Some would argue that awareness of things is knowledge that there are things. Plato, Russell, that I am familiar with. In juxtaposition to knowledge of things. — Mww

I would say that this probably runs afoul of the Myth of the Given. In order to know that there are things one must have grasped concepts such as "thing" and "existence" and made a judgment on the basis of those concepts. Wilfrid Sellars provides a pretty thorough critique of the notion of immediate knowledge.

Doesn’t Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (if indeed a discovery it was, as it had been anticipated previously) have some bearing on the question of self-knowledge? — Wayfarer

Yeah, I'd say so, but I personally don't think it undermines the possibility of self-knowledge. Unconscious mental processes are not present in experience the way empirical objects are, but their effects are. Thus, I'd say that they can be investigated, understood and known. What are your thoughts?

I am reluctant to directly compare this to Descartes as he published in such a constrained environment.

I am also reluctant to make my quoted passage a generality when I put it forward to show an example of his analysis and manner of discourse rather than put the passage on par with the problems he presented in his Metaphysics.

Experiencing, understanding and reasoning are acts of subjectivity. They are not something over and above the subject but constitutive of the subject itself. So when I engage in these activities I am intrinsically conscious of them as constitutive of me. Or so I would argue... — Esse Quam Videri

Kant made an effort to address this in the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps you could set your thesis against that since his view is sharply different from yours.

What are your thoughts? — Esse Quam Videri

What I have in mind is something that’s been central to my thinking for a long time. The mind-created world essay (this thread sprouted from that one) grew out of an earlier attempt to articulate how contemporary cognitive science has converged—somewhat unexpectedly—with a broadly Kantian insight.

The basic point is that the world as experienced is not a passive imprint of a mind-independent reality (per John Locke and empiricism more generally). Rather, the mind (or brain) actively synthesises disparate sensory inputs with organising structures—categories, forms, constraints—at a level largely below conscious awareness. This synthetic activity gives rise to what Kant called the subjective unity of perception: the coherent, stable world that shows up for us at all. It is not too far-fetched to compare the h.sapiens forebrain as a remarkably sophisticated VR generator.

There’s good empirical support for this. Neuropsychological disorders— like visual agnosia—show that when this integrative synthesis breaks down, the “world” fragments in very specific ways. This is not a matter of losing access to an external object so much as losing the capacity to bind features into a unified perceptual field (Oliver Sacks books had a lot to say on this.)

It's also the case that neuroscience still lacks a clear account of how this synthesis is implemented. The so-called neural binding problem highlights precisely this gap: there is no agreed-upon neural locus or mechanism that explains how distributed processes are unified into a single phenomenal scene. That absence matters philosophically, because it undercuts the assumption that perceptual unity is simply “read off” from the world (ref).

Andrew Brook argues that this places Kant as almost 'the godfather of cognitive science' because the core Kantian insight, not that the world is unreal, but that objectivity itself is constituted through cognitive synthesis, which has become influential through constructivism in many different disciplines.

That’s the sense in which I say the “mind-independent world,” as commonly understood today, is not a brute given (per the Myth of the Given) but a construct—one grounded in real experience, certainly, but mediated by cognitive conditions and cultural factors we usually overlook, because they've become second nature, and hence, in some basic sense, unconscious, or at least sub-conscious.

In order to know that there are things one must have grasped concepts such as "thing" and "existence" and made a judgment on the basis of those concepts. — Esse Quam Videri

In order to know what things are one must conceptually represent them to himself and judge accordingly. This is knowledge of.

One has no need of conceptual context for mere appearances to sensibility. One can have (the sensation of) a tickle on the back of his neck without the slightest clue as to its cause, antecedent experience not necessarily any help except to inform of what the cause is not, but not what it is.

To know that there is a thing, some as yet undetermined something, is merely the impossibility of its denial that isn’t self-contradictory. It is said to be given for the simple reason the perceiver, insofar as he is affected by it, cannot be its cause.

Sellars is correct as far as empirical knowledge mediated by discursive judgement is concerned, of course. Knowledge that there is a thing, is not that.