. Basic statistical data allowed by the method might give us “a priori” an unexpected answer. “The acorn is mostly food.” However, a significant percentage becomes an Oak. Synthetic arguments of what happens to the food or if it is a piece of Oak furniture are in the boundaries of the method that goes further with the dislodging of other types of wood in the creation of a hybrid piece. IMO. The favoring of acorns by the observer (objectivity) vs natural selection (functions) creates furniture types of different skills. What happens to the food is mostly scientific and in the realm of physics and or biology. In the smaller scope, the essence of an Oak might be described by the individualized sensibilities and why not a percentage will assign the intention of furniture.

[thrasymachus]

Gertie wrote
No I admire what he did. As you say it's a hugely ambitious goal which lays his thinking and conclusions open to all sorts of critique. I laid out mine. If I thought he'd cracked what I consider unknowable then presumably so would everyone, and his views would be considered facts. But it's a philosophical approach, which attempts to address what I still consider to be unknowable. Just like Physicalism is. Criticising physicalism doesn't make Kant right btw.

Why do you say we can't separate ontology from epistemology?

No, he didn't crack the unknowable, rather, he insisted the unknowable is impossible, but he did demonstrate that metaphysics is somehow IN the apriori analysis of physics, and it has nothing to do with Christian theology. An analysis of what lies before our eyes yields the possibility of meaningful metaphysics. If he wasn't such a committed rationalist, likely devoid of feeling altogether, perhaps he would have seen that noumena cannot be removed from phenomena existentially. On paper, it sounds almost right, until one actually beholds the world and realizes what Kierkegaard did, that the noumenal world IS this phenomenal world. But it does take a "leap" to see this. What is a leap? This, too, is latent in the mundane. It is a realization that the understanding can actually face being as such in existential encounter. How is this latent in the mundane? It is always already there. I am reminded of Maxfield Parrish's' girls sitting on rocks gazing dreamily at the sky, and reason and thought are suspended, and the question stands open to the world, like a rhetorical question that wants no answer, but is open (Levinas talks like this: the desire that is exceeded by the desideratum, the idea that is exceeded by the ideatum) allowing the world to "speak". And here, says Kierkegaard, we see that finitude is actually the everydayness of living. Our affairs really belong to metaphysics.

Ontology without epistemology is nonsense. That is what it is to speak without justification, an epistemic term. What if I say Being is ugjks&%%Kjh? What is your immediate objection? What does that even MEAN? Even if one, like the Zen Buddhist, wants to deliver the understanding from structured thought altogether, this is done in an implicit justificatory system of thought. An accomplished Zen Buddhist is not an infant child for whom the world is a "blooming and buzzing". And the profoundest intimations of intuitive openness are received in justified belief.

This is a big issue. I think Kant allowed us to see that an analytic of pure reason highlights what is NOT reason, and this made existentialism possible, and existentialism is aligned with the Hindu/Buddhist in that it is the explicit seeing, as a kind of revelation, that, as Kierkegaard put it, we actually exist! And this is a revival of something we LOST that the ancients had, this primordial relation with the world that was profound and deeply satisfying. Primordial happiness. Or divine love (institutionalized in "Christendom" and distorted and trivialized in this).

All I know for certain my own conscious experience exists and what it is like (its content). That integrated bundle of experience IS me. A first person pov of trees and other physical stuff including other minded people like me I can share notes with, space and time, causation, gravity, etc I experience as 'out there'. And my 'inner' responses. The world is the 'out there' part of my experience of what world is made of and how it works. (Which physics, reason, logic, and causation are rooted in).

You will not find anyone disagreeing with this. I for one haven't read anyone who does. Perhaps the pyrrhonian skeptics. Phenomenologists are simply saying all this is right and true, but it is all phenomena. When I observe a tree, consider it s space and time and the rest, this is an ACT that is deeply IN the object I see. That is, the act constitutes the object. I observe the tree in time and space, but put aside einstein, for before one gets there, one has to deal with the time analysis of having a thought at all. And this is very constitutive! Experience itself IS time. But the result is not solipsism which assumes there is something out there we can't access. The result is taking all of what we witness for what it is. A phenomenon is not ME and I am not trapped in an inner world. The objective world is still an objective world, only I am now delivered from the ontological prioritizing of physics! Which reduces all things to an ontology that entirely forgets that objects are constituted by the perceptual act. This is an egregious mistake.

I can only assume my experience represents something real other than itself. A leap of faith on a Yes/No question.

If I do assume Yes, I ontologically position myself as an experiencing subject within that world - while epistemologically that world's existence remains only knowable as within my experience. That 'within' switch is a bit weird, but easy enough to distinguish if I recognise the difference between ontology and epistemology. Once I've assumed that world ontologically exists, my experience represents me as part of it, rather than it being the part of the content of my experience.

All that is being insisted on here is for "that which one is a part of" to be grounded in what you actually encounter. The grand "out there" is what lies before you, in the interiority and exteriority of what is there, waiting to be examined. You have the same tendency as anyone else who wants to make objects independent, and they are: this lamp is NOT me, and it is "over there" in a different space than I am in, etc. The phenomenologist simply says, now let's look at a more basic level of inquiry. That lamp is discovered to be a thing of parts, analytically speaking. Any first year medical student will tell you the brown base and the light emanating are not possessed apart from the organs that produce these. It turns out that the logic following properties to their sources, as with light and sound, applies to everything. Not that the lamp becomes a brain function--that would be a physicist's account. No, the lamp is not more a lamp than it ever was, for it is allowed to be all that it there: As i observe the lamp, there is interest, anticipation and memory, the "presence" of the lamp qua presence, the cognitive (Kantian, if you will) structure of knowing it is a lamp, the pragmatic function of knowing its use, the historical underpinning of lamps, the intersubjective affirmations of things like lamps that daily confirm the "theory" that lamps are harmless and belongs in various contexts (not in a fusion reactor, e.g.); I mean, THIS is what sits before me. Just ask me what it IS, and I will tell you just this kind of thing.

This is Heidegger's' view. If you read his What IS Metaphysics, you will find that what "the world (that) ontologically exists" is just the vacancy of anything to say. It IS important because (inherited from Kierkegaard) it is a source of existential anxiety: the "nothing" that is at the foundation of all we know. Really interesting paper, Faith and Authenticity: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on Existing in'Closest Closeness' to the Nothing, by Travis Obrian I am reading. When we get to the nothing, the void of the world when one confronts it (Zen-like?) as "being as such", we enter into a world of post modern thinking. All post modern thinking is post Heideggerian.

So once I put aside solipsism I'm accepting I'm in the ontological world my experience represents to me. And then the issue becomes what can I know of the reality of that ontological world and how can I know it - Kant's project.

I guess for Kant that ontology would be what is "behind" the pure categories of the structure of our judgments. So it goes from, here is a cat, to structural features inherent in the judgment then to the pure categories, and from there, transcendence. Eugene Fink' Sixth Meditation wants to take this to the wire: there is, in this transcendental boundary something visible to inquiry. He wants to look

..... at that belief in the world in such a way as to inquire back behind the "world-character" of world-believing life, behind humanness, and
thereupon to reduce that life to the transcendental constituting experience
of the world that was concealed by the apperception of the human. 9Thus
through the reduction the proper theme of philosophy is revealed: the transcendental
constitution of the world

[Gertie]

What "evidence" is there, that is so "overwhelming"? You have presented none.

That is not correct. Read again.

There is no evidence, but only consistency with your ideas. Your ideas do not contradict any available evidence, but there is no evidence that actually supports your ideas. That is my point here. We tell ourselves, often, that our ideas are justified, but when we look closely, this, often, turns out not to be the case. It's — often! — just a matter of having the courage to face 'the facts', in favour of wishful thinking.

Dreams are like one-off dramas, waking is like an ongoing soap opera. The consistency is the evidence, and the ongoing narrative of our waking life can contextualise and account for dreams. But it's when we get to fundamental levels of knowing we see that narrative itself is built on assumptions.

[Pattern-chaser]

Dreams are like one-off dramas, waking is like an ongoing soap opera. The consistency is the evidence, and the ongoing narrative of our waking life can contextualise and account for dreams. But it's when we get to fundamental levels of knowing we see that narrative itself is built on assumptions.

[My emboldening.]

I can't disagree with this; it appears to be an excellent summary and commentary.

[Gertie]

Dreams are like one-off dramas, waking is like an ongoing soap opera. The consistency is the evidence, and the ongoing narrative of our waking life can contextualise and account for dreams. But it's when we get to fundamental levels of knowing we see that narrative itself is built on assumptions.

[My emboldening.]

I can't disagree with this; it appears to be an excellent summary and commentary.

cheers

[Sy Borg]

What "evidence" is there, that is so "overwhelming"? You have presented none.

That is not correct. Read again.

There is no evidence, but only consistency with your ideas. Your ideas do not contradict any available evidence, but there is no evidence that actually supports your ideas. That is my point here. We tell ourselves, often, that our ideas are justified, but when we look closely, this, often, turns out not to be the case. It's — often! — just a matter of having the courage to face 'the facts', in favour of wishful thinking.

One of the key differences between dreams and reality is the way they treat causality. In waking reality, events are typically governed by reliable physical laws and cause-and-effect relationships. By contrast, dreams tend to be surreal and fantastical, with events occurring without any clear physical cause or explanation.

Further, waking reality has more consistency and continuity than dreams. Dreams can often feel vivid and immersive while we are experiencing them, but they can also be disjointed and fragmented, with sudden shifts in location, time, and perspective. By contrast, (sober) waking reality generally has a more stable and predictable structure.

How about your evidence that being awake and dreaming are no different?

[Belindi]

What "evidence" is there, that is so "overwhelming"? You have presented none.

That is not correct. Read again.

There is no evidence, but only consistency with your ideas. Your ideas do not contradict any available evidence, but there is no evidence that actually supports your ideas. That is my point here. We tell ourselves, often, that our ideas are justified, but when we look closely, this, often, turns out not to be the case. It's — often! — just a matter of having the courage to face 'the facts', in favour of wishful thinking.

One of the key differences between dreams and reality is the way they treat causality. In waking reality, events are typically governed by reliable physical laws and cause-and-effect relationships. By contrast, dreams tend to be surreal and fantastical, with events occurring without any clear physical cause or explanation.

Further, waking reality has more consistency and continuity than dreams. Dreams can often feel vivid and immersive while we are experiencing them, but they can also be disjointed and fragmented, with sudden shifts in location, time, and perspective. By contrast, (sober) waking reality generally has a more stable and predictable structure.

How about your evidence that being awake and dreaming are no different?

Dreams are often joined up narratives in a time sequence. The consistency and continuity of dreams as individuals remember them originates not , for the most part, in incoming data but in memories. Like rational waking awareness makes narrative sense of the memories where dreams originate, so does the rational waking awareness make narrative sense of data incoming from the environment.

Dreaming awareness and waking awareness are each filtered through the activity of the brain chemicals that surge during waking awareness.This explains why dreams are so easily forgotten when we wake up. Waking awareness is such that it depends on incoming data plus remembered data. If the remembered dream data is inconsistent with incoming data the former (unless
the subject writes it down or otherwise deliberately memorises it by a work of art like Salvador Dali 's or by telling it to a listener) is forgotten.

It's our intrinsically inborn need and capability to make narrative connections that creates the rational world we live in.

https://www.google.com/search?q=soft+wa ... e&ie=UTF-8

[The Beast]

Kantian thought allows for the concept of essence. It is in my opinion different than the metaphysical essence hence his description of the metaphysical. So, in the case of Acorn/Oak essence, it is in the basic constituents of matter which are present in all phenomena. It can be known as the 5% of the Universe within which is arguably a dismissive percentage of living matter of which sentient is but a dismissible quantity. The Oak has a process that is knowable to the observer that can rewrite its phenomenal method of existence (Oak) superseding the writing by Nature. The sequential method is in the studying of the Oak’s phenomenology; find its essence; provide a method of existence. Kantian Essence: “ A property or group of properties of something without which it would not exist or be what it is” If I must proceed with the transcendental dialectics then it is clear I must consider Alchemy as the process responsible for transforming dirt into wood and as a different method from transforming dirt into thought…or not

[Pattern-chaser]

What "evidence" is there, that is so "overwhelming"? You have presented none.

That is not correct. Read again.

There is no evidence, but only consistency with your ideas. Your ideas do not contradict any available evidence, but there is no evidence that actually supports your ideas. That is my point here. We tell ourselves, often, that our ideas are justified, but when we look closely, this, often, turns out not to be the case. It's — often! — just a matter of having the courage to face 'the facts', in favour of wishful thinking.

One of the key differences between dreams and reality is the way they treat causality. In waking reality, events are typically governed by reliable physical laws and cause-and-effect relationships. By contrast, dreams tend to be surreal and fantastical, with events occurring without any clear physical cause or explanation.

Further, waking reality has more consistency and continuity than dreams. Dreams can often feel vivid and immersive while we are experiencing them, but they can also be disjointed and fragmented, with sudden shifts in location, time, and perspective. By contrast, (sober) waking reality generally has a more stable and predictable structure.

How about your evidence that being awake and dreaming are no different?

Evidence? Perhaps you missed the thrust of my argument?

As often happens, you asserted (say) "TRUE", I responded with 'don't know; not sure', but what you heard me say was "FALSE". I am unconvinced, not opposed (to you or your arguments). I do not find such evidence as there is to be conclusive. But I have no evidence to offer you. That tends to happen when one's position is an uncertain, unconfirmed, one.

Actually, I have loads of 'evidence', but it's not what a scientist would accept as evidence. It's anecdotal and empirical, and could easily be mistaken, as such things frequently are. I simply remember that, when I am dreaming, I am not aware of — i.e. do not notice — the inconsistencies that I might later seem to recognise using hindsight. Or maybe it's not hindsight, but neuro-linguistic programming (i.e. self-brainwashing)? That is the interesting speculation we are considering in this sub-thread, isn't it? The possibility that 'waking' and 'dreaming' are not as distinct as we have always thought?

[Sy Borg]

What "evidence" is there, that is so "overwhelming"? You have presented none.

That is not correct. Read again.

There is no evidence, but only consistency with your ideas. Your ideas do not contradict any available evidence, but there is no evidence that actually supports your ideas. That is my point here. We tell ourselves, often, that our ideas are justified, but when we look closely, this, often, turns out not to be the case. It's — often! — just a matter of having the courage to face 'the facts', in favour of wishful thinking.

One of the key differences between dreams and reality is the way they treat causality. In waking reality, events are typically governed by reliable physical laws and cause-and-effect relationships. By contrast, dreams tend to be surreal and fantastical, with events occurring without any clear physical cause or explanation.

Further, waking reality has more consistency and continuity than dreams. Dreams can often feel vivid and immersive while we are experiencing them, but they can also be disjointed and fragmented, with sudden shifts in location, time, and perspective. By contrast, (sober) waking reality generally has a more stable and predictable structure.

How about your evidence that being awake and dreaming are no different?

Evidence? Perhaps you missed the thrust of my argument?

As often happens, you asserted (say) "TRUE", I responded with 'don't know; not sure', but what you heard me say was "FALSE". I am unconvinced, not opposed (to you or your arguments). I do not find such evidence as there is to be conclusive. But I have no evidence to offer you. That tends to happen when one's position is an uncertain, unconfirmed, one.

Actually, I have loads of 'evidence', but it's not what a scientist would accept as evidence. It's anecdotal and empirical, and could easily be mistaken, as such things frequently are. I simply remember that, when I am dreaming, I am not aware of — i.e. do not notice — the inconsistencies that I might later seem to recognise using hindsight. Or maybe it's not hindsight, but neuro-linguistic programming (i.e. self-brainwashing)? That is the interesting speculation we are considering in this sub-thread, isn't it? The possibility that 'waking' and 'dreaming' are not as distinct as we have always thought?

Not a big fan of Occam's Razor, are you? Like any other animal, I prefer to take reality at face value. I see no reason to add extra speculative layers on to what is already apparent. Here is our Earth, created and energised by its star, and this planet's geology has complexified to the point that we call it biology. Then evolution over deep time, now us. And we are famously in the process of creating that which will supersede H. sapiens as the dominant beings on the surface of this planet (which I personally think will be a blend of human and AI rather than just AI).

Isn't all that beautiful and weird enough for you without rendering it esoteric?

[psycho]

In my opinion the phenomenon "Time" is made up of two components.

The change suffered by the elements of reality and the internal representation that we make of those changes.

We will never directly access the changes. The information is mediated by our perception system.

I have the impression that the correspondence between the original phenomenon and its perception is quite faithful to the phenomenon.
Our efficiency as agents is remarkable.

For me, the representation of the sequence of changes in reality is a complex construction (formed by multiple simultaneous frames).

Yes, time can be different for the experiencer and the observer, most famously in the region of strong gravitational forces. And subjective time certainly seems different based on qualitative and associated emotional factors. Enjoyment compresses subjective time while suffering stretches it, perhaps because self-awareness is far lower in the former. One "loses oneself" for periods, so it feels like the ego has spent less time dealing with with the activity, eg. playing games vs having dental treatment.

I agree that what we do perceive is probably pretty accurate, but there is also a great deal that we filter out. As you know, only filtering by senses and the brain allows us to make any sense of the world, and we necessarily filter out different stimuli to dogs, ants, butterflies, whales and trees.

Imagine if we perceived all of reality. All frequencies, from gamma rays to longwave - to see all waves, feel all waves, hear all waves and smell all waves. You would see all the neutrinos and dark matter WIMPs pouring through everything. You would see down to atomic level as well as at the cosmic level, viewing the surfaces of planets from across the universe.

It would be overwhelming, a blinding, deafening, smelly and nauseatingly weird cacophony. You would need a brain so large that it would form a molten core, or perhaps even perform nuclear fusion or collapse into a black hole.

We are not able to distinguish changes in the rate at which physical time passes.

Yes, it's a subtle point. To the person falling into a black hole, time passes as usual (?) but to the observer they stop in space and become ever more red and faint. Still, if wee think of that which changes time - acceleration - then perhaps a change in the rate of time passing would be felt as G-forces?

Something interesting is to look for the origin of the feeling of continuity in an everyday circumstance. How do I perceive continuity when moving? What is the process that produces the sensation of continuity? It is not memory. When walking, it is not the memory that gives us the sensation of a continuous fluidity in reality.

If reality is quantised, as it is believed to be at either quantum or Planck scales, then perhaps the continuity is more of an impression than an actuality?

We cannot notice changes in the rhythm of the passage of time because we are included in those changes in rhythm.

I do not agree that the quantization of reality implies the quantization of the passage of time. It would imply that something exists intermittently. I still don't see the reason to consider such a thing.

[Gertie]

Gertie wrote
No I admire what he did. As you say it's a hugely ambitious goal which lays his thinking and conclusions open to all sorts of critique. I laid out mine. If I thought he'd cracked what I consider unknowable then presumably so would everyone, and his views would be considered facts. But it's a philosophical approach, which attempts to address what I still consider to be unknowable. Just like Physicalism is. Criticising physicalism doesn't make Kant right btw.

Why do you say we can't separate ontology from epistemology?

No, he didn't crack the unknowable, rather, he insisted the unknowable is impossible, but he did demonstrate that metaphysics is somehow IN the apriori analysis of physics, and it has nothing to do with Christian theology. An analysis of what lies before our eyes yields the possibility of meaningful metaphysics. If he wasn't such a committed rationalist, likely devoid of feeling altogether, perhaps he would have seen that noumena cannot be removed from phenomena existentially. On paper, it sounds almost right, until one actually beholds the world and realizes what Kierkegaard did, that the noumenal world IS this phenomenal world. But it does take a "leap" to see this. What is a leap? This, too, is latent in the mundane. It is a realization that the understanding can actually face being as such in existential encounter. How is this latent in the mundane? It is always already there. I am reminded of Maxfield Parrish's' girls sitting on rocks gazing dreamily at the sky, and reason and thought are suspended, and the question stands open to the world, like a rhetorical question that wants no answer, but is open (Levinas talks like this: the desire that is exceeded by the desideratum, the idea that is exceeded by the ideatum) allowing the world to "speak". And here, says Kierkegaard, we see that finitude is actually the everydayness of living. Our affairs really belong to metaphysics.

Ontology without epistemology is nonsense. That is what it is to speak without justification, an epistemic term. What if I say Being is ugjks&%%Kjh? What is your immediate objection? What does that even MEAN? Even if one, like the Zen Buddhist, wants to deliver the understanding from structured thought altogether, this is done in an implicit justificatory system of thought. An accomplished Zen Buddhist is not an infant child for whom the world is a "blooming and buzzing". And the profoundest intimations of intuitive openness are received in justified belief.

This is a big issue. I think Kant allowed us to see that an analytic of pure reason highlights what is NOT reason, and this made existentialism possible, and existentialism is aligned with the Hindu/Buddhist in that it is the explicit seeing, as a kind of revelation, that, as Kierkegaard put it, we actually exist! And this is a revival of something we LOST that the ancients had, this primordial relation with the world that was profound and deeply satisfying. Primordial happiness. Or divine love (institutionalized in "Christendom" and distorted and trivialized in this).

All I know for certain my own conscious experience exists and what it is like (its content). That integrated bundle of experience IS me. A first person pov of trees and other physical stuff including other minded people like me I can share notes with, space and time, causation, gravity, etc I experience as 'out there'. And my 'inner' responses. The world is the 'out there' part of my experience of what world is made of and how it works. (Which physics, reason, logic, and causation are rooted in).

You will not find anyone disagreeing with this. I for one haven't read anyone who does. Perhaps the pyrrhonian skeptics. Phenomenologists are simply saying all this is right and true, but it is all phenomena. When I observe a tree, consider it s space and time and the rest, this is an ACT that is deeply IN the object I see. That is, the act constitutes the object. I observe the tree in time and space, but put aside einstein, for before one gets there, one has to deal with the time analysis of having a thought at all. And this is very constitutive! Experience itself IS time. But the result is not solipsism which assumes there is something out there we can't access. The result is taking all of what we witness for what it is. A phenomenon is not ME and I am not trapped in an inner world. The objective world is still an objective world, only I am now delivered from the ontological prioritizing of physics! Which reduces all things to an ontology that entirely forgets that objects are constituted by the perceptual act. This is an egregious mistake.

I can only assume my experience represents something real other than itself. A leap of faith on a Yes/No question.

If I do assume Yes, I ontologically position myself as an experiencing subject within that world - while epistemologically that world's existence remains only knowable as within my experience. That 'within' switch is a bit weird, but easy enough to distinguish if I recognise the difference between ontology and epistemology. Once I've assumed that world ontologically exists, my experience represents me as part of it, rather than it being the part of the content of my experience.

All that is being insisted on here is for "that which one is a part of" to be grounded in what you actually encounter. The grand "out there" is what lies before you, in the interiority and exteriority of what is there, waiting to be examined. You have the same tendency as anyone else who wants to make objects independent, and they are: this lamp is NOT me, and it is "over there" in a different space than I am in, etc. The phenomenologist simply says, now let's look at a more basic level of inquiry. That lamp is discovered to be a thing of parts, analytically speaking. Any first year medical student will tell you the brown base and the light emanating are not possessed apart from the organs that produce these. It turns out that the logic following properties to their sources, as with light and sound, applies to everything. Not that the lamp becomes a brain function--that would be a physicist's account. No, the lamp is not more a lamp than it ever was, for it is allowed to be all that it there: As i observe the lamp, there is interest, anticipation and memory, the "presence" of the lamp qua presence, the cognitive (Kantian, if you will) structure of knowing it is a lamp, the pragmatic function of knowing its use, the historical underpinning of lamps, the intersubjective affirmations of things like lamps that daily confirm the "theory" that lamps are harmless and belongs in various contexts (not in a fusion reactor, e.g.); I mean, THIS is what sits before me. Just ask me what it IS, and I will tell you just this kind of thing.

This is Heidegger's' view. If you read his What IS Metaphysics, you will find that what "the world (that) ontologically exists" is just the vacancy of anything to say. It IS important because (inherited from Kierkegaard) it is a source of existential anxiety: the "nothing" that is at the foundation of all we know. Really interesting paper, Faith and Authenticity: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on Existing in'Closest Closeness' to the Nothing, by Travis Obrian I am reading. When we get to the nothing, the void of the world when one confronts it (Zen-like?) as "being as such", we enter into a world of post modern thinking. All post modern thinking is post Heideggerian.

So once I put aside solipsism I'm accepting I'm in the ontological world my experience represents to me. And then the issue becomes what can I know of the reality of that ontological world and how can I know it - Kant's project.

I guess for Kant that ontology would be what is "behind" the pure categories of the structure of our judgments. So it goes from, here is a cat, to structural features inherent in the judgment then to the pure categories, and from there, transcendence. Eugene Fink' Sixth Meditation wants to take this to the wire: there is, in this transcendental boundary something visible to inquiry. He wants to look

..... at that belief in the world in such a way as to inquire back behind the "world-character" of world-believing life, behind humanness, and
thereupon to reduce that life to the transcendental constituting experience
of the world that was concealed by the apperception of the human. 9Thus
through the reduction the proper theme of philosophy is revealed: the transcendental
constitution of the world

You seem to me to be talking around the question I'm trying to pin down about how you see the relationship between epistemology and ontology. 

My  argument  is basically this -

1  Either my conscious experience is all that exists, in which case ontology and epistemology (or noumena and phenomena) are indeed identical, or my conscious experience represents a real world I'm interacting with.  I can't know which is true.

2.  If I make the assumption that my conscious experience represents my interaction with the world, then I've accepted an ontological world exists which I'm part of (part of in the sense that I'm not the entirety of the world). 

3.  My experience of the world is as a subject with a specific pov, not a perfect and unlimited omniscient pov.

4.  Therefore my conscious experiential representation of the world (the epistemological way I know it), is not identical with the ontological world. 

Conclusion -   Epistemology and ontology are different. Or solipsism is true.



Do you agree with this much? If so, in what sense specifically can't we separate them? If not, what's your argument? 

[psycho]

I have the impression that the correspondence between the original phenomenon and its perception is quite faithful to the phenomenon.
Our efficiency as agents is remarkable.

I think we all have such impressions. They only reflect, after all, what reality appears to be, so why wouldn't we suspect that what we perceive might be so? But we have no justification; our confidence rests on a 'faith position', yes? And so does our "remarkable" "efficiency as agents"?

I find uncertainty is always a good, grounding, position to begin thinking about something. "Do we really know that, or do we just hope we know it?" is one of my favourite questions to ask myself. At worst, it reminds me that certainty is rare; at best, it sets me on the right path, toward (apparent) understanding.

What are the chances that each one of us is an effective agent in reality (using only the information we gather from it) and that despite that, reality does not have a very good correspondence with that information?

[Sy Borg]

Yes, time can be different for the experiencer and the observer, most famously in the region of strong gravitational forces. And subjective time certainly seems different based on qualitative and associated emotional factors. Enjoyment compresses subjective time while suffering stretches it, perhaps because self-awareness is far lower in the former. One "loses oneself" for periods, so it feels like the ego has spent less time dealing with with the activity, eg. playing games vs having dental treatment.

I agree that what we do perceive is probably pretty accurate, but there is also a great deal that we filter out. As you know, only filtering by senses and the brain allows us to make any sense of the world, and we necessarily filter out different stimuli to dogs, ants, butterflies, whales and trees.

Imagine if we perceived all of reality. All frequencies, from gamma rays to longwave - to see all waves, feel all waves, hear all waves and smell all waves. You would see all the neutrinos and dark matter WIMPs pouring through everything. You would see down to atomic level as well as at the cosmic level, viewing the surfaces of planets from across the universe.

It would be overwhelming, a blinding, deafening, smelly and nauseatingly weird cacophony. You would need a brain so large that it would form a molten core, or perhaps even perform nuclear fusion or collapse into a black hole.

We are not able to distinguish changes in the rate at which physical time passes.

Yes, it's a subtle point. To the person falling into a black hole, time passes as usual (?) but to the observer they stop in space and become ever more red and faint. Still, if wee think of that which changes time - acceleration - then perhaps a change in the rate of time passing would be felt as G-forces?

Something interesting is to look for the origin of the feeling of continuity in an everyday circumstance. How do I perceive continuity when moving? What is the process that produces the sensation of continuity? It is not memory. When walking, it is not the memory that gives us the sensation of a continuous fluidity in reality.

If reality is quantised, as it is believed to be at either quantum or Planck scales, then perhaps the continuity is more of an impression than an actuality?

We cannot notice changes in the rhythm of the passage of time because we are included in those changes in rhythm.

I do not agree that the quantization of reality implies the quantization of the passage of time. It would imply that something exists intermittently. I still don't see the reason to consider such a thing.

I would think that kind of inconsistency is fairly typical for entities at quantum scales. Planck scales may be either weirder. Also, I think it would not be a matter of intermittently not existing but intermittently not progressing in time - at the most infinitesimal of scales. Think of how a movie seems continuous but is actually made up of rapid frames.

[psycho]

We are not able to distinguish changes in the rate at which physical time passes.

Yes, it's a subtle point. To the person falling into a black hole, time passes as usual (?) but to the observer they stop in space and become ever more red and faint. Still, if wee think of that which changes time - acceleration - then perhaps a change in the rate of time passing would be felt as G-forces?

Something interesting is to look for the origin of the feeling of continuity in an everyday circumstance. How do I perceive continuity when moving? What is the process that produces the sensation of continuity? It is not memory. When walking, it is not the memory that gives us the sensation of a continuous fluidity in reality.

If reality is quantised, as it is believed to be at either quantum or Planck scales, then perhaps the continuity is more of an impression than an actuality?

We cannot notice changes in the rhythm of the passage of time because we are included in those changes in rhythm.

I do not agree that the quantization of reality implies the quantization of the passage of time. It would imply that something exists intermittently. I still don't see the reason to consider such a thing.

I would think that kind of inconsistency is fairly typical for entities at quantum scales. Planck scales may be either weirder. Also, I think it would not be a matter of intermittently not existing but intermittently not progressing in time - at the most infinitesimal of scales. Think of how a movie seems continuous but is actually made up of rapid frames.

The reality changes continuously.

Thus, the elements of reality would have intermittent states: Change -> Stable -> Change -> Stable...

But we could not distinguish the "Stable" states because we are part of the rhythm of reality.

The "Stable" part is irrelevant in the analysis if it is not possible to distinguish it. If the stable part lasted a million years, it wouldn't make any difference to us.