What’s Going On?

I didn’t know where else to start…

But now I see I can’t! To say what is going on, I need to know how it all began. Problem is I have access only to the present. I have memories, sure; but these are not the past. And I plan, but for a future which never arrives. I experience only a moment, within which all memories and thoughts occur. Beginning and Ending are just my ideas of where and when, of what and how. While in this moment, I am only who I am.

So let’s jump in.

Kant had an idea:

“The mind must do three kinds of synthesis. It must generate temporal and spatial structure (Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition). It must associate spatio-temporally structured items with other spatio-temporally structured items (Synthesis of Reproduction in the Imagination). And it must recognize items using concepts, the Categories in particular (Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept).”
-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

So we’ve got intuition to couple us to spacetime, imagination to display ideas, and intelligence to recognize concepts.

“Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”
(Kant, CPR)

Are we stuck in between?

“… the I that I think is distinct from the I that it, itself, intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself, not as I am …”
(Kant, CPR)

So I am, but I only seem to know it. That’s what gets this whole show kicked off. You know, the knowledge quest. The I we are goes beyond itself and appears before us. The mind is coupled to the structure of reality through intuition, but somehow is able to appear outside itself though conceptualization.

So that’s what’s going on. Well, at least it was… maybe we’ll be able to find it again?