Whether it comes 'prior to' human perception, doesn't make it any more real. If it happened as human perception was introduced, it's the same, the universe as it stands may be real but we currently misunderstand it's history(what people think is that because it 'just appeared' as perception arises, there is evidence of something fake occuring--- but that's wrong. It's no less real it just has an abstract, very short, history). If the mind creates the universe, and there is something like computer code and framework happening under-the-bonet, pulling wool over our eyes, it's still no less real--- there's just more to it than meets the eye.

If the universe has been around for billions of years, that's a whole different discussion, it being there 'prior to' perception doesn't suggest it's been there for more than a minute nor that if it has been around for a minute, it's fake.

The big bang may be only an essence; a resource for our minds to create the universe. In that regard, it never happened, it's just the simulation of the result of such an event.

Well, putting religion and spirituality to one side, no. But is there a good reason not to?
— Punshhh

Religion and spirituality are not really discursive endeavors. Is there a good reason not to put religion and spirituality aside when doing philosophy?

Sorry, I meant, is there a good reason not to believe in a demiurge. I’m happy to keep religion and spirituality to one side.

Cogent means clearly (and thus clearly expressible) and convincing, so I asked whether you had a clearly expressible and convincing reason to believe in a demiurge.

Yes, I see now. I was interpreting the word belief in its religious context. Now I see that you were using it in the sense of ‘holding an opinion, or idea’.
I do have such an explanation, but whether it would be convincing , is unlikely. Because I became convinced by the idea myself, I doubt I could have been convinced of it by being told it. Or that I could necessarily convince someone else. As it is more of a lived experience, a journey.

Are you suggesting you have experienced the demiurge?

Yes, although it would have more likely have been a higher being(indicating there was a demiurge) But this is besides the point now, as we are putting spirituality to one side.

but I don't think the same applies with a demiurge

Agreed.

If we feel an unshakeable conviction regarding what it was an experience of, it will be enough to non-rationally convince us, but it will not be enough to non-rationally convince others unless they have a will to believe as we do.

Agreed, this is what I was getting at with ‘convincing’

I’ll put my idea again, in a simple form.

What we have is the coming together of two things spirit(not in the spiritual sense) and matter( a field of spatial temporal potentiality). This results in the diverse forms we find. But where ever we look, the two are wedded, that one can’t be teased from the other. Because what we see is neither(spirit, or matter) but the fruit of that union. Resulting in three things and a world that is neither spirit, or matter.

As far as I know mathematics exists only in the spatiotemporal world. There can be no order without things to be ordered. — Janus

That conclusion is drawn from the unstated premise that "things" by your usage exist only in a spatiotemporal world. However, we are talking about immaterial "things", which are not spatiotemporal, meaning, value, and intention.

In classical metaphysics there is a very strong logical argument, the cosmological argument, which demonstrates that there must be something immaterial which is prior in time to all material existence, as active cause of the first material thing. This implies that we ought to conclude that your unstated premise is false. Therefore your argument is unsound.

And of course, those who practise mathematics demonstrate every day, that things being ordered need not be spatiotemporal things. So you really ought to reject your own argument.

The problem is that we have every reason to think there is a world prioir to perception... — Janus

Likewise, we have every reason to believe that there is an immaterial world prior to the material world.

First, denying this would require either that material things came into existence from absolutely nothing, or that they have existed forever. Both of these possibilities are contrary to empirical evidence. Material things do not come into being from nothing, nor do they exist forever.

Second, the nature of time indicates to us that actual material existence comes into being at the present time, now, while the future consists only of possibilities for material existence. This implies that the possibility for any material thing must precede, in time, the actual existence of that thing. Since the possibility for a thing is not necessarily a material thing in itself, we must conclude that there has always been something immaterial prior to any material thing, as the possibility for material things, in general.

Not that I think the question and the answer to it matter that much, at least not to those who just accept that we live in a material world consisting of many, many things which don't depend on us for their existence. — Janus

The philosophical mind however, wants to know the nature of these things which don't depend on us. To simply assume, and accept, that the nature of these things is adequately described by the concept "matter", therefore we live in a "material world", is not good philosophy.

Isn’t that utterly simple? Going back to the original post: the contention is, simply, that “the world” (object, thing) is not simply given but is constructed by the mind/brain. That’s what the brain does! In humans, the brain is an enormously complex organ which absorbs a very large proportion of the organism's metabolic energy. What’s it doing with all that power? Why, it’s creating a world! A very different world to that of cheetahs, otters, butterflies and divas, but a world nonetheless

This is Kant’s basic point - not that Kant has the last word on all the implications, not that Kant is correct in every detail. But his ‘Copernican revolution in philosophy’ is the factor which was a fundamental turning point in modern philosophy. It was arguably the origin of all such later developments as phenomenology and constructivism, and why Kant has been (rightly) designated the ‘godfather of cognitive science’. Hence also the amount of content devoted to cognitive science in the original post and the implied convergence of Pinter's 'gestalts' with the 'ideas' of classical philosophy.

I am not sure if it works to simply claim that appearances are of something, and that this relation is wholly simple and cannot be further explicated. It seems like simply rejecting phenomenalism by fiat. But from whence this unimpeachable knowledge? It would appear to be an absolutely simple and unimpeachable knowledge of things-in-themseleves at least in their relation to "everything we experience." Yet no mechanism can explain such knowledge because "causes" etc. are said not to apply

Certainly, Kant was very influential here, and he is often invoked in these sorts of contexts, but I think this the ascription to Kant of the title "godfather of cognitive science" actually runs quite counter to Kant's own philosophy. To use the empirical sciences—phenomena—to say things about the noumenal nature of things is simply off-limits. Kant certainly might serve as an indirect inspiration for those who try to explain the contours of appearances in terms of cognitive science, neuroscience, natural selection, physics, information theory, etc., but in the end all these efforts fall afoul of Kant's epistemology. They are, in reality, far closer to the earlier forms of thinking on this subject that Kant dismisses as "twaddle" because they are not properly "critical."

For, it was hardly a novel thought that the properties of the mind and of man's senses/body affect how the world appears. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver," wasn't an obscure insight, but a sort of core dictum, and there was a vast literature on the "way of knowing proper to man as a physical being, and a particular sort of physical being, as against 'angelic knowledge'" that one could trace as far back as Plato, and certainly to De Anima. Kant's novelty lies more in absolutizing this doctrine such that the Peripatetic Axiom that: "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses" (i.e., received by the body through the environment) becomes radically altered, as does the parallel axiom that "what is known best to us (concrete particulars) is not what is known best in itself (intelligible principles)." These aren't exactly negated, but they are very much changed.

The Copernician Revolution then is more about epistemology becoming "first philosophy" then the introduction of the idea that the mind shapes experience and the act of knowing. Hence, contemporary introductions on metaphysics (e.g. Routledge's) have to specify that they are focused on "traditional" or "not post-Kantian" metaphysics, because they don't put epistemic concerns first. You see this all the time in contemporary metaphysics where the conditions for being known (by man)—or later, "spoken of"—are considered to be synonymous with the conditions for existing at all. Many arguments from underdetermination rest on this assumption.

On this point, I think Pryzwarra has a good answer in Analogia Entis. He says that first philosophy must always deal with both the metaontic and the metanoetic, because some sense of being is required to say anything about anything, and yet how we know anything is always an question with great priority. Hence, first philosophy involves a sort of instability, a passing back and forth between being and knowing (mirroring creaturely instability where essence is not existence). It's like Plotinus says, thinking and being are two sides of the same coin, but only unified in the One. Their bifurcation in creatures causes heartburn, the need to overcome duality (non-dualism; Kant, by contrast, seems to absolutize dualism). Nonetheless, the metaontic has to have a sort of priority, because an "act of knowing" still presupposes something about "act," and existence, being. I think one can see this in how Kant is forced to still appeal to terms such as grund (ground, cause) and wirklichkeit (actuality) even in places where he wants to deny their applicability.

But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.

Yet then what of throwing free will into the noumenal realm? At any rate, I think this might lead towards the parallel charge of Kant as leading towards skepticism, that his world bottoms out in nothing. I suppose there is a greater similarity to Nagārjuna here. Personally, of the bit I know, I find Huayan Buddhism and later Mahayana to be more compelling on this point, with the idea of luminous awareness as the flip side of emptiness, since it appears to be more in line with the idea that the contingent and finite must "boil over" (Eckhart) from the "infinite."

This charge of solipsism is often levelled at the kind of phenomenological idealism I'm advocating - but the response is, we are members of the same species language, and culture.

Sure, and that works in many philosophies. I think Kant specifically may have barred himself from making such appeals though. The "cause/origin" of appearances is what they are appearances of. So phenomenal experience "comes from" something we can know nothing about. To appeal to culture and biology, phenomena, as an explanation of what produces that which can receive appearances would be off-limits.

Thomist critics like Maritain would say that Kant misses the “intuition of being” — a direct grasp of existence itself that grounds metaphysics. Without that, they argue, Kant seals us off from reality - something other critics also point out. There’s force in that critique. But even granting it, Kant’s basic insight remains: theworld of experience is constituted through the mind’s forms and categories, not simply received as a mirror of things-in-themselves.

Yes, but they generally also attack the deflated notion of causality he inherits, which is partly what results in the "bridge" being cut off. But without the bridge, consciousness appears to be one way and not any other "for no reason at all." After all, it cannot have "causes" if causes are imposed by the mind. But then the question remains: "from whence these categories?" Appeals to physics, natural selection, or even the seemingly basic structures of information theory and semiotics are off-limits.

And then I think the bolded would just be rejected as a strawman of much prior philosophy. No knowledge of "things-in-themseleves" is assumed because the category itself is rejected. The only "thing-in-itself" analog would be God, whose essence is unknowable. This is an area of some agreement the , but as noted before, apophatic methods work here with God because the transcendent is not absent from what it transcends, whereas Kant allows himself no such purchase.

Here, I think Berkeley's instincts are generally better, even if he hasn't been received as well, or Fichte.

To use the empirical sciences—phenomena—to say things about the noumenal nature of things is simply off-limits. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But isn’t it you who is here saying things about the noumenal or thing-in-itself? If there’s a fault in the expression Ding an sich, it lies in the “Ding”: as soon as we call it a “thing,” it’s already objectified, named, made into some thing—even if we then say it’s unknowable. We’re simultaneously thinking it and not thinking it.

So there is no “noumenal nature” as if it were an object awaiting description. To treat it that way risks projecting it as the first link in a causal chain—an “uncaused cause” - which is where Kant says it becomes dogmatic metaphysics.

For, it was hardly a novel thought that the properties of the mind and of man's senses/body affect how the world appears. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Agree! I see Kant as continuous with many aspects of the previous tradition. He adopted Aristotle’s categories almost unchanged, and his habilitation thesis was on Plato’s Ideas, although that was before his “critical period.” But meanwhile, there had been the scientific revolution, and the abandonment of the geocentric universe with its crystal spheres. Kant is continuous with the older tradition, but he is also responding to a radically altered intellectual landscape in a way that his immediate predecessors were not.

I think this might lead towards the parallel charge of Kant as leading towards skepticism, that his world bottoms out in nothing — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nāgārjuna likewise is accused by his Brahmin critics of nihilism (as was the Buddha). But no-thing-ness—the Buddhist emptiness—is not nothing, not a nihilistic void as it is sometimes called. That idea of “The Void” evokes all kinds of existential terrors (or at least uneasiness, which I can hear you expressing!). It was a common rendering among 18th-century translators of Buddhism, and later echoed by Nietzsche and other European philosophers (Nietzsche called Buddhism “the cry of an exhausted civilization”).

In the OP, I footnoted a passage from the Kaccāyanagotta Sutta which goes to the heart of this apparent impasse:

By and large, Kaccāyana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. — Kaccāyanagotta Sutta

The import for the “mind-created world” argument is that the world (object, thing) outside perception neither exists nor does not exist. To say “nothing can be said about it” is not to claim “it is something that does not exist.” Rather, it neither exists nor doesn’t exist; in fact, there is no “it.”

In broader philosophical terms, to speak of “the unconditioned,” “absolute,” or “unborn” is to gesture towards what is not any specific thing at all and is beyond the scope of discursive thought. This is not unlike what we find in Neoplatonism: the One of Plotinus cannot be an object of thought, or an object at all, since it transcends the distinction of self and world. The famous expression of the One as “beyond Being” means, in my interpretation, beyond the polarity of existence and non-existence—beyond anything of which something determinate can be said.

And you can see how this leads back to Kant and the limits of discursive reason: the Ding an sich is not a hidden object, but a marker of the boundary of thought itself, reminding us that whatever lies “beyond” cannot be spoken of in terms of existence or non-existence. And as language relies on those very distinctions to gain traction in the world of experience, it is in that sense beyond speech.

To say “nothing can be said about it” is not to claim “it is something that does not exist.” Rather, it neither exists nor doesn’t exist; in fact, there is no “it.” — Wayfarer

Unfortunately that is not a sensible, or even meaningful, thing to say―better just to remain silent. If philosophy is about anything it is certainly not about talking nonsense.

‘Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.’

[However]

Philosophers in the Mahayana traditions hold some things to be ineffable; but they also explain why they are ineffable… Now, you can’t explain why something is ineffable without talking about it. That’s a plain contradiction: talking of the ineffable.

Embarrassing as this predicament might appear, Nāgārjuna is far from being the only one stuck in it. The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why. Martin Heidegger made himself famous by asking what Being is, and then spent much of the rest of his life explaining why you can’t even ask this question. — Beyond True and False, Graham Priest

Unfortunately that is not a sensible, or even meaningful, thing to say―better just to remain silent. If philosophy is about anything it is certainly not about talking nonsense.

But we were always going to hit this wall once straying into Buddhism. In Buddhism this whole world of appearances is nothing but maya. So how can these appearances, or a being enthralled by them, know, or account for the noumena when they themselves are part of the illusion?

It was this realisation that led the Buddha to sit under the bodhi tree.

It’s a bit too radical for me, I don’t usually go further east than Hinduism. Although I do generally consider the phenomenal world we know to be an artificial construct.

Unfortunately that is not a sensible, or even meaningful, thing to say.. — Janus

Status quo for Janus, the standard reply.

When the discussion extends beyond the tight boundaries of Janus' preconceived conceptual enclosure, Janus recoils and strikes. Nonsense! There's something outside those boundaries Janus, or else you wouldn't need to be making those judgements. And dismissing that external world as meaningless and unintelligible, does nothing to propagate understanding.

But we were always going to hit this wall once straying into Buddhism. In Buddhism this whole world of appearances is nothing but maya. So how can these appearances, or a being enthralled by them, know, or account for the noumena when they themselves are part of the illusion? — Punshhh

You are assuming this world is an illusion. How could you know that when everything you could possibly know comes form your experience in this world? Something can only be said to be illusory compared to something else that is real, but we have nothing real to compare it a purportedly illusory world to. If this whole world is an illusion then your very existence is itself an illusion, yet to say that makes no sense because your existence is all you have known.

Nonsense! There's something outside those boundaries Janus, or else you wouldn't need to be making those judgements. And dismissing that external world as meaningless and unintelligible, does nothing to propagate understanding. — Metaphysician Undercover

Explain to me then what it could mean to say that something is, and yet that it neither exists nor does not exist?

Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why. Martin Heidegger made himself famous by asking what Being is, and then spent much of the rest of his life explaining why you can’t even ask this question. — Beyond True and False, Graham Priest

And yet Kant talks about the noumena that we cannot experience, cannot know―he says that there are things in themselves that appear to us as things, he says that they cannot exist in space and time, cause anything, or be differentiated or structured in any way. So, he contradicts himself by applying the concepts he says can only be applied to things we can experience by applying them to things he says we cannot experience.

He doesn't really know that we don't experience things in themselves, in fact he says that they are what appear to us as the things of experience, so in that sense we do experience them. It comes down to different ways of taking about it. It is of course simply true by definition that they do not appear to us as they are in themselves, because we can only know them as they appear to us. We also must acknowledge that we do not know everything about them, and could not know that we knew everything about them even if we did. Ignorance is a great part of the human condition.

Our concepts, what we say about things are not the things themselves. Our language is inherently dualistic―whereas we have no reason to think that nature itself is dualistic. The map (our conceptual models) is not the territory. Some things can only be shown, not said. Much is shown in literature which is not explicitly said. Much is shown by body language which is not said. A great part of our everyday experience cannot be captured adequately in discursive words and is better shown by poetic allusion. "A picture is worth a thousand words" and so on. All this is true, but none of it gives us license to speak pretentious nonsense in a discursive context.

Explain to me then what it could mean to say that something is, and yet that it neither exists nor does not exist? — Janus

Are you familiar with the concept of "potential"? In Aristotelian philosophy "potential" names a category which is required to describe becoming, change. This is what forms the category for those aspects of reality which are neither being nor not being, but may or may not be. Potential is very real, yet it cannot be said to exist nor not exist. Therefore it "is" in the sense of real, yet it neither exists nor does not exist.

Matter is in this category. This is because particular things exist as forms, determinate this and that, but they each have the potential to be something else. That potential is attributed to the thing's matter. But the matter itself cannot be a determinate this or that, or this would negate its definition as potential.

Potential is a different thing to the noumenal, which is what we have been discussing. If something has a potential it is built into the actuality of the thing, and is real in that sense. So, I would say that actual potential exists, but that what it is potential for does not exist until it is actualized. For example, right now I have a real potential to do many in the next few minutes, but since I can only do one or maybe two things at a time most of those potentials will not be actualized in the next few minutes. For another example, referring back to mass energy, a massive body at rest has the energy potential expressed in the formula E=mc2.

The other thing that comes to mind is the idea of the quantum foam, but in that context the term "virtual" not 'potential' is used. And the virtual particles are said to wink in and out of existence. which would mean that they exist then don't exist, not that they neither exist nor don't exist.

In Buddhism this whole world of appearances is nothing but maya. — Punshhh

Actually Māyā is Hindu terminology. The Buddhist term is saṃsāra, ‘cyclical existence’. It’s idea of the illusory nature of experience is more that we wrongly attribute significance to things we’re attached to - not that the world is illusory per se, but we evaluate it wrongly.

What divulges meaning intent for one can confound another. Not because they do not comprehend, but due to the fact they have not yet had any reason to apply the intent of the meaning in a productive dialogue.

We are often happy to talk of the 'infinite' yet struggle with the obvious problem of relating to the concept in an experiential sense. Sometimes it pays to speak in order to better present silence beyond the white noise that can never be experience -- when tinnitus dies away we assume the experience of silence exists.

I think I know what are getting at. But if you insist that the category of existence can only pertain to the things we perceive then we can say that things as they are unperceived do not exist. Whatever way you spin to say of something that it neither exists nor does not exist is vacuous.

Added to that I think that if you are speaking about something it is a contradiction to say it doesn't exist. You might say unicorns don't exist, but they do exist as imaginary creatures. Fictional characters exist as fictional characters and so on. To say there is a thing-in-itself and then to say it doesn't exist is a contradiction. We can say it doesn't exist in the same sense as our perceptions of objects do, but to say it neither exists nor doesn't exist is just a conceptually empty self-contradictory statement. What could it mean?

if you insist that the category of existence can only pertain to the things we perceive then we can say that things as they are unperceived do not exist. — Janus

I’m not claiming that the thing-in-itself is some ghostly half-real entity. My point is that existence and non-existence are categories that only make sense within experience, within a perspective. When you try to apply them outside that framework—i.e., to the 'unperceived in itself'—they lose their meaning. Saying 'it neither exists nor does not exist' is shorthand for saying: the category of existence simply doesn’t apply there. That’s not a contradiction but a recognition of a boundary or limit to knowledge.

Kant’s remark in the Transcendental Aesthetic that if we “take away the thinking subject the whole world of appearances would vanish” is often misconstrued. It doesn’t mean the world literally ceases to be, but that the world as knowable is always ordered through the framework of an observer. The realist assumption—that the world would be just the same even if there were no observer—forgets this constituting role of the mind - which is precisely the point of the 'blind spot of science', which regards the world it studies as if it were simply there in itself, while forgetting that the very concepts of objectivity and existence already presuppose the standpoint of an observer.

Added to that I think that if you are speaking about something it is a contradiction to say it doesn't exist. You might say unicorns don't exist, but they do exist as imaginary creatures. Fictional characters exist as fictional characters and so on. To say there is a thing-in-itself and then to say it doesn't exist is a contradiction. — Janus

These are different things though. Kant frames Noumena as something only talked about in the negative sense (meaning we cannot comprehend any 'aboutness'). For unicorns we can visual an 'aboutness' (menaing we have a sensory frame of reference for such a creature).

When talking about ontological epistemic conditions it can serve a useful function to delineate between the unknownable and the ... well ... 'that which is not to be spoken of'. I think this is an area where mysticism shines, with talk of Tao/Dao and other similar concepts in other branches of human exploration.

Anything that can reflect on the framework that is a human being is all there is. What is ineffable can still have a semblance of existence and so the concept of Noumena or Tao/Dao is presented as a roughshod adumbration of our human limitations (through which we can only say is everything).

I should add that philosophy is one area where such limitations on language should most definitely be pushed. Sometimes we push too hard. Hopefully philosophy is still rigorous enough to make some headway though.

I’m not claiming that the thing-in-itself is some ghostly half-real entity. My point is that existence and non-existence are categories that only make sense within experience, within a perspective. — Wayfarer

Yes, but it doesn't follow that they cannot make sense pertaining to things which are inferred to exist outside of experience.

It doesn’t mean the world literally ceases to be, but that the world as knowable is always ordered through the framework of an observer. The realist assumption—that the world would be just the same even if there were no observer—forgets this constituting role of the mind - which is precisely the point of the 'blind spot of science', which regards the world it studies as if it were simply there in itself, while forgetting that the very concepts of objectivity and existence already presuppose the standpoint of an observer. — Wayfarer

If the world doesn't cease to be then it exists, in virtue of the meanings of the terms. Of course the world as known (not as knowable) is always known by a knower―again true by definition. As to the purported "realist assumption" that the world would be just the same if there were no percitpinets, well that's obviously wrong since without percipients there would be no perceptions, and perceptions and the judgements, if any, that grow out of them, are a part of the world. Apart from percptions and judgements, the world would be the same without any observer.

You are presenting a strawman of science―it deals with the world as perceived by us, no reasonable scientists would deny that. A naive realist might think of the eyes as passive "windows" that simply allow us to look out on a world of objects which exists in exactly the same form as our perceptions of them. That is obviously wrong, you don't have to think hard to realize that.

On the other hand there seems to be good reason to think that the way we perceive things is a real reflection of the way the world acts upon us, just as the different ways the world appears to animals is a real reflection of the ways in which the world acts upon them. It seems reasonable to think that objects have mass and shape, for example, independently of our perceptions of them.

Colour is another story, although it seems reasonable to think that the reflection of different wavelengths and intensities of light from different surfaces strictly determines, along with the visual organs of particular animals, what and how colours appear to them. I don't see that we have any good reason to deny those things even if they cannot be known with certainty.

Kant frames Noumena as something only talked about in the negative sense (meaning we cannot comprehend any 'aboutness'). — I like sushi

And yet he talks about them in a positive sense, saying that noumena cannot exist in space and time, while being unable to offer an argument for that, other than that we know space and time only via our experience of phenomena. It just doesn't follow from the fact that we know space and time only via experience that there is no space and time outside that context. It is true to say that there is no space and time as experienced outside experience but that is just a tautology and as such tells us precisely nothing.

I don't know what to make of the rest of your post.

You are presenting a strawman of science―it deals with the world as perceived by us, no reasonable scientists would deny that. — Janus

It’s not a strawman at all. The Blind Spot of Science article in Aeon (and the later book by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson) addresses mainstream science, the assumptions of physicalism and objectivism, which you will also argue in favour of in other contexts. The point is not that individual scientists are naïve realists who think the eyes are passive “windows,” but that the methodological outlook of modern science brackets the constituting role of the subject, and then forgets that it has done so. Of course that attitude is contested, but it remains the default for many. So declaring that many scientists hold to scientific realism is hardly a 'straw man' :rofl: .

Apart from perceptions and judgements, the world would be the same without any observer. — Janus

Precisely the point at issue! What world are you referring to? The moment you speak of “the world apart from perceptions and judgments,” you are already invoking the categories of thought and perception through which such a world is conceived. You have a world in mind, so to speak. To say it “would be the same” is to assume what is in question—namely, that the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence can meaningfully apply outside the framework of an observer. That’s exactly the blind spot. To which your response is invariably: 'what "blind spot"? I don't see any "blind spot"!'

Actually Māyā is Hindu terminology. The Buddhist term is saṃsāra, ‘cyclical existence’.

Yes, l presupposed that saṃsāra was part of maya forgetting its root. Thanks for putting me right.

You are assuming this world is an illusion. How could you know that when everything you could possibly know comes form your experience in this world?

Know independently, yes.

I was referring to the spiritual teachings.

As to my own beliefs (I don’t hold beliefs, rather I seek wisdom), part of my predisposition on these issues is formed by spiritual teachings. Although, I pare it down to the bare minimum, so have very little in what could be described as beliefs. I am working on the hypothesis that physical material and the physical world is a concrete representation of noumena which is so dense and rigid that an entire cosmology of powerful forces is required to sustain it. Rather like if you imagine a delicate melody rendered in concrete blocks that can only be heard by physically banging them together.
As to the details of how, or why, or what, I withhold judgement.

And yet he talks about them in a positive sense, saying that noumena cannot exist in space and time, while being unable to offer an argument for that, other than that we know space and time only via our experience of phenomena. — Janus

He is talking about Noumena negatively because we have no sense of other-than space and time. That is the point. He cannot even 'point to' noumena only flit around it as a kind of negative limitation on human 'sensibility' (which is all we have).

Edit: 'it' is not an it! Language can make something seem to be that is not possible.

I would add that I believe strongly that anything we can say is possible to be brought into existence as a 'semblanc'e of such ideas. Like a Backwards Purple Banana Hoop or any other string of nonsense.

He is talking about Noumena negatively because we have no sense of other-than space and time. That is the point. He cannot even 'point to' noumena only flit around it as a kind of negative limitation on human 'sensibility' (which is all we have). — I like sushi

:up:

but that the methodological outlook of modern science brackets the constituting role of the subject, and then forgets that it has done so. Of course that attitude is contested, but it remains the default for many. So declaring that many scientists hold to scientific realism is hardly a 'straw man' :rofl: . — Wayfarer

The natural sciences don't so much bracket the subject as it is the case that the subject is not within their purview. Science is not a human being so it doesn't "forget" anything. Scientific realism is the idea that science gives us real information about, and understanding of, the world. That cannot be proven to be so, of course, as nothing in science is proven, but it is far from an implausible, let alone an incoherent idea. The strawman is that the natural sciences forget the subject, when the reality is that the subject is irrelevant to them.

Precisely the point at issue! What world are you referring to? — Wayfarer

I don't hold to a two worlds conception of nature. There is only one world. As I said before I don't accept the bifurcation of nature into phenomena and noumena.

To say it “would be the same” is to assume what is in question—namely, that the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence can meaningfully apply outside the framework of an observer. That’s exactly the blind spot. To which your response is invariably: 'what "blind spot"? I don't see any "blind spot"!' — Wayfarer

I don't question that the predicates you mention can meaningfully apply to what is independent from human perception―to me questioning that is a nonsense. It's not a blind spot, I understand your argument, and I simply disagree with it. I think it is you who has the blind spot in that you apparently cannot imagine that it is impossible that someone might interpret the situation differently than you and being consistent with that different interpretation disagree with you. Apparently you are too mired in your own dogma, your own sense of absolute rightness, to be able to understand that.

I think all language is inherently dualistic and nature, including our perceptual experience, is not. So, in that sense we can say that our language and hence our ideas and models are always more or less inadequate to reality.

As to my own beliefs (I don’t hold beliefs, rather I seek wisdom), part of my predisposition on these issues is formed by spiritual teachings. — Punshhh

You must believe that it is possible to attain wisdom and that some spiritual teaching or teachings can help you with that.

Okay.

But that is just to restate the blind spot. To say “the subject is irrelevant to science” is precisely the forgetting I am talking about. Science can only operate because there are subjects who perceive, measure, theorize, and draw conclusions. When it presents its findings as “the way the world is in itself,” it effaces the constitutive role of the subject in making any of those findings meaningful in the first place.

Scientific realism, as you describe it, is not incoherent—it’s indispensable within its proper scope. What’s incoherent is to extend it into a metaphysical claim: that the world is the way science describes it independently of the perspective through which such descriptions become possible. That is the leap from method to ontology, and that is exactly what the “blind spot of science” critique is about.

I don't question that the predicates you mention can meaningfully apply to what is independent from human perception―to me questioning that is a nonsense. It's not a blind spot, I understand your argument, and I simply disagree with it. — Janus

But you’ve just restated the issue in another guise. To say the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence “can meaningfully apply” to what is independent of perception is exactly the move that the blind spot critique is drawing attention to. Of course it feels like nonsense to you to question that—because you’re presupposing the very standpoint I’m asking us to examine!

The point is not that your position is inconsistent. It’s perfectly consistent within the realist frame. The point is that this frame cannot account for its own conditions of possibility—namely, the constituting role of the subject. That is what Kant meant when he said that if you remove the subject, the world of appearances vanishes. It doesn’t mean reality is “just in the mind,” but that our very talk of “existence” and “objectivity” already presupposes the subject’s framework.

So when you say you “understand the argument and disagree,” that is precisely what the blind spot looks like from inside it. I don’t think it’s dogmatic to point out the conditions that make any interpretation possible. You and I can only disagree because there is already a subjectivity through which concepts like “existence,” “sameness,” and “objectivity” have meaning. That’s not my dogma; it’s the very ground on which both of us are standing when we argue.

Potential is a different thing to the noumenal, which is what we have been discussing. If something has a potential it is built into the actuality of the thing, and is real in that sense. — Janus

This is not necessarily the case. That is simply how we represent what is named as "potential", as something built into the actual. This is because our knowledge is strictly formal, it consists of forms. And so any understanding of the potential of the world, must be approached through the actuality of the world. For all we know, the so-called "noumenal" could be the potential. Notice that Kant speaks of "the possibility" of sense appearance, and names space and time this way, placing them into the larger category of potential.

Furthermore, we notice, observe and experience sensation at the present in time, now. However, the potential for whatever happens at the present must be prior to it, therefore this can never be sensed, nor experienced in any way. So we cannot accurately understand the potential of a thing as being built into the actuality of that thing, because it is necessarily prior to the thing, temporally. Now we tend to represent the potential for one thing, as the actuality of another thing, in a the way of determinist causation.

But this cannot provide an accurate understanding either, for two principal reasons. First, it produces an infinite regress of "actual things" one being the potential for the next. That would mean that everything in the world is determined, but determined from nothing, no start, infinite regress. The second reason is more complicated, and requires an understanding of how we relate to "potential" in our active experience. Whenever there is potential (understood here as possibility), there is always a multitude of possible outcomes. That is the nature of potential. It implies that an active form of selection is required to produce the outcome which actualizes. If we say that this is an actual "thing" in the sense described above, we deny the reality of selection, and move back to the determinist infinite regress of things, described above. Therefore the active form of selection cannot be the actuality of a thing.

This is why Aristotle proposed two principal senses of "act" . The one sense is the "actuality" of the thing, as what the thing is, its form. The other sense is "activity". The two are fundamentally incompatible, as the thing's form is understood as static being, what the thing is, while activity is understood as the active cause of change.

So, I would say that actual potential exists, but that what it is potential for does not exist until it is actualized. — Janus

OK, this is a good starting premise. Now, you see that the potential for a thing is necessarily prior in time to the thing's actual existence. Do you understand the two reasons I provided above, as to why "potential" must be a distinct category, and cannot be adequately understood as "built into the actuality of the thing"? Even if we qualify "the thing" as a collection of all things, such that potential is passed from one thing to another as energy, we do not get the premises required to adequately understand "potential". We get lost in an infinite regress. Further, if you believe in the reality of potential, you must also believe in what this implies, the need for an act of selection any time one possibility is actualized rather than another. The act of selection cannot be attributed to "an actual thing", or else the reality of selection is negated.

As I said before I don't accept the bifurcation of nature into phenomena and noumena. — Janus

This is a gross misunderstanding if you are referring to Kant. There is no bifurcation at all.

And yet Kant talks about the noumena that we cannot experience, cannot know…. — Janus

I would like to offer, for your consideration, the idea, the interpretation, that Kant isn’t talking about noumena at all. He is talking about the faculty of understanding, and its proclivity for exceeding its warrant, such warrants having already been specified in preceding sections of his critical theory. It may be nothing more than an extreme example of common knowledge, that humans are wont to imagine all sorts of weird stuff, he merely explaining the fundamental causal process in play when we do that.

Especially considering the title of the section in which the subject is brought to bear: “Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects…..” (A236/B295) One should grasp that the objects being divided according to a certain ground, does not presuppose those objects, but only the relation of conceptions in general contained in a ground, which makes a division predicated on such relation, possible.

Remember? “…I can think what I please, provided only that I do not contradict myself…”, which is precisely what understanding is doing, when empirical conceptions of possible objects arise from it alone, the empirical representation of which, from intuition, is entirely lacking.

Ever notice Kant never defines what a noumenon is, but only the advent of it as a conception, and the consequences thereof?

In the text is found the categorical, re: apodeitically certain, judgement “…. Thus the criterion of the possibility of a conception (not of its object) is the definition of it, in which the unity of the the truth of all that may be immediately deduced from it, and finally, the completeness of what has been thus deduced, constitute the requisites for the reproduction of the whole conception.…” (B115)

So are we not forced to admit, insofar as Kant offers no definition of what a noumenon is, offers no descriptions of what a noumenon would be like, but authorizes (B115) its validity as a mere possible, non-contradictory, conception, there can be no talk of noumena as such, but only the conception itself, represented by that word, which is actually nothing other than talk of the modus operandi of the faculty of understanding in opposition to its own rules?

The conception is a possible thought, therefore is not self-contradictory. (I can think what I please…)
The effort to represent the thought without the required sensuous intuition necessary of all empirical objects, is. (….and with this I contradicted myself)

The talk is not of noumena; it is of the foibles of pure understanding of which noumena is merely an instance, and from which the ground of the division resides in understanding being limited to cognition of phenomena at the expense of noumena.

Think about it, if you like. Or not.

You must believe that it is possible to attain wisdom and that some spiritual teaching or teachings can help you with that.

Believe is a vague term, so I can’t answer that without a definition. I don’t hold beliefs other than what beliefs are necessary to live a life. However I lead a life informed by what I have discovered or adopted as a practice for a period of time. So this allows guidance in how I live from myself, or other sources. I have tried a variety of practices and understandings from schools and took only what fitted my path and kept the remainder at arms length. So don’t adhere to a belief system.
I am on a path of seeking guidance in this from something like an inner being, or soul, or whatever you want to call it, within my being. Independent of rational thought, although there is a a process of intuition and contemplation involved, but secondary in importance.

As such beliefs are relegated to a thinking mind, or commentary on the periphery after the fact. An insight might take the form of an encounter with an insect, or the play of light, or noticing of a weird juxtaposition, or series of random events in the world which for a moment have a meaning. The meaning is not necessarily intellectualised, or contemplated. The idea is to ease the path of the development whatever way seems appropriate.