Kant Meets Cyberpunk
In 1992, my first year of graduate school, I read William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer and, by chance, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at the same time. It seemed to me that the two were intimately connected, but various older grad students in my Kant class pooh-poohed my ideas about this and I lacked the intellectual confidence to pursue it farther.
But the thought has stayed with me. In Neuromancer, like in Tron, there's an artificial environment that one can travel in virtually. One "enters" it by jacking into a neural interface. Also like Tron, but unlike The Matrix, the artificial environment of Neuromancer substantially differs in its basic structural features from the real-world environment. Derived from early computer graphics programs, Neuromancer's cyberspace matrix is composed of lines of light arranged into geometrical figures in simple colors; space is experienced in discrete units and movement is in rectangular clicks. As I seem to remember having imagined it, and as we might as well imagine it for present purposes (though now looking through the text, this not accurate), everything is laid out rectilinearly and the only colors are simple primaries.
So now imagine that you were born jacked into such a matrix. You might think that objects were necessarily laid out in straight lines at right angles and possessed of only primary colors, and that space came in discrete units. But this would be a feature, not of things as they are "in themselves", but rather of how your mind processes the structured input it is given. We might even imagine (and maybe it's true) that a human mind that developed in such a matrix couldn't even conceive of curves, oblique angles, tertiary colors, or continuous space. For such a mind, objects as presented in the cyberspace matrix would be the only empirically available reality, and what we non-cyberspace-embedded folks consider to be the real world would be an incomprehensible "noumenal realm" behind those appearances. Conversely, we might imagine -- though it's impossible to depict vividly in a novel -- this matrix-grown strange baby to have new sensory modalities and new basic ways of cognizing the world that are unfamiliar to us, especially if its brain is artificially enhanced (a fourth "spatial" dimension for matrix-informational layout would be a conservative start).
The analogy to Kant is imperfect. Kantian purists will, I suppose, cringe at the comparison. Time, causation, three-dimensionality, and many other properties are shared by the Neuromancer matrix and the reality outside of the matrix. And the features of the matrix available to the embedded mind might not be given "a priori" in a strict Kantian sense (whatever Kant's sense is). I'm sure there are other important disanalogies too. But as a way of getting a toehold on the Kantian picture, I still rather like the comparison. We are born into naturally given matrixes that necessarily structure our experiential encounter with the world, and out of which we cannot break, even in imagination. All this that I see and hear is just user interface.
Such thoughts are doubly apt, perhaps, if we are actually already living in a giant computer simulation.