Kant student here. Find below some relevant Kant for the unitiatied. Note that Kant interpretations are everywhere and that no two scholars are alike, but I've

Kant student here. Find below some relevant Kant for the unitiatied. Note that Kant interpretations are everywhere and that no two scholars are alike, but I've tried to list the less controversial stuff. Look at a thing on your desk. You are having a sensation of light and colour. Kant calls this raw pixel level sense data "sensibility". Now as well as just seeing pixels you can distinguish the thing you are looking at as an individual object, with certain dimensions and in a certain location. Kant calls this processed spatiotemporal data "intuition". Now you may also recognise the object you are looking at as being "a stapler" and you may recognise it as being on your desk and as belonging to your friend who's lent it to you. Kant calls this abstract data "concept" (also called "idea" as in the OP). Now. If you're doing Science then you'd better have intuitions corresponding with all your concepts otherwise you're just making stuff up without actually looking at the world. But unfortunately there's a limit to how much we can observe in the world and we are greedy so we start coming up with judgements about concepts that do not correspond to any intuitions. E.g. "The universe is a simulation". In the Critique of Pure reason the central question is how any such judgements can be true (hint we think that some are true: Pythagoras's theorem is a judgement about all triangles, and so we think it is true for some triangles we have never seen). If you think this is a worthwhile question you might like to read Kant. A Kantian reply to the blog post linked above would be that if the universe is a simulation then we can't even be sure that the laws of mathematics or geometry hold outside of it, because these laws are added by our brains when we turn "sensibility" into "intuition". If it seems silly to you that the laws of mathematics or geometry might be all in our heads, then you are what Kant calls a "Transcendental Realist". If it seems natural to you that the laws of mathematics and geometry are all in our heads and that this is what allows those laws to be true of every object we see, then you are what Kant calls "a Transcendental Idealist". If we're being Transcendental Realists then it makes sense to collect empirical data to settle whether the universe is a simulation or not. If we're being Transcendental Idealists, then the empirical data we collect has absolutely no bearing on the question.