I think the key is reason. The ability to ask 'why is that?' 'Why should that happen?' 'What does that mean?' I was contemplating the other day that the hallmark of reason is to be able to recognise necessary truths. That is the rational faculty in a nutshell, and the thing that separates us from our simian forbears. The 'rational animal'.

In evolutionary terms, presumably that began to emerge long before any kind of real culture, probably paleolithic. I always took that to be the drift of the famous monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Well, we see things very differently. For me the key is the arational, when it comes to any knowledge or understanding which is not empirical, discursive, dialectical or logical. if it can be captured in language at all the arational is more akin to the metaphorical, the poetic. It evokes rather than describing, measuring or explaining.

To be sure, that is part of symbolic language, but it is closer to 'symbolic' in the sense meant by Jung than it is the idea of a symbol representing something or other in the sense of strict reference.

The whole point of my argument is the refutation of the idea that an object has an inherent existence absent any mind. — Wayfarer

You have an inherent existence, do you not? You know this because you think, but your existence is surely not merely a phenonenol truth.

Not quite. Absent cognition, the universe is featureless, because features map against the capacities of the ‘animal sensorium’. Again, that what we see as shapes and features has an inextricably subjective basis. — Wayfarer

I used the word "features" in an attempt to generalize beyond our framework. It's non-specific, except it is clear that one feature you can't deny is your own existence. This cannot be the only feature, unless solipsism is true.

If “physical” just means “whatever exists,” then physicalism is no longer a metaphysical thesis but simply another way of talking about ontology. — Wayfarer

In another thread, you challenged what is meant by "physical". I acknowledge that the term is ambiguous (is a gas "physical"? Is a quantum field? What if a "many worlds" interpretation is true?- are the inaccessible worlds physical? )

I embrace reductionism, and reductionism entails the notion that everything that exists is composed of the same kinds of things. Not monism (one thing), but (at least potentially) a set of things. That set of things is what I'm referring to, to avoid a semantics debate about what it means to be "physical".

I'd really like you to respond to this:

But suppose we simply say that physicalism's model applies specifically to phenomenal reality. Your objection vanishes, does it not? I have much more to say about this, but I first want your reaction. — Relativist

You have an inherent existence, do you not? You know this because you think, but your existence is surely not merely a phenonenol truth. — Relativist

Any being does, but already said you think cogito ergo sum proves nothing. The point, which I return to, is that the fact of one's own being is apodictic, cannot plausibly be denied. For to doubt it, one must first exist.

I embrace reductionism, and reductionism entails the notion that everything that exists is composed of the same kinds of things. Not monism (one thing), but (at least potentially) a set of things. That set of things is what I'm referring to, to avoid a semantics debate about what it means to be "physical". — Relativist

That formulation still leaves a hard remainder. The laws of physics, mathematical structures, symmetry principles, and modal constraints are not composed of the same kinds of things as the entities they govern. Are they also things? They are not particles, fields, or energy distributions. Yet physicalism treats them as objectively real and universally invariant (reflecting the theistic heritage, 'divine law', from which it originated). Materialism would like to say that they are dependent on, or emergent from, or supervene on, physical states or processes — but none of those dependency relations can be shown to be straightforwardly physical either. Any attempt to demonstrate such dependence must rely on inference (“if this, then that”), which is itself of a different order from physical causation. Logical necessity does not require or imply a transfer of energy.

But suppose we simply say that physicalism's model applies specifically to phenomenal reality. Your objection vanishes, does it not? I have much more to say about this, but I first want your reaction. — Relativist

What does 'phenomena' mean? It is from the Greek, 'what appears'. And implicit in that term is the subject to whom phenomena appear.

In Aristotelian philosophy, matter (hyle or prima materia) is formless and unknowable until it is informed by an intelligible kind. So, in that sense, the physical (matter) and intelligible (form) can be understood as separate principles, although Aristotle would not say they could exist separately. But the point is, neither can it be used to endorse physicalism, because matter in itself has no determinate form.

So: phenomena already imply subjectivity, and the physical already presupposes form, as if it has no form, it has no identity. The error of physicalism is to say that the physical has determinate reality sans any act of observation or form - that's what I mean by 'inherent reality'. This is also why quantum theory persistently resists being interpreted as a theory of fully determinate, observer-independent objects - “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." That holes physicalism beneath the waterline, something which a lot of people seem not to have noticed.

You have an inherent existence, do you not? You know this because you think, but your existence is surely not merely a phenonenol truth.
— Relativist

Any being does, but already said you think cogito ergo sum proves nothing. The point, which I return to, is that the fact of one's own being is apodictic, cannot plausibly be denied. For to doubt it, one must first exist. — Wayfarer

Yes, but I was using this as an example of "feature": this one indisputable fact is a feature of objective reality (not merely phenomenal reality). Are there other features? If solipsism is false, then it is logically necessary that there are other features. Not(solipsism) is disputable, but do you actually reserve judgement on solipsism?

— Wayfarer

But suppose we simply say that physicalism's model applies specifically to phenomenal reality. Your objection vanishes, does it not? I have much more to say about this, but I first want your reaction. — Relativist

So: phenomena already imply subjectivity, and the physical already presupposes form, as if it has no form, it has no identity. The error of physicalism is to say that the physical has determinate reality sans any act of observation or form - that's what I mean by 'inherent reality'....
The context of my question was Kant's view of TRUTH as a correspondence with phenomenal reality. You said you accepted this. So I'm asking you to assess whether or not physicalism is possibly true, in terms of it possibly corresponding to phenomenal reality, in this Kantian sense. This has nothing to do with "inherent reality". It only has to do with the theory of truth you accepted.

Yes, but I was using this as an example of "feature": this one indisputable fact is a feature of objective reality (not merely phenomenal reality). — Relativist

The whole point of Descartes' meditation, was that he could doubt the existence of objective reality. But even if he doubted everything he thought he knew and sensed about the objective world, he could not doubt that he doubted it. Here is a translation of the original text:

I will suppose then, that everything I see is spurious. I will believe that my memory tells me lies, and that none of the things that it reports ever happened. I have no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras. So what remains true? Perhaps just the one fact that nothing is certain. Yet apart from everything I have just listed, how do I know that there is not something else which does not allow even the slightest occasion for doubt? Is there not a God, or whatever I may call him, who puts into me6 the thoughts I am now having? But why do I think this, since I myself may perhaps be the author of these thoughts? In that case am not I, at least, something? But I have just said that I have no senses and no body. This is the sticking point: what follows from this? Am I not so bound up with a body and with senses that I cannot exist without them? But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something7 then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. — Descartes First Meditation

So, in no way can this be interpreted as 'a feature of objective reality'. It is the grounding truth of Descartes' first philosophy. On this basis he proceeds to then erect his structure of 'clear and distinct ideas'. It was only after Descartes that the ideas of 'objective and subjective'came into common use (ref).

The context of my question was Kant's view of TRUTH as a correspondence with phenomenal reality. You said you accepted this. — Relativist

I didn't say that. This was the exchange in question:

"My understanding is that Kant believed that we only can have genuine knowledge and truth about the phenomenal world, but not about things-in-themselves (noumena) as they exist independently of our experience. However, you acknowledged the possibility of making true statements about the actual mind-independent world, so you must disagree with him on this point."

— Relativist

I do not disagree with Kant on this point. It IS the point! Nothing about scientific method demands that it concerns 'things in themselves'. It is perfectly compatible with the idea that phenomena, how things appear, are governed by rules and principles and behave consistently to a point (as we always have to allow for the fact that nature will confound from time to time.) — Wayfarer

Kant's point is, once again: he is at once and empirical realist AND a transcendental idealist. Empirical realist: the scientific account provides genuine knowledge - Kant would never question the veracity of Newtonian physics. So in that context, we can speak of 'correspondence' of statements and facts - but this is something that Kant describes as 'nominal'.

But he is ALSO a transcendental idealist: "I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves." (ref)

There are two levels or two kinds of understanding - empirical and transcendental - at play throughout this debate. That is why I keep saying, that the empirical truth of the fact that the Universe pre-dates human existence, is not undermined by my saying that our knowledge of the pre-human universe still assumes an implicit perspective - even though we know that it existed for billions of years before we did. That's what I mean by an 'implicit perspective'. Take that out, and we can't make sense of anything, as there is no perspective. So the empirical view is not truly 'mind-independent'. What 'mind independence' is, is an extrapolation based on the scientific principle of bracketing out the subjective view, but mis-applied to reality as a whole. It mistakes the methodological step of 'bracketing the subjective' for a metaphysical principle 'the world we see is the same as would exist were we not in it.'

I'm asking you to assess whether or not physicalism is possibly true, in terms of it possibly corresponding to phenomenal reality — Relativist

To answer in terms of the geneology of the idea of modern physicalism. 'Geneology' is the history and background to an idea, how it developed over time. Harking back to Descartes - his philosophy divided the world into res extensa, extended matter, and res cogitans, literally a 'thinking thing' ('res' being the root of 'reality'.) So, thinking being and extended matter. But, as has been often commented, Descartes himself could never account for how res cogitans and matter interacted, if they're of such radically different kinds. So it was inevitable that the whole concept of 'res cogitans', the so-called 'ghost in the machine', would be jettisoned, in favour of a model which proceeded to explain 'everything there is' in terms of res extensa, extended matter, which has, after all, provided enormous material power. I think that's overwhelmingly what is behind today's physicalism and scientific materialism - which is, as said, powerful, but at the expense of bracketing out the subject to whom it is meaningful, hence 'the meaning crisis.'