system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
There is a question I don't understand

What statement is true according to Kant's transcendental idealism?

a) The external world exists independently of us and we can't gain knoweldge about it via perception

b) The external world only exists when it is percieved, "to be is to be percieved"

c)  The external world does exist independently of us but we can gain knowledge about it via our perceptions

d) There exists no external world

e) It's meaningless to discuss whether there exists an external world of us.

&#x200B;

None of these seem to be correct. I think it's answer "a)"  but that one doesn't seem entirely correct either. If we are exist in the  external world, humans came out of and exists within the external world - can we then really say that we exist independently of it merely because don't have access to it via our senses or perceptions? Given the nautre of our experiences, there must be a mind-independent world beyond experience which gives rise to these experiences in the first place. After all, transcendental idealism does not reject the existence of a physical world.
gpt
A is horse poopie, basically for some of the reasons you described. Unfortunately it is a common enough misinterpretation that your instructor may well think it's the correct answer, and among these it is probably closest. Without wanting to call them out, they may not be specialists in Kant and it can be quite hard to get Kant right when you don't spend a lot of your time thinking about him (or if, as many non-historians do, you already feel that transcendental idealism is a silly doctrine not worth spending time on!) Note also that historians and interpreters still seriously debate how to best understand transcendental idealism, and defend versions of various of these answers.

The problem is that it doesn't really make sense to map Kant's talk of appearances and things in themselves (the proper subject of transcendental idealism) onto talk of an 'internal' and external world. Kant is very adamant (in the 'Refutation of Idealism', for instance) that we can know that there are objects outside of us, and we know so from experience. Appearances are appearances *of* things, and so they really acquaint us with features of a world 'outside' us. What they don't do is give us direct knowledge of things as they are outside of our experience, or 'in-themselves.' Whether this means there really are mind-independent things in themselves fully separate from appearances, or whether it just means that we see the things but only see the features of them that are fit to appear to us, is a subject of serious debate. But you are totally right to point out that something needs to be grounding these appearances either way.

I don't know if the argument from birth has much to do with it - after all, 'birth' is also something that exists as appearance, etc. - but you are  justified in thinking something was wrong with this question.