Atla wrote
Do you understand this?
First, you should call other people and their views horrible names. It degrades discussion. Even if the other "started it," to continue it is just as juvenile.
Second, you have Kant wrong. You say some things that are true, but you you say others that are not. Consider:
Science is 100% descriptive, but in the end so is philosophy. In fact you seem to be the one chasing a philosophical illusion, by still looking for a genuine foundation.
Nothing is 100% anything, certainly not philosophy. Philosophy is apriori, it takes what is given, and looks for the underpinnings that are assumed in this given. I observe a planetary anomaly, say, or that my shoe is untied, or any you can imagine in the world. This is given, that is, part of a world that is there prior to inquiry, and in this prior there is education, the bringing forth of latent rational abilities, language acquisition, enculturation, and so on, much of which is grounded in observation. Once this empirical world is in place, then philosophy can begin. For Kant, it is an examination of the form of thought, judgment which is in the everydayness of living. His space and time are apriori forms of intuition. The foundation for claims like this lies not in further observation, but in what has to be the case given what is given in everyday experience, and for this, attention goes to the formal dimension of logic and its "purity" apart from how this plays out in incidental affairs.
Are Kant's apriori claims justified? Apriority is of course everywhere in empirical science. Any extrapolation from what is the case to what has to be the case in order for this to be so is done so apriori. No one has seen the Big Bang, yet it is a sound scientific theory since observations of star spectra indicating trajectories, speeds, suggest some powerful cosmic event, and it remains an empirical theory because the "big banging" is an empirical concept, things banging, that is. Philosophy differs in this because its conclusions are not empirical ideas. Kant's spatial apriority is grounded on the "observations" of geometrical intuitions, a world of necessary conditions about triangles and such, and space itself which possesses these. He does the same with time.
Yes it's probably so that there is only access to appearances, which are structured according to the workings of our own individual brain/mind, which Kant called a priori. (I don't think he really explored the individual differences, especially gender differences here though.) And we extrapolate from those appearances a world beyond appearances, but we can never be absolutely sure what it's actually like, or whether it even exists.
He doesn't extrapolate to a world beyond experiences (unless you are talking about noumena of which he says nothing can be said. He only presents this concept because he has to, not because he wants to reveal its reality. Of this, nothing can be said. See the Transcendental Dialectic). But he insists that this world is representation, and that it is not possible to make knowledge claims outside of the empirical world.
It is not "brain/mind". "Brain" is an empirical concept and so when we observe a brain it is, as with all empirical concepts, in space and time and these are apriori forms of intuition that cannot in any way present something outside of their own intuitive conditions. So no, when you observe a brain, you are not seeing something that is beyond the intuitive conditions of its apprehension. That tree in the forest when all perceptual systems are absent: no tree, no forest, no sound; in fact, no sense at all can be made of such a thing.
Mind is more puzzling. One would have to define it better as it is "given" and what is given in mind is phenomena, ideas, sights and sounds, the temporal nature of this, the anticipatory structure of past, present and future, the pragmatic nature of meaning, affect, and on and on. If by mind you mean the field of givens--reason, intuitions, language, MEANING, as they are presented in thought and experience, then you are not talking about the brain at all. There certainly is a correspondence between brain and mind, but they are very different things. Correspondence does not yield a reduction any more than a volcano's correspondence to a comprehensive account of the subatomic activity contained therein reduces a volcano to subatomic activity. It simply reveals a matching set of parts.
The reason volcanoes can still be volcanoes after such an analysis is that both are phenomena and analyzed as such.
Which doesn't mean however that the world beyond appearances is "interdependent with the human conditions". Only our model of it, our extrapolation is "interdependent with the human conditions". There is an important difference between the two.
This model, for you is meant to be an extrapolation: an extrapolation from what to what? That is, your have before you what is there to be extrapolated from in order to posit something else, something unseen, but presupposed in what is before you. Kant was insanely good at this. What do you have in mind?
And the Einsteinian spacetime is still NOT the same kind of space and time that Kant discussed. The appearances structured by Kantian space and time, happen in a world that behaves according to Einsteinian spacetime. Do you understand this?
No, For our discussion here, I'm afraid you have this backwards. Look at it like this: Einstein might start a conversation on space and time with "Two objects exert a force of attraction on one another known as "gravity" and if we...."" ; then the interruption: Excuse me, but what do you mean by "objects" and "force" and "attraction" and the rest? Einstein, knowing where this goes, would politely respond that this is not a discussion of the phenomenological examination of concepts, or of space and time, but an apriori discussion of the empirical concept of gravity.
If you work within the empirical model, then you get what you say above; and if you work with the phenomenological model, you get the opposite. The phenomenological model is philosophy, physics is not, and the former is what is at issue here. What is NOT on the table here is what Einstein had to say about time and space
as a physicist. If it were, this discussion would be very short lived: see Einstein's general theory of relativity. but that is not what this is about. It is about Kantian idealism, which is an examination of the presuppositions of language and logic and experience.