also feels vulgar to include Mormonism into Christianity. The latter has centuries of sophisticated and curated thought building its tradition, the former is dumb as soon as you bat an eye on it — Lionino

There are literally hundreds of Christian denominations, if not thousands. You'd be hard pressed to explain why Mormonism fails to fit the general definition yet continue to hold the others do.

Your reference also to "Christianity" as a single monolithic belief system that has marched forward for the past 2024 years references no actual religion or belief system.

Denominations split to this day

For a list of denominations:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations

Mormonism began in 1830, but it's not as if the other Christian traditions all trace back 2000 years and have held consistently throughout. Fundamentalism, for example, traces back to the early 1900s.

For a list of 62 denominations that began in the 19th century: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Christian_denominations_established_in_the_19th_century

Christianity is not immutable and the relative antiquity of one denomination over another doesn't afford it greater legitimacy.

Protestantism generally relies upon a restorationist theology where they claim their views restore the true beliefs of the church lost by the Catholics (of which there are varying movements within that tradition as well). The point being that it is well accepted among Christians that the church does change, leaving the various denominations to argue what it truly ought to be.

But, sure, a Catholic can deny a Baptist is a Christian and insist upon his prescriptive definitions, but that would serve no purpose other than provocation, as it's not like the terminology usage will change among the traditions nor will the belief systems

It seems not. — Banno

Seemed that way too me too

Was that post intended to say something — Banno

Was this one?

The tomato is red" is true only when someone is looking at it? — Banno

Does the mildew smell nauseating when no one is smelling it?

[

there are no red tomatoes in a box, unobserved? One can never order a box of red tomatoes without threatening metaphysical collapse? — Banno

There is no nauseating mildew in a box unsmelled? One can never order a box of nauseating mildew without threatening metaphysical collapse?

You haven't thought this through. — Banno

Someone hasn't. That's for sure.

But making me feel nauseous isn't like making me see red!

Yes it is.

If there is no color in light, and the visible spectrum is light, then it only follows that there is no color in the visible spectrum. — creativesoul

Light exposure influences the biological machinery to do different things... mindlessly. This includes the eyes, when looking at the infamous image of the dress. — creativesoul

These comments are inconsistent. The first states the visible spectrum is light. The second states the visible spectrum is biologically created. The first is a direct realism claim. The second is an indirect realism claim.

An internal experience of light can be experienced without there being any external light source. These are called phosphenes and they can be created predictably with electrodes in the brain, so much so that they can assist those with damaged optic nerves to "see."

https://www.pennmedicine.org/departments-and-centers/ophthalmology/about-us/news/department-news/vision-scientist

The point of this is that it is empirically proven that an internal, subjective experience can be evoked by direct brain stimulation. This means that you cannot conclude anything about the constitution of the stimulus from the experience. The smell you smell is the product of stimuli upon the brain, so the perception is entirely the creation of the brain.

You can no more say the electrode is a dot of light than you can say the tree is green.

Notice that the shades of red are red? Do you suppose that the shades of pain are painful? No; the items in the first are red, the items in the second are not pain. — Banno

If I want you to understand red, I show you a red card. If I want you to understand sweet, i give you a piece of candy. If I want you to understand massage, I rub your shoulder.

If I want to cross categories and let you understand pleasure through vision, I create a visual scale with smiley faces. I suppose I could correlate tastes to sounds and smells to taps on the shoulder and make all sorts of scales.

None of this makes pain special.

This is so i basic I find it hard to believe it is where dispute lies, but I suspect the role of pain to Wittgenstein is being misunderstood. I'd love to think myself so clever that I pierced this complex philosophy, but I find that hard to believe.

The beetle analog was written about pain, not colour. While to some extent there is an overlap, one can produce samples of colour and chat about whether these are red, and what shade of red. One cannot do the came with pain; what one sees is the manifestation of pain, the groaning and grimacing. One cannot see into the box. — Banno

This strikes me as special pleading and a category error, holding a special rule to the sense of sight as opposed to touch and then asking why we can't publicly see the pain in the object. It's just such a confused statement. If we insist the red is in the pen (which is your thesis), the we must insist the pain is in the knife (which would avoid the special pleading). We then need to publicly experience that pain, which would be performed by each of us touching the blade of the knife and feeling the pain as a group. To demand that we must experience the pain distantly like we do color just makes a category error. Touch doesn't require photons for perception.

And note that the above doesn't suggest the color or the pain was in the mind. I'm keeping this consistent with the thesis that the object contains the attributes, not the mind. The fact that we have to reach out and touch the knife for the pain in the knife to be known to us doesn't anymore suggest the pain is an object of the mind than is color because you also must open your eyes to see the color. That is, with regard to any sense, you must make your perceptions available to the object to experience it, whether that be looking at it across the room or touching it with your finger.

I recognize this is a criticism and not a recitation of Wittgenstein which I've otherwise been delighting you with, but it just makes so little sense to me how you can concede to pain all the indirect realism concerns, but then just decree that the same things don't apply to color. For the sake of this academic experiment, I'm willing to consider the idea that we are compelled to limit our understanding of the world to that which can be spoken of, but I have to apply this game we're playing consistently. That is, if the pen has color we can point to and it remains something beyond just subjective experience, then I can't suddenly stop playing your game and then worry about pain being in its own special class that is just subjective experience.

That is, let's pick a model: Either we have these qualitative states of red and pain we can speak of and we have this world of phenomena and noumena or we just have our community of words. I'm saying pain is no different than red. Either they're both phenomenal states or neither is.

The point is, colour is not a beetle. Lionino cannot see your beetle, by definition, but you both see the red pen. You both see red. — Banno

This strikes me as incorrect. What we both see is the beetle, which would include its properties, including its redness. I speak of my beetle and you of yours, but it becomes irrelevant as to what it actually is. All that is relevant is we speak consistently enough to play our word game. That is, don't speak of what I see.

It's when you ask what actually we see you run into problems. You can point to the pen as evidence of what is being seen, but you can't then in turn say the beetle is X in an ontological way. All you can say is that red is defined as that pen we both see, but not suggest you have any idea what we both see.

Indeed. And if colour is only in your head, then how is it that Lionino is able to use the word in a way that is consistent with what is in your head? Could it be because there is a shared pen that is red? — Banno

If I say that color is entirely in my head, you can't disagree with this, else you fall into metaphysics. You've committed to a linguistic model, so you violate your principle to suggest to know what my beetle is. Your position is that the beetle is irrelevant for our conversation and so you'd ask I remain silent about it

So, assuming your linguistic model true, Lionino and I have no knowledge of redness or pens in an ontological way. We have words and only words. I see you do things and hear sounds associated with that and from that I figure out what game you must be playing, and from that, I join in and we word play.

The pen is just the thing we hang a word on. Saying it "is" red must be kept clear. "Is" is being used to state a definition, not an empirical fact here. As is in "the bachelor is unmarried" versus "bob is unmarried."

Where I find this unsatisfactory is that if you ask what this pen is in an empirical sense, not a definitional sense, you get no response. Literally, silence. And I'd like to know what a pen is other than that indescribable thing we've labeled "pen."

That exploration is worth having even if you've figured out how to communicate without it.

It leads to silly, solipsistic statements such as
The definition of "red pen" is that thing that is out there that appears in my head as red.
— Hanover — Banno

It's not solipsistic at all. My comment referenced an external object. Solipsism says I only know my own mind.

How does Lionino know how the pen appears in your head? Your definition doesn't even get to stand up, let alone take a step forward. — Banno

He can't know my beetle, so we don't talk about that. What he can know is what I say and so long as we use the words in a consistent way, we get to play our language game together.

Maybe we have the same beetle, maybe we don't. We must realize it's irrelevant so we remain silent about it.

What is important is that we have a commonality of usage, so when I say my pen looks red you compare it to the other times you've heard the word and you assume a consistency. All that is important is that our language interaction work.

If you ask what's behind the curtain, as in, what is the meaning in the mind and what are the phenomenal states, you go hopelessly down the road of asking what precedes language and what exists independently of it.

Such is linguistic philosophy.

I am aware of the strained argument that an external object must exist to remind us of our prior usage. That seems ad hoc and wrong, designed perhaps to avoid my conclusion that the external is irrelevant for the playing of the word game. I say there's a red pen and you agree and so we speak together, regardless of whether we have a metaphysical underpinning.

This is about words. If the red reaaly is out there or really is just imposed by the brain doesn't matter. All that matters is that when i explain my view, you understand it and I speak it consistently.

In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word is God. And that's that. Sentences can mean very different things in very different contexts.

Anywat, I don't buy into the above, but I can recite if having to sit for an exam.

My own view is a dualistic theism where there are hearts and minds and an entire inner and external world of mystery and purpose, where every blade of grass sits exactly where it does for a specific reason, including there being a higher purpose for our having this conversation.

I say that just to avoid any confusion that i buy nto what I recited above.

You say you use words in some way other than saying them?
— Hanover

This seems telling. Yes, we all use words in ways other than to simply make statements. You know that. We use them to do all manner of things, from making promises to declaring war. — Banno

You changed what I said to salvage what you said.

I didn't make any claim about types of statements, performative or otherwise. I said it odd to suggest that words could be used in ways other than saying them. Whether I report of your marriage or pronounce you married, in either case I say it.

In any event, you said "Use is determined by... well, what we do. Not by what we say we do."

What we do with words is say them (or write them). Their usage after spoken is another thing. And so we can go back to what we were talking about, and that is definitions because that's all we're limited to.

The definition of "red pen" is that thing that is out there that appears in my head as red. You disagree, but that disagreement is not philosophical. It's that you think I don't speak English like I ought to. You think I use my words inconsistent with the way my community of speakers does. I disagree, so now we are in some sort of sociological investigation, where we go out into our respective communities and figure out how it is we arrive at the words we do and then we can debate who's correctly identified the way we're to talk.

And that is the whole thing of it. You've argued consistently that this whole metaphysical debate is off limits and that the proper way to go about knowing about the world is to figure out how we use words. So let's put that to the test now that you've got full buy in from me. "The pen is red" means we have a pen object and a red subjective state because my community relies upon neuroscientists to tell me what my brain does and that's how I use my words.

We're now just in a contest as to who can write the best dictionary for the task at hand.

My updated suggestion is that you're talking out of your hindquarters. — Jamal

I said I liked the suggestion, not that I thought it correct. The idea that a whole movement has been created from misunderstanding sarcasm is an entertaining thought.

Do you mean that he revealed this about analytic philosophy with his criticisms, or do you mean to characterize his own philosophy as exemplifying this "objective"? The former is an interesting take, but the latter seems obviously wrong. — Jamal

I think he revealed it through his working it through to its conclusion. I didn't take him as a critic of analytic philosophy though, just more taking it where it went.

I think you meant that though, just using "criticism" to mean logical analysis as opposed to one skeptical of it.

Yet that would be a very interesting suggestion, which is likely wrong, but to think his point wasn't we ought abandon metaphysical analysis based upon his analysis, but what he really set up was a reductio ad absurdum that his followers mistook and they embraced his absurd conclusions instead of rejecting analytic philosophy as he meant to show was absurd.

I like that suggestion actually.

Not when the dream is happening, though. — frank

I had an 8:00 am class in college that I'd go to and come back home and sleep. I was half awake and half sleeping and I knew I was asleep so I'd fly and do other cool shit I couldn't do when I was awake.

I think sometimes people who talk about how other people think actually think there's one way of thinking. I'd suspect Picasso saw things like he painted them more than that he just jumbled his real thoughts.

I had a professor once who talked about what dogs could think and I think he thought he knew, but I knew he never could have had a dog, or if he did, he never took it seriously.

The animal thing foreclosures me taking seriously that language is needed for serious thought.

Wittgensteinian is interesting to the extent he lets you know the logical conclusions of analytic philosophy where the only objective is to define your terms and forget about the world

Use is determined by... well, what we do. Not by what we say we do. — Banno

You say you use words in some way other than saying them?

Doubly odd.

You show signs of recognising differing uses. Progress. The physiology is not the whole story. — Banno

Your argument reduces to saying that my use of the term "red pen" is incorrect because no one uses it that way. My argument is that they do. The physiology dominates my definition.

Since use is determined by whatever the community says it is, then I say my definition is correct. I live in a different community than you apparently.

We're just arguing over who's the better dictionary writer.

Try going into a shop and asking for the red pens that are not red and see how far you get. — Banno

But we're not in the shop. We're here. Use is contextually based. Maybe a tomato is a fruit, but I'm asking the shop owner to direct me to the vegetables for the tomatoes. I'll speak French in France as well.

This reduces to what we just think are one another's idiosyncratic uses of language. I say the pen itself isn't red, which is consistent with how the neuroscientists define it. Reliance upon experts to define terms in an intellectual setting such as this is reasonable. What do you suggest, a democratic vote?

I will restate the question: if the pain happens exclusively in the mind, how does a burn on your finger hurt your finger and not your foot? — Lionino

If you cut off someone's foot, the person might still feel pain in what they believe to be their foot. This phantom pain is caused by the severed nerves that once traveled to the now missing body part and so the brain identifies the pain where it once was.

You can reliably stop the phantom pain by removing the person's brain. Without the brain, there is no pain because it is the brain that makes the pain.

Then there are other sorts of pains that you don't really identify as having a specific location, like the pain of a breakup. You don't say that your face is sad because your women done left you. Or maybe you do. I don't really know you all that well.

Sure - in this case. But it would be wrong to conclude that therefore the only way we use "red" is to refer to firing of certain cells in V4 - as worng as to conclude that "red" just is light at 700nm. — Banno

If Witt is correct, then the engagement in language games is inescapable. It's not like I get to be a Kantian metaphysician and you a Wittgensteinian linguist and we then go about proselytizing our respective positions.

So, to the extent @Michaelargues the pen is not red and you say it is, the dispute per Witt is over proper usage. Since our community of speakers does typically defer science to scientists, it is proper to argue the pen is not red based upon best scientific theory.

That is, your commitment to your unsophisticated definition of red that doesn't take the full neuroscience involved is just a stubborn nuance of yours. That I insist upon calling Pluto a planet because that's what I've always done, simply means I obtain usage through a relatively ignorant community of speakers.

If the best scientific description of an object places color as a brain construct, then we should deny the pen itself is red if we want to side with the educated community as opposed to those who've not truly considered the issue.

What are we to make of this? Will we be good scientists and acknowledge the theory falsified, because Subject 1001 reports that they see blue? Or are we going to say instead that Subject 1001 is mistaken? — Banno

Your experiment takes as a given that asking the subject is the gold standard for determining color. That is, you take their word as truth and you try to find what the cause of the truth is.

And that seems right because it'd be odd to tell someone they can relax because their test results showed they weren't in pain after all.

But, you raise another point and that is if stimulation of V4 resulted in the subject seeing red and numbing V4 eliminated red from their seeing it, we'd be forced to conclude red was quite literally in their head and not in the pen.

Would not such a finding about V4 disprove that red is in the pen? If not, what would? Is your position falsifiable?

My suspicion is that the only way for you to concede that the red is not in the pen is for people to stop saying it is. That is, when they call the pen blue, then you know it's not red.

If that's the case, why even entertain the scientific arguments? Your claim is not scientific. It's linguistic.

Your repetition of the name "Amadeus" in your reply reminded me of this song:

If our perceptions may not bear any resemblance to what's out there, then why believe the science that led you to accept indirect realism? — frank

Science reliably predicts the behavior of my perceptions. Physics is the study of the way physical objects are observed to act.

In saying that no one believes the airplanes are blips, you are implying that we aren't expecting more than what the blips are telling us to accomplish some goal. We don't need to know the color of the plane to prevent it from crashing into another one while landing. — Harry Hindu

If you're conceding our perceptions might just be a pragmatic stimulus to navigate the world, which may or may not bear any resemblance to the object, then we're agreeing. If the pen is not red, but just appears red, then you're not asserting a direct realism.

How about they all stand up together? — Harry Hindu

With disagreement. Surely you don't think there is one final interpretation of the Bible that irons out out all the inconsistencies. Jesus died to save mankind from the original sin that occurred in the Garden of Eden said no Jew ever.

I don't see how that suggests that color of the pen is part of the pen and not the person's perception. It just describes how perceptions occur.

We can also stimulate non-functioning auditory nerves in the profoundlly deaf by implanting a cochlear implant. Once implanted, the person will begin experiencing beeps that he learns to translate into words and sounds so that he can properly respond to them. That person's perception of the sound is entirely different from those with normal functioning auditory nerves. That would lend support to the fact that the sound is not in the bird's chirp, but it's in the listener's head, and there is no reason to believe that the deaf person's perception of the chirp is the same as mine.

We both would say, however, that the bird chirped, yet our internal states would be entirely different.

I can imagine the same could be done of vision, where an artificial visual stimulator could offer flashes that could be perceived such that the person would call an object a "chair," but his perception of that chair would bear no resemblance to my own. He'd see a particular array of flashes, yet I'd see a particular shape, yet we both have the shared experience of something, both of which we use the shared word of "chair."

That explains linguistic use. It doesn't explain metaphysics and it refutes direct realism.

The fact that we know that phenomenal states can exist without external stimuli and that phenomenal states can be manipulated to provide varying perceptions of the same external stimuli forecloses direct realism as a viable option. Yet it persists.

If I have a fear of dogs and I feel that fear every time I see a dog, is the fearsome dog an object like a red pen, with the fearsomeness and the redness within the object, or is the fearsomeness within me the perceiver only?

If I internally create the fearsomeness but not the redness, how do you decide which traits of the perception go into the internally created bucket and which go into the objectively existing bucket?

Your post is motivated by the clutter of cars interfering with your favorite past time of bike riding. But that is an aside.

I hate bicycles. They occupy my American roads that are neither quaint nor ancient. The vast spaces I travel over were never filled with little old women chatting about their day, nor are there other options, like rail or buses. Billions are spent annually for cars to dart about for the purposes of commerce above all else, but also for getting to and fro. I get that you want to exercise in your spandex and your backwards hat and I know I've been encouraged to "Share the Road" or whatever those signs might say, but the investment in the roadways was not made for providing exercise and leisure. We are paving the planet for me and my SUV to get where I need to go.

We have parks with miles and miles of paved trails to nowhere for you folks to enjoy, and if that's not enough, we have stationary bikes and treadmills for you to pretend to be in the wild. Use those set asides and stop showing up where motorists belong.

I agree with the Gary's sage advice: Get the fuck out the road!

This post makes you so mad. You're probably even madder than Gary ever was. Gary probably laughed at yelling at the little old ladies a few minutes later. I know Gary well. Gary is Hanover.

But I am not a Kantian. I do not believe we can know about things that we cannot know (noumena). — Leontiskos

I don't think we can know about things we cannot know either. That's what it means to be noumenal.

But even here your example fails, because just as there are distinguishing properties of red and white pens, so too are there distinguishing properties of red and white images, and also distinguishing properties of the two sets of code that generates those different images. — Leontiskos

The red is what you perceive in your mind. It is that phenomenal state. So, look at an apple and the red you perceive is the red.

The word "red" is what I type, but it is not my fingers moving. It is the letters R - E - D. The input causes the output, but the input isn't the output.

That there is an object X that causes you to see red and an object Y that causes you to see white doesn't mean that X is red and Y is white. It's for that reason we don't say my fingers moving are the word "red."

If you want to say that X and Y are different to the extent one makes you see red and one white, that's fine, but that doesn't mean X is red, where "is" means "to be." X is a bunch of electronic impulses in the computer code example and it doesn't look red. It looks like code, or maybe just computer parts.

Hmm? We could, by analogy, call the code white which causes the white image, but it is the image on the screen that is white, not the code. — Leontiskos

In this analogy, the code is the noumena and the color is the phenomenal. The point being that there is no reason to claim any property on the noumenal. The pen and the perception of the pen need bear no relationship to one another.

Do you think that pens do not really exist, and the mind is just projecting them? That there is no difference between a dream or a hallucination and reality? — Leontiskos

I've not argued idealism, but I do wonder what can be said of the reality that realists speak of.

Consider two pens, a red pen and a white pen. Is it your claim that there is no external difference between these two pens? Or: that the only difference between the two pens is something the mind projects into the pens? (Note that your word "elicits" already tells us that there is an external basis for differing color perceptions.) — Leontiskos

Consider 2 sets of computer code, one that projects an image of a white pen on the screen and a second that projects a red pen on the screen. Which code is white?

Why do we even have words the refer to mental states if something is lost when using them? — Harry Hindu

I don't understand the reasoning behind this question. You're asking why speak at all if our speech isn't 100% accurate and complete in terms of what it conveys? My response would be because knowing something is better than knowing nothing. Why did we have black and white photography before color photography came out? Because something is better than nothing. And, I'd say, I don't labor with the belief that current color photography is 100% accurate in what it depicts. It's 2 dimensional, for example.

As in my example earlier of the air traffic controller looking at blips on his radar screen. No one believes that airplanes are blips, but we can all see the value in having him look at those blips.

If I made it to the grave sight after telling me how to get there nothing was lost in translation. If I say "I understand how you feel" when you tell me how you feel nothing was lost in translation. — Harry Hindu

Genesis 1:2

English Standard Version: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."

New Revised Standard: "the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters."

Good News Translation: "the earth was formless and desolate. The raging ocean that covered everything was engulfed in total darkness, and the Spirit of God was moving over the water."

Septuagine Bible w/Apocrypha: "But the earth was unsightly and unfurnished, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the water."

Will the real Genesis 1:2 please stand up? That is, the one where nothing gets lost in translation.

You can only be disappointed in Stalin if he had not achieved his goal, but he clearly did. — Tarskian

Kind of like I should be impressed with Jeffrey Dahmer. He set out to murder and then eat people, and by God he did it. What's not to like?

Feels trollish, but I'll wait and see how things develop. Regardless, it's not interesting enough to keep my attention.

The typical response to critics of Marxism who refer to Stalin is to try to distinguish true Marxism from his brand of mass murder and destruction.

You, on the other hand, accept the criticisms joyfully, embracing its horrors.

Pretty idiotic, but novel.

I truly admire him. — Tarskian

As your eyes met his in deep admiration, he'd have murdered you too.

Was the failure of communism mainly due to pursuing happiness not as a methodology or process; but, as the final goal of the system itself? — Shawn

I think Stalin, for example, failed because he only pursued happiness. That and he killed 40 million people.

Did you have another communist in mind?

If you define bad faith as anything less than open, honest communication, then you're in bad faith by not having the conversation with your wife that you're having with us.

If you define bad faith some other way, where interests are weighed, like believing the preservation of the marriage matters or the intersts of the children (if any) ought be weighed, then it's not necessarily bad faith to withhold information.

But, as others have said, this isn't advice. It's analytic philosophy, working with terms and definitions.

Talk to a therapist. I'd love to tell you that there's a principle that honesty at all costs, damn the torpedoes, is always in order as a matter of obligation. That would then clean up all the messiness of figuring out what your highly particularized situation demands.

Unfortunately though, life is too complicated for an easy answer.

Do you never try to convey how you feel to others? If you do then you must have some degree of certainty that they will at least partially understand what you are saying because they can experience the same feelings but in different but similar contexts (they have lost a love one too, just not your loved one). — Harry Hindu

Heavy emphasis of "partially." Words aren't useless. They are massively important to communicate with one another. Words are an interpretation of mental states into symbols. The mental states stay behind and the symbols do the best they can to project one's thoughts to another. Much is lost in translation.

How can I make it to your loved one's grave with a high chance of success (much more than random) when you are describing your internal states of what it is like being in that location and what it was like to get there yourself? — Harry Hindu

I've not argued that communication is worthless. I've only said that it can't be used to precisely convey my mental state. Whatever is expressed will be significantly limited in content.

Kant described transcdenntal apperception, which is the ability to form a single conscious state from the millions of elementary inputs. That is, as I sit here right now, I have a single conscious state. I could itemize various aspects, like what I see, how I feel, what I'm thinking about, etc., but the entirety of that mental state is singular. It is what I am experiencing in total right now. That cannot be conveyed.

That I might be able to convey to you the directions to the park doesn't suggest that I am able to convey to you my mental state. In fact, the directions I might articulate to you that will get you to the park is not how I conceive of getting to the park. I don't have a silent train of words going through my mind thinking about where I turn and where I go. I just know how to get there, and If you asked me for directions, I would think of the roads and the buildings along the way and then after the fact put that in to words so you'd know where to go. I can't transmit my mind's eye of me visualizing internally how to drive there.

We're way too in love with the notion that we must think in words. That's either a fabrication created by philosophers or I'm super strange in my thought processes. I think it's the former.

You sure are making a lot of knowledge statements about what you know about others' experiences for someone that says
The noumena isn't known. — Harry Hindu

I know that others don't know what I feel when I tell them about it because I don't know what they feel when they tell me about it. I could question the person for hours and still have more questions.

The noumena doesn't refer to subjective experience. It refers to the object. That is, the pen is noumenal. The experience of the pen is phenomenal. The fact that I can't fully know another person's subjective experience isn't because it's noumenal, but it's because I simply can't experience it like I can a first person experience.

So, wouldn't it be more likely that while they may not fully share an experience they do share some experiences, and those reasons for those similarities and differences can be pointed out as similarities and differences in our physiology and prior experiences? — Harry Hindu

I don't think any amount of talking will convey to you the first person experience I have of anything. It will always be a rough estimate. Experiences are not just personal, they are highly contextualized and nuanced. What it feels like to visit a grave, for example, will include thousands of memories, pain, happiness, and maybe even the heat from the sun and pebble in your shoe. A report of an experience is an experience of a report, not a coveyance of an experience.

Why is it useful to report what you see? — Harry Hindu

So that the other person can be informed, more of less, of what I see.

In reporting what you see, you seem to know there are other people with other minds that can perceive what you do, in the way that you do, or else what is the point of reporting what you see? Why use language at all? — Harry Hindu

It's true that I assume the listener understands me, but I don't think he fully understands me. This thread is evidence of that.

You seem to be trying to build an argument with these questions, so I'll keep answering you, but maybe move closer to the point because it's not apparent to me.

It may be the other person doesn't see what I see or know what I know. My expectation is that much of what I do experience I do not fully convey in words and that much of what the listener hears isn't accurate of what I meant. Maybe we have shared experience, maybe not. I'd find it hard to believe that two people would fully share an experience down to the last emotion or perception.