Animae wrote:
If Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism is right then we will be able to do amazing things once we acquire the tools to change ourselves

Animae wrote:
By “amazing things” I wasn’t thinking about knowing reality in itself, but rather acquiring a new perspective on reality by altering our pure intuitions (I think this is the correct term). To take a simple and perfectly clear (IMO) example, we can think about how we experience space, as 3 dimensional. Now, it seems to me that it would be conceivable—by altering our (biological) nature a certain extent—to allow us experience 4 or perhaps even more dimensions.

Paul wrote:

You can't experience things that don't exist, except by dreaming or acid trips. There are only four macroscopic dimensions (three space, one time) and you have to be around the plank length to "experience" the debatable number of extra dimensions of string theory.

You can eliminate a dimension very easily. Wear an eye patch, and you're only experiencing the world in two spatial dimensions. You can still easily deduce the existence of a third dimension despite your lack of depth perception, though. In the same way, the existence of a fourth spatial dimension would be evident in some way if we were merely blind to it.

Paul wrote:

Transcendental idealism was ahead of its time in noting that the four dimensions are transcendentally indistinguishable with space and time only separated for observer points. Special relativity extracted the physical implications from that more than a century ago though, nothing new is coming from it. In no way did Kant believe in extra macroscopic dimensions waiting to be discovered (or at least he didn't write a lot about it, and I'll be astonished to discover that he did).

Paul wrote:

Of course, but we've had perception-altering drugs for eons now. Experiencing things in ways that aren't representative of the actual relations of things in the world is counterproductive. Finding new accurate ways to collect and represent sense data just means we'll all have x-ray vision, bat sonar sense, and that smell-taste combo thing cats do. Which sounds fun, but it has nothing at all to do with Kant.

Paul wrote:

It's not dualists vs. materialists. It's dualists vs. monists, and monists split against each other as physicalists (materialists are long dead because physics isn't materialist anymore), [Berklean] idealists and neutral monists. Kant's transcendental idealism is a type of neutral monism.

Paul wrote:

If you want to talk about consciousness in Kantian terms, look at the transcendental unity of apperception -- or what Wittgenstein more eloqeuntly dubs the microcosm or metaphysical self. Consciousness is basically a collection, a perspective. It's empty backdrop on which experience plays out.

Kant is a methodological solipsist, meaning he starts from the solipsistic world (Wittgenstein's microcosm) and works from there to deduce the objective and the transcendental (Wittgenstein's macrocosm). As opposed to the behaviorists and externalists who start with the world and try to work the self into it. Methodological solipsism makes consciousness the least problematic thing of all things... it's not whether we're conscious that we need to worry about, it's whether anything exists beyond our consciousness. We never directly experience anything but our own consciousness -- you can only directly experience yourself, everything you experience is only a part of yourself which you interpret as a representation of something supposed to be beyond you.

The "problem" of consciousness arises only from the opposite approach, the physicalist who's so transfixed by the film (the representations of the so-called external world) that he wants to reduce the room and the projector and the seat and himself into products of the screen. (Okay, that was a pretty deeply flawed analogy, but hopefully you get the point.)