Transcendental Idealism was the metaphysics of German Philosopher Immanuel Kant. It argues that our world is actually made up of two worlds:
>Nuomena
>Phenomena
Noumena is basically the outside world as it exists . Without any mind or particular set of senses observing it. It's the things as they are or the "thing in itself" (Ding an Sich).
Phenomena is the world as it appears to us. It is the array of visuals, sounds, tastes, smells etc. that create a moving picture inside our minds. This is what we think the outside world is, created with info parsed by our senses and processed by the brain.
According to Kant, the Noumena is the source of all sensual information that is collected by all beings. That information is then processed to create the moving image that appears to the consciousness. That is the Phenomena.
So what can we know about the Noumena or "outside world"? Since all the information we have about the world comes from the phenomena residing in our minds, we actually cannot learn anything about the Noumena from the Phenomena. It's a dark realm of pure unknown.
But if we cannot know anything about the Noumena then we cannot claim that the categories of human intuition and judgement, like causality, exist within the Noumena. Which means that those categories must exist within the mind itself, because they do appear in the phenomena.
Therefore Kant's theory argues that the categories (he listed 12 of them including causality) and the super categories of Space of Time actually exist within the mind and not the outside world. Like an Operating System in a computer. And when outside sensuos signals from Noumena are processed by the mind , these categories shape the raw data to create the mental image that is Phenomena.
Which would mean that Cause and Effect is not something that actually exists out there, i.e. X causes Y is not something that can be said to exist in the Noumena, but It's rather a product of our mind's interpretation.
>Nuomena
>Phenomena
Noumena is basically the outside world as it exists . Without any mind or particular set of senses observing it. It's the things as they are or the "thing in itself" (Ding an Sich).
Phenomena is the world as it appears to us. It is the array of visuals, sounds, tastes, smells etc. that create a moving picture inside our minds. This is what we think the outside world is, created with info parsed by our senses and processed by the brain.
According to Kant, the Noumena is the source of all sensual information that is collected by all beings. That information is then processed to create the moving image that appears to the consciousness. That is the Phenomena.
So what can we know about the Noumena or "outside world"? Since all the information we have about the world comes from the phenomena residing in our minds, we actually cannot learn anything about the Noumena from the Phenomena. It's a dark realm of pure unknown.
But if we cannot know anything about the Noumena then we cannot claim that the categories of human intuition and judgement, like causality, exist within the Noumena. Which means that those categories must exist within the mind itself, because they do appear in the phenomena.
Therefore Kant's theory argues that the categories (he listed 12 of them including causality) and the super categories of Space of Time actually exist within the mind and not the outside world. Like an Operating System in a computer. And when outside sensuos signals from Noumena are processed by the mind , these categories shape the raw data to create the mental image that is Phenomena.
Which would mean that Cause and Effect is not something that actually exists out there, i.e. X causes Y is not something that can be said to exist in the Noumena, but It's rather a product of our mind's interpretation.
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