Try to imagine that you had a cognitive defect such that you could not think of the world in terms of causes and effects, yet your experience remained the same as it is now. Under these circumstances,...

Try to imagine that you had a cognitive defect such that you could not think of the world in terms of causes and effects, yet your experience remained the same as it is now. Under these circumstances, flipping a switch followed by the light going on would be no different than coughing while at an intersection followed by the traffic light turning green. However, the fact is that we do connect flipping the switch and the light because the sequence is a regular and ordered one, but we do not connect coughing and the green light, because this sequence is not regular and does not follow any particular order. This scenario illustrates Kant’s point that causality is not an item of experience (like the sensation of light), but is a way in which we inevitably organize our experiences into those sequences that are regular and those that are not. Could you imagine what life would be like if the mind did not have this feature?