A short note to Christopher. Consider this experience with me real quick. I came downstairs, intoxicated, and went into the kitchen and got out something to drink, then went into the wood room to get my cup, only to find it missing, and then remembering that I had had coffee with it in the living room before going out for our morning ride. And so I went into the living room to get it. In the meantime I continue my thinking about the next time I would see you and what I would say. And then suddenly, I am standing in the living room. I recognize that I am in the living room. And I know that I had come into that living room with a purpose, but for the life of me I could not remember what that purpose was. And I cast my eyes about in search of some clue, and when they lighted upon the cup I remembered and was able to say: That’s right. I wanted to get my cup.

That’s a common type of experience, which you will know as well as anyone. Now that normally ends the experience, right? I get the cup and go pour myself a drink and go out for a delightful smoke. But no. I have the spirit of Kant now, and so I realized that something was revealed in this so common experience, the experience of doing something on automatic pilot while you are thinking about something else, and so where you are asleep about what is going on. I was asleep to the fact that I had come in there to find the cup. I was awake to my thoughts about talking with you. I was half there, so to speak.

Now to carry this quickly to the conclusion, Kant realized that in order for such an experience ever to have arisen in human consciousness it was first necessary to presuppose a cause to my present state, my state of standing in the living room not knowing what to do next. That is not given in the data, for all we have are my thoughts and then this recognizing of my place in space, in the living room.* As Hume rightly pointed out there is not the least evidence of anything like causation in what is given to us, namely that I would have to be in that position, and not simply, as perception shows, I just happened to be in that position in the living room. And so obviously the mind had to dream it up. And since it was necessary for the mind to have dreamed it up, this causation, namely that there was a reason that I was standing in my time and space, and I had merely to remember it. The experience is that I forget things. This experience is only possible by virtue of the mind itself imposing causation upon the data given in the passive perceptions of the eyes and other senses.

[* An animal, I think, in contrast and upon seeing itself in the living room, would look about and wait for an impulse, e.g., to lie down, or to sniff a shoe, and simply accept his position in the room, not find it odd at all.]

That is, in a nutshell, Kant’s dedication of the categories of human understanding. It is by virtue of them that we are able to devise the perceptions so that we come to an experience with objects. And so Hume essentially had presupposed Kant.

I now will ruminate on vision versus sight. What we see when we look around us is a vision which is produced by our eyes. The things we actually see, e.g., the distant mountains, are actually on our retinas and yet the vision is of mountains in space, and that space is what we ourselves add to the vision, for, again, on our eyes themselves everything is flat.

And so our vision of things in time and space is a production of our own imagination, and we know this. I guess we know it because we can draw little cubes on a piece of paper, just a bunch of connected squares, and see them, actually see them, extended in space, a space which exists entirely within us. And we see the little cube bouncing this way and that in our vision, and we realize that that bouncing is in us and not in the little squares on the paper.

To recap: we spy ourselves in time and space and are puzzled. In order to solve this puzzle I must go back into the past and recreate the sequence (this happens when I then spy the cup), and so I have positioned myself in time and space by connecting it to an earlier vision of myself getting something to drink, and thereby I necessitate the present moment, and then am able to see the sequence of talking with you (in my thoughts) as not only intervening but the reason (the cause) of my not remembering what I was doing. By virtue of this connection suddenly I am doing something such that what I was thinking about was only thinking and not what I was doing. What I was doing was coming to get my cup.
Now we jump a bit, toward the great antinomies. It seems that these categories, since they are simply dreamed up by our productive imagination, are valid only because by virtue of them some data (in our case the senses like sight and touch). And so, simply because the notion of causation enables to divide data into experiences which are valid for us objectively as human beings, these does not thereby enable it to combine data which is not given in time and space. And so, for example, while we utilize causation effectively in devising such experiences, we cannot make a jump and say: but then there had to be a first cause, for we would then also have to ask, as experience has taught us, what was the sudden cause of that cause, i.e., see it in time, as the scientist must. And so we are unable by means of the notion of causation to infer that there would have to be a God, nor are we able to disprove that notion, and so it remains a matter of sheer speculation. God is a matter of speculation only, and cannot be assumed as something substantial.

The validation of the categories, therefore, is only in time and space and for the purpose of making an experience, for otherwise we have no way of validating the use of the concept beyond a possible experience, and that means we have no knowledge of any God. Or free will also, for that matter.

But I’ll save that for another time. For that leads us to Kant’s God.