[MD] Kant's Motorcycle

[Case]

[Micah]
Perceptions are the organization of sensory data, they are not separate. You
cannot have perceptions without your senses. Kant is perceiving without
sensory data...this is impossible. He is not pointing out what things are,
he is pointing out that they are not. That is a denial of reality and
therefore mystical. TITS are not knowable, can that be any more mystical?

[Case]
Ok, see how you made me break out the brackets? Now you are confusing Kant's
whole program. You have gone all "Bass-o-matic" Kant says perception is the
process by which sensation is rendered intelligible. Sensation alone is
meaningless. Creating perception from sensation is not a passive process. He
says that by virtue of our nature we form perception and concepts from the
raw material of the senses but the process of formation involves preexisting
structures. These are the a prioris that we got this thread started with. A
priori categories are built in, hardwired it you will. In computer terms
they are BIOS, written in firmware. He does say that even in the absence of
all sensation perception would occur. This was in opposition to Humes
account. But this has nothing to do with TITs.

[Micah]
Kant's stated objective was to defend religion from the onslaught of
science. Since the mystical (religion) cannot be rational; he has attempted
to make the rational into the mystical.

[Case]
As I mentioned I do not know or frankly care what Kant's religious program
was. It does not seem relevant to what we are talking about.

[Micah]
Red is a quality of red apples, they reflect that color spectrum - my senses
don't. 

[Case]
Apples reflect all sorts of electromagnetic radiation. You senses respond
within a specific range. Neither the apple nor you eye has anything to do
with color. Rather they furnish the raw materials from which perceptions are
formed.

[Micah]
My classification or perception of the color reflected by apples does
not affect the fact that red apples have the quality of reflecting the color
red. I suppose you could say the apple is every color except red because
that is the color not absorbed. But our senses don't see the absorbed
spectrum, so therefore we perceive red. This is how senses and perceptions
work together; we cannot perceive something without sensing it.

[Case]
Sort of, our senses respond to particular wavelengths. How we classify these
sensations is a function of our biology and our reinforcement history. We
have the cortical equipment to discrimination and generalize sensations and
to store past experience. The meaning "red" or "tasty" emerges from the
immediate sensation and our previous experience.
 
[Micah]
Kant is perceiving without senses when he says we cannot know TITS. His
senses deliver data the he perceives as red and he proclaims "this apple is
not really red, and further we cannot even know that it is an apple, because
the TITS of the "Noumenal" world can't be known. This is an outright denial
of sensory data in favor of a "mystical" perception. Nothing is real -
mystical.

[Case]
This is not a discussion about TITs. At the moment, distasteful as this is
for me to say, TITs are irrelevant. Kant is talking about how perception,
knowledge and reason are possible. He is not denying the senses at all he is
saying that they are not sufficient to explain perception. He does not say
that the apple is not really red he says that in order to call an apple red
we must have an internal structure of classification and experience in
classifying things and we must have sensations to experience and classify.

My own take on this is that sensations are instantaneous. They do not
persist in time. In order for perception and knowledge to occur there must
be a smearing of time, a temporal buffer where sensations are recorded and
can be played back. We are as beings are able to represent a fifth
dimensional perspective in four dimensions. That is, we can mentally move
back and forth in time randomly rather like we can construct four dimensions
of space from the three dimensions of our retinas. (note: I add time in as a
dimension)