Sifr

-At times it seems like the debate between Rationalism and Empiricism is an elaborate deception. It tries to trap me into some complex net of arguments to take me away from my own fundamental questions. Is the world in my mind or is it outside ? But wait a minute, that was not as important as knowing if there is a mind of my own. Come ’show me your mind’.

-Kantian way of ‘rationalization’ is quite convincing. That you ‘experience’ through a pre-existing framework makes sense. Can we call that framework ‘pure intuition’ ? We may as well ‘learn’ that framework - though the learning process could be at a different level - like learning rules of a game or learning axioms of mathematics.
But even that was not important. The important question was can we change this framework ? Can somebody create a framework that is different from this shared spatio temporal framework ?

- I have a lot of respect for Hume. Look, at its simplest level Hume said causality is the trick of your ‘mind’ while Kant said it is a trick of your ‘pure intuition’. Arent they same ? To be more clear, Kants approach is different only because he was a ‘fundamentalist’; he thought the ‘pure intuition’ is the one, true fundamental structure necessary for understanding the concept of causality.
Hume probably kind of psychologised philosophy. How is ‘psychology’ related to ‘pure intuitions’ ? I see ‘causality’ because I conceive the event through the ‘category of understanding’ ( causality and dependence is a category of relation). But isnt it a trick of mind in the first place to create this ‘category of understanding’ ?

- And then there is this obvious Kantian paradox ? So after all this do you still believe in the ‘thing-in-itself’ ? Where does your ‘framework’, your transcendental ideality end and the reality begins ? Again seriousness of philosophy stops you from saying ‘you do not know’. Mr. Kant concluded in this case though he cannot definitely go and ’show you the thing-in-itself’ (part of noumena), but as a follower of the ‘cult of englightenment’ (with Newton as its Prophet) he tried to take his ‘transcendental idealism’ away from ’subjective idealism’ as much as possible.
But again to me, the more interesting question probably is : do we really need the ‘thing-in-itself’ ? Is it necessary ? This line of argument tends to open up other doors of perception, virtual reality and my next point.

-To go back to Kantian refutation of idealism ( which says that everything is in mind - there is no external object), Kant said there has to be something permanent (or persistent or enduring) outside to be able to use our temporal ‘framework of understanding’. Again this is more or less common sense. Yes. But why don’t you want to do some more ‘pure reasoning’ - why don’t you want to see the logical ending of the argument. So if Kant needed temporal pivots why cant he have the concept of a ‘layered mind’ ? In a ‘layered mind’ theory one layer of mind gives the relative permanence to some imagined object, the second layer provides you with the framework to conceive the ‘imagined object’ and the third layer experiences the object. And here one of the layers could be a collective experience or shared among a species. From this point of view some other species of animal like ‘rats’ are probably living a different reality. But then there is no reason why we should limit ourselves in three layers ? Cannot we have multiple layers where each layer talks in terms of rules of abstractions created in the lower layer. Theoretically, we can create as many layers as we want. We can also create a separate set of layers for a subset of a species. Interesting possibility : is it possible to have something ‘in your mind’ and still ’shared’ or ‘collective’ ? I do not want to get into the arguments of ‘idealism’ to find out if that is the case right now - but is it a possibility ?

- Where can we go from here ? For example category of quantity : unity , plurality and totality. You cannot experience totality. You experience totality through the concept of totality. This is like a ‘game’; you create a concept, associate some attributes to the concept and now create a larger picture with that concept as a ‘primitive’. You know what Kant missed when he created all these categories ? He missed the qaulities of this ability itself to create ‘categories’ - yes you could go one layer above, and see how we create these ‘categories’ themselves in different cultures and then experience the world through those categories. So the next step is to create alternative sets of ‘categories of understanding’ and then find out the ‘rules’ and ‘generalizations’ common in them and create the layer above it.

- Philosophers since then created different ontological categories. Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz created a system on the basis of abstract and concrete. Recentely E. J. Lowe in 2006 thought of categorizing in terms of objects, modes, kinds and attributes. But all of them go backward from the ‘external world’ to ‘categories’; they are all descriptive in a way ( though realists dont believe that). What if we start with a set of new ‘categories’ and then map/see/describe/sense/experience the world in terms of this new set/hierarchy of categories. Will the world change? In what way? Can somebody write a fiction with a new set of categories - or create a computer game?