[MD] Consciousness (explained?)

[X Acto]

 Jan-Anders:


> 1 According to Kant we can have a lot of opinions about the table
> itself but we will not know anything about the table itself. We know
> our sensations and thoughts about it but we cant bring the table
> itself into our brains, nor bring our brains into it. Some are then
> concerned about their thoughts in the same way but as René Descartes
> expressed it "I think, therefore I am"

Bo:
Yes, and Kant was SOM brought to its final stage, most of experience 
is provided by the subject (Das Ding für Uns) but there still is an 
objective residue - Das Ding an Sich) - out there. After Kant Western 
philosophy atropied, everyhing became footnotes to Kant or took on 
some very peculiar topic - ecolology - Pirsig is the first thinker who not 
only challenges Kant, but SOM's root: Plato & Co.  

Ron:
Bo, have YOU read Kant? Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher.
Have you heard of "the critique of pure reason"? Pirsig mentions his apriori
concept in reference to his motorcycle in ZAMM?

"Kant believed himself to be creating a compromise between the empiricists and the rationalists. 
The empiricists believed that knowledge is acquired through experience alone, but the rationalists 
maintained that such knowledge is open to Cartesian doubt and that reason alone provides us 
with knowledge. Kant argues, however, that using reason without applying it to experience will 
only lead to illusions, while experience will be purely subjective without first being subsumed 
under pure reason.
Kant’s thought was very influential in Germany during his lifetime, moving philosophy 
beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, 
Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer each saw themselves as correcting and expanding the 
Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism. Kant continues 
to be a major influence on philosophy, influencing both analytic and continental philosophy.
Kant is best known for his transcendental idealist philosophy that time and space are not 
materially real but merely the ideal a priori condition of our internal intuition."
-wiki