Kant: synthetic unity of apperception as the ground

[volatileworld]

In order to understand the world completely we must understand how we come to understand things in general. That is, we must have a picture of our cognitive faculty of understanding. Kant argued that synthetic unity of apperception is the faculty of understanding itself. That is, all our knowledge about the objects in the Universe come from it. I tried to model synthetic unity of apperception as the grid of cells where logic relates cells together:
https://www.academia.edu/7347240/Our_Co ... _Dialectic

what do you think?

[HexHammer]

Prolific brain diariah ad libitum ...OM*G!!!

I could understand if one wrote 1 page of nonsense and babble, but this is an epic journy of complete and utter idiocy, feverishly ramblings!

[Ginkgo]

In order to understand the world completely we must understand how we come to understand things in general. That is, we must have a picture of our cognitive faculty of understanding. Kant argued that synthetic unity of apperception is the faculty of understanding itself. That is, all our knowledge about the objects in the Universe come from it. I tried to model synthetic unity of apperception as the grid of cells where logic relates cells together:
https://www.academia.edu/7347240/Our_Co ... _Dialectic

what do you think?

Many people don't acknowledge the synthetic apriori so I think you are going to have a tough time convincing the skeptics by way of a computations performed by linking neurons through synapses. At this stage I don't think the argument is convincing enough.

[volatileworld]

Your point is good. The problem is that I have not finished reading Fichte and Hegel... I think only what belongs to monad is original innate a priori. While combination of monads (synthetic a priori) belongs to experience as well as it is a product of transcendental productive imagination which generates space, time and the categories (as these post-Kantians argued).

[hammock]

In order to understand the world completely we must understand how we come to understand things in general. That is, we must have a picture of our cognitive faculty of understanding. Kant argued that synthetic unity of apperception is the faculty of understanding itself. That is, all our knowledge about the objects in the Universe come from it.

Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant's model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

1. The mind is complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)

2. The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.

3. These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.

These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant's most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.

To study the mind, infer the conditions necessary for experience. Arguments having this structure are called transcendental arguments.

Translated into contemporary terms, the core of this method is inference to the best explanation, the method of postulating unobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observed behaviour. <KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND>

The great thing [about Kant's philosophy] was to form the idea that this one thing -- mind or world -- may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. <MIND AND MATTER>

Nevertheless, we should avoid the neo-Kantian / early structuralism error of literally treating Kant's conditions for cognition (faculties of Sensibility and Understanding) and the natural world (regulative forms and things in themselves) as if they had literal, discoverable phenomenal counterparts in the latter or the brain.

...Poincaré's structuralism had a Kantian flavour. In particular, he thought that the unobservable entities postulated by scientific theories were Kant's noumena or things in themselves. He revised Kant's view by arguing that the latter can be known indirectly rather than not at all because it is possible to know the relations into which they enter. Poincaré followed the upward path to structural realism, beginning with the neo-Kantian goal of recovering the objective or intersubjective world from the subjective world of private sense impressions: “what we call objective reality is… what is common to many thinking beings and could be common to all; … the harmony of mathematical laws” (1906, 14). However, he also followed the downward path to structural realism arguing that the history of science can be seen as cumulative at the level of relations rather than objects. For example, between Carnot's and Clausius' thermodynamics the ontology changes but the Second Law of Thermodynamics is preserved. While Worrall never directly endorses the Kantian aspect of Poincaré's thought, Zahar's structural realism is explicitly a form of Kantian transcendental idealism according to which science can never tell us more than the structure of the noumenal world; the nature of the entities and properties of which it consists are epistemically inaccessible to us (as in (2) above). Michaela Massimi (2011) develops a neo-Kantian perspective on structural realism. <STRUCTURAL REALISM>

There's also a history of incorrectly conflating "external world" or "real world" with the so-called "noumenal world". Helmholtz did this sort of thing.

Perhaps the relation between our senses and the external world may be best enunciated as follows: our sensations are for us only symbols of the objects of the external world, and correspond to them only in some such way as written characters or articulate words to the things they denote. They give us, it is true, information respecting the properties of things without us, but no better information than we give a blind man about colour by verbal descriptions. <Helmholtz, 1853>

The senses give us, as Helmholtz says, effects of things, not faithful copies, let alone the things themselves. To these mere effects, however, belong also the senses themselves, together with the brain and the supposed molecular movements in it. We must therefore recognise the existence of a transcendent world order, whether this depends on 'things-in-themselves', or whether—since even the 'thing in itself' is but a last application of our intuitive thought—it depends on mere relations, which exhibit themselves in various minds as various kinds and stages of the sensible, without its being at all conceivable what an adequate appearance of the absolute in a cognizing mind would be. [That we do not have knowledge of this transcendent order shows us that all metaphysics is, like art, a creation of the imagination. Nonetheless we should still] 'in natural science everywhere apply the same conceptions and methods as the Materialist; but what to the latter is definitive truth is to the Idealist only the necessary result of our organisation. <THE HISTORY OF MATERIALISM>

Our extrospections instead do concern the real world.

For Kant, the world view we have through our objective conceptions is not simply a model or representation of the world. Our objective world-view, based on phenomena and conception, is the real world. The world of phenomena simply is the world I live in. If I look at a tree, what I immediately see really is the tree. There is not a tree that exists beyond the phenomena; the tree exists through the impression I have of it, and the conception of tree that I derive from the impression. In this sense, Kant deviates from simple empiricism that states that what we actually see is the appearance of the tree, but that the real tree is somehow beyond these mere appearances. Technically, Kant defines reality as objective validity. Since our world view is objective in relation to phenomenal impressions, we may describe it as having empirical reality.

Kant's view that our phenomenal understanding constitute reality has two merits: (1) it accords with our common sense experience of living in the world (e.g. when I go to the bakers to buy a loaf of bread, I am not suddenly confronted with an anxious moment of wondering if the bakery is real, or whether the bread is all in my mind: I simply accept that what I see and hear around me is real); (2) it is able to resist the problem of idealism that dogs empiricism; i.e. since empiricism states that we do not have an immediate impression of reality, then how can we be sure that reality is there? <DOES KANT'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE LEAD TO SOLIPSISM?>

It should be pointed out, however, that Kant is not endorsing an idealism about objects like Berkeley’s. That is, Kant does not believe that material objects are unknowable or impossible. While Kant is a transcendental idealist–he believes the nature of objects as they are in themselves is unknowable to us–knowledge of appearances is nevertheless possible. [...] Another way to put the point is to say that the fact that the mind of the knower makes the a priori contribution does not mean that space and time or the categories are mere figments of the imagination. Kant is an empirical realist about the world we experience; we can know objects as they appear to us. He gives a robust defense of science and the study of the natural world from his argument about the mind’s role in making nature. All discursive, rational beings must conceive of the physical world as spatially and temporally unified, he argues. And the table of categories is derived from the most basic, universal forms of logical inference, Kant believes. Therefore, it must be shared by all rational beings. So those beings also share judgments of an intersubjective, unified, public realm of empirical objects. Hence, objective knowledge of the scientific or natural world is possible. Indeed, Kant believes that the examples of Newton and Galileo show it is actual. So Berkeley’s claims that we do not know objects outside of us and that such knowledge is impossible are both mistaken. <IMMANUEL KANT: METAPHYSICS>