This thread isn't about the immediacy of experience as such. What I'm trying to get at in this thread is the reality of the idea - I'm arguing for objective idealism, and trying to relate it to Platonist philosophy, which is a very different point to your argument about how 'immediate experience can only be communicated by allegory', valid point though that might be. — Wayfarer

It's not unrelated because under objective idealism experience is fundamental. This is certainly true of Hegel's (the original) objective idealism. That's why his text is called Phenomenology of Spirit, and why he rejects Kant's notion of 'thing-in-itself-as-independent-of-human-experience. The dialectic must start from experience as such; where else?

Immanent and transcendent are mutually-defined, i.e. like ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘left’ and ‘right’. Been meaning to write an OP about that. — Wayfarer

Well that's true. Except you are talking only of simple anti-symmetry here, not the proper asymmetry of a reciprocal or inverse relation.

So higher and lower, or left and right, are symmetry-breaking of the simple single scale kind. Like positive and negative, or clockwise and counter-clockwise, it takes hardly any energy to reverse the direction and erase the difference. The symmetry-breaking is only the smallest possible step away from being reversed.

A proper metaphysical strength dichotomy - like chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, flux~stasis, matter~form, etc, are symmetry-breakings across scale. They are hierarchically divided. They are as far apart as possible due to being defined in formally reciprocal fashion.

This is a big difference. So the question becomes whether immanence~transcendence is being understood as just a simple pair of cancelling opposites - adding a bit of up to a bit of down erases any difference. Or whether we are understanding them as being defined reciprocally. So transcendence would be 1/immanence. And vice versa.

Discrete and continuous are poles apart as a metaphysical dichotomy because discreteness is defined by being the least possible form or any continuity. It is 1/continuity. And continuity can likewise be defined as 1/discreteness.

Whatever value you can assign to a notion of "the discrete", that becomes then mutually the value you assign to "the continuous" via the maths of the reciprocal.

So there is a proper way to think of these things. One that is mathematical. Are we talking mild additive/subtractive anti-symmetry or fully blown, limit taking, asymmetry - the product of an inverse or reciprocal relation?

It must be hard for you to talk about differences in pressure or temperature when you don’t even believe in macrostate descriptions. Oh the tainted sameness of summing over microstates that make no significant difference. — apokrisis

As I said, it's a tainted sameness, because it's a matter of overlooking differences, and assigning "same", for one purpose or another. By way of contradiction, this is not a true sameness if it includes differences. When we allow such a designation of sameness, then the real differences are, of necessity, undisclosed in order that sameness may be declared. And the reason for not disclosing these differences, the purpose of concealing them, is therefore undisclosed as well. Having such hidden goals amounts to sophistry. Therefore allowing such a tainted sameness allows that we are victimized by sophistry.

Just because the word "red" refers to the thing which causes the concept redness in the mind, it does not follow that the word "red" is necessary for the existence of the thing, and by extension, the existence of the concept. — Samuel Lacrampe

What you claim here is false. Without the word "red" there is nothing that "red" refers to. That's the point. You are claiming that thing which "red" refers to would exist without the word red. But without the word "red" there would be nothing which "red" refers to, because there would be no such thing as "red". So this nothing cannot be an existent thing. To get to the point of asserting that there is something which "red" refers to, it is necessary that there is the word "red".

But according to google, a plane is a flat surface, and so we are really saying the same thing, and in which case our concepts of triangle-ness does coincide. — Samuel Lacrampe

No, I am saying "plane", and you are saying "flat". By what principle of identity do you conclude that two very distinct words are "the same thing". And since it is very clear that these two distinct words are not the same thing, then it is also very clear that we are not saying the same thing when we say these distinctly different words.

But why would 'exact same' implies that accidentals have been included? — Samuel Lacrampe

This is how we distinguish between when we are referring to two distinct things which are similar to each other, and when we are referring to the exact same thing, by taking account of the accidentals. So it is by analyzing the accidentals that we determine whether we are talking about two distinct, but similar things, or that we are talking about one and the same thing.

As a side note, I thought your position from an earlier post was that universal forms (2) existed, in addition to particular forms (3). — Samuel Lacrampe

Yes, that's what I was arguing. But I also argue that these two types of forms are categorically different, and that's why we need dualist principles to understand reality.

The dialectic must start from experience as such; where else? — Janus

The starting point of Platonism is that ‘the Forms’ are purely intelligible, i.e. they’re seen by the intellect in an act of pure intuition. Appealing to experience as the basis of philosophy, is simply empiricism - Kant’s ‘critiques of empiricism’ puts paid to that, i.e. in order for experience to mean anything, there must already be the categories of the understanding, the intuitions and so on. ‘Concepts without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are blind’.

So the question becomes whether immanence~transcendence is being understood as just a simple pair of cancelling opposites - adding a bit of up to a bit of down erases any difference. — apokrisis

No, not opposites, but poles - the transcendent is beyond experience, the immanent is within it, but in the context of philosophy, they’re often understood as two aspects of the same reality, paradoxical as that might appear. But in the context of theological philosophy, which I know of course that you don’t accept, Deity is both transcendent and immanent - at once beyond the world, but also within it. That idea finds expression in many different schools of philosophy.

Therefore allowing such a tainted sameness allows that we are victimized by sophistry. — Metaphysician Undercover

:-O I guess that’s one of the hazards of posting on public forums.

Deity is both transcendent and immanent - at once beyond the world, but also within it. — Wayfarer

Surely the debate is normally over which it is, not that it is both?

Generally I take the distinction to mean that the causes of being are either fully within that being, or in some important fashion, causality comes from without. So, speaking theistically, either the divine is immanent in being, or the divine is a cause that stands transcendent to that being.

But perhaps you are taking my constraints approach where what develops are limits. So being is both the cause of its own structure, and yet that structure appears to lie without. As the kind of limits on possibility that maths describes, the limits are where being ceases. And so they are boundaries that are outside what they encompass. Or at least that is how they look when we draw them in as the metaphysical line marking the edges to existence.

I guess that’s one of the hazards of posting on public forums. — Wayfarer

But it goes far deeper than that, to all instances of overlooking differences in order to declare that two things are "the same". Unless it is a principled declaration, meaning that it is recognized that the two things are not really the same in any absolute sense, only similar, and therefore "the same" in reference to some stated principle, then we loose sight of reality. If it is asserted that two things are the same, yet that principle of reference is not stated, and we proceed to assume that they are the same, as a premise for a logical argument, then we are victimized by sophistry.

That is the case with your op. It is sophistry. You declare that "the same information" is transmitted by different media, without any statement as to the principle by which we can call this "the same"information. You assert that it is the same, and the reader is meant to assume that it is the same, but no reason is given as to why it ought be called the same.

And the problem goes deeper, because if such a principle is brought forward, then this is admittance that what is called "the same" is not really the same, but similar relative to some principle. And the argument which follows relies on "the same" being used in the absolute sense.

without any statement as to the principle by which we can call this "the same"information — Metaphysician Undercover

Greek ship, three masted, arriving after noon.
Griechisches Schiff, drei Masten, Ankunft nach Mittag.
Navire grec, à trois mâts, arrivant après midi.
Graeca navis tres masted, venientes post meridiem.
--. .-. . . -.- / ... .... .. .--. --..-- / - .... .-. . . / -- .- ... - . -.. --..-- / .- .-. .-. .. ...- .. -. --. / .- ..-. - . .-. / -. --- --- -.

All of those text strings mean the same thing; it’s not ‘sophistry’ but a simple statement of fact.

The argument is, that if the same idea can be represented in completely different ways, then the information, the idea, is separable from the representation. The representation is what is physical.

Deity is both transcendent and immanent - at once beyond the world, but also within it.
— Wayfarer

Surely the debate is normally over which it is, not that it is both? — apokrisis

I know this thread has wandered all over the place, but am hesitant to pursue this line of thought here. So I will refrain from responding here, but I think it might make an interesting topic, so will get around to posting it as a topic.

That's what I'm saying. — apokrisis

Yes, I thought so. But I'm between your position and Janus's. I think Janus was just trying to point at the that-it-exists of experience. It's all too natural to phrase this in terms of the subject, overlooking the entanglement of the 'subject' and the 'object' in the lived non-instantaneous moment. But I agree with Janus's general point about what is excluded by the scientific method. We have a tendency to privilege the publicly quantifiable as the 'really' real.

What is philosophy for? Is it a higher science 'devoid' of value? A value-neutral tool? Or is it an expression of the spiritual? I don't expect one-answer-for-all here. I'm just suggesting that half-conscious answers to these most general questions shape everything from the get-go.

Red just "is" because we haven't got something we can compare it to as what might be "other", given the same observable "psychological machinery". — apokrisis

I wonder if you are understanding 'just is' as I intend it. I don't mean that it's mysterious (though maybe it is). I just mean the bare fact of color. We live in a world of color. Any talk about this color is not the color itself as unthematized color. One might say that redness is not a 'thing' apart from concept, but what this concept grasps is there for those (literally) with eyes to see.

So yes. Ultimately our models of cognition run out of counterfactuals to sustain the explanatory assault on "experience" — apokrisis

What also interests me is description that reveals. Are we sometimes so eager to explain what we already have grasp that we stop feeling around for what we haven't noticed? It's not just about explaining. It's also about paying attention in a new way, seeing around inherited preconceptions. We might even think of un-explaining what has been badly explained.

Hope you not talking about me. I give very good reasons for deflating the inflated notions of "consciousness" and "meaning" that folk routinely trot out. :) — apokrisis

I wasn't talking about you. I had that Nagel quote in mind. The total denial of what-it-is-like strikes me as absurd. I remember reading BF Skinner as a teen. I see the attraction of ignoring consciousness (as a theme of the investigation) methodologically in this or that context, but that's a local context.

I also like questioning the notions of consciousness and meaning. We use these 'pieces' in discussions all too often without really thinking about what we could mean by them. We get stuck on the surface that way.

...due to the ‘flattening’ of ontology since the victory of nominalism at the end of medieval times... — Wayfarer

It occurred to me to add the pointification or atomization of the object in a hypostatization of or within ontology. We tend to call real what stands still for us to stare at. So the dynamic becoming that we ourselves are is unreal not only to the physicist but also to a certain kind of abstract theologian.

Everything mortal and passing is unreal from such a perspective, unworthy of contemplation even, since it can't be the foundation of the perfect knowledge which is itself understood as a static object. Yet our most intimate experience is unique, passing, mortal. If we aren't actually mortal, few of us live with certainty of this immortality. And in any case the moments themselves are mortal and not-to-be-repeated.

There's nothing 'wrong' with the depersonalized theoretical mode, but on could argue that shifting into this mode forecloses access to this or that aspect of the total human experience. (We perhaps assume that what is 'there' for us is independent of our mood/mode/motive.)

The historical process was not so much about atomism, although that plays a role. The key development was the ascension of nominalism, which means that ‘types’ or ‘Forms’ are no longer considered real; they’re simply names we give to objects that have something in common. (There’s a huge amount of detail to consider, though, as the debate between (medieval/Platonic) realists and nominalism occupied centuries.) My view is that the debate itself has largely been forgotten, but we’ve inherited the consequences, in that Western culture has largely been shaped by nominalism (and its successors). That is what I meant by ‘flattening’. In the older view, because things have a final cause - a ‘telos’ - then the world is naturally intelligible, it is suffused with purpose. In theology, nominalism also over-rode this Platonistic sense of purpose with the ‘soveriegnty of the Divine Will’ - so God was literally beyond reason, and the rationalistic aspects of Scholastic philosophy were rejected. That is all part of the making of the modern worldview. (I have been reading this title - the abstract shows that it is about these themes and ideas.)

But I'm between your position and Janus's. I think Janus was just trying to point at the that-it-exists of experience. — 0rff

And I want to acknowledge that the Hard Problem has something to it, while also deflating it as much as possible. The way it is usually presented is much too strong.

So for example here, I would counter that experience can't simply exist. It requires someone that it exists for.

Janus said at one point he was not talking about qualia or particular sensations when he talked about raw feelings. He meant just the bare feeling of being "a self". Yet this doesn't sound right either because of such a selfhood involves at least some vague feelings to be "a feeling". The distinction of the knower and the known still lurks in that way of talking.

But I agree with Janus's general point about what is excluded by the scientific method. We have a tendency to privilege the publicly quantifiable as the 'really' real. — 0rff

My approach is Peircean. When I talk about scientific reason, I mean what he meant. So I am arguing something more inbetween the position you probably think I have and the one I believe Janus has. :)

So as an epistemic basic, I agree with the idealists that we can't transcend the conditions of experience. We don't get to peek at the Kantian thing-in-itself in any direct perceptual fashion.

But then that is what justifies the scientific method as the best epistemology can get.

The Peircean approach is semiotic. What we see of reality is the signs we form of its existence. We live inside our experience spinning theories that can then be inductively supported by acts of measurement.

This is just the basic form of all cognition or mindfulness. It is how the biological mind works. When I see the red of the post box or smell the perfume of a rose, these are just habitual signs that anchor my interpretations of the world. They form my "umwelt".

Redness or sweetness are symbols. They signify an appropriate response. We "know" from science that red is just something we feel because our eyes transduce some balance of radiant electromagnetic energy. We know that sweetness is just a response to some corner of a floating molecule connecting in lock and key fashion to a particular variety of odour receptor.

So our minds don't experience reality as it actually is. They just co-ordinate their habits of response in a functional fashion with the world that is presumed to exist via a robust shorthand of sensory signs.

At this point, people always bring up the perception of motions and shapes. Sure, they say, colour and smell are secondary qualities, but objects have forms we can directly perceive. Yet psychological science says not so fast. Even the primary sensory qualities are acts of interpretation. Tricks like the waterfall illusion and the motion after-effects it produces show how even "a feeling of moving" is a quale. It is sign we read into the world as something we experience.

So a biological level of consciousness is already about living within an umwelt - a system of signs that reliably coordinates us with the world. It is not some kind of veridical representation, a picture that recreates the world in our heads. The post box is not red in some thing-in-itself fashion. But the ability to coordinate behaviour in terms of such an experiential code - see red, see shape, know what that means - is a powerful thing.

And getting back to science, that just takes this basic semiotic logic to its ultimate level. Now we are actually talking about a mathematical level of sign. The theory predicts that I will discover my instruments will show certain numbers if I take a look.

All the bogus stuff about "seeing the thing-in-itself" is completely abandoned. There is no pretence, like there still is with talking about seeing red or tasting sweetness. Science deals directly in full-on signage. It says this is how nature works. And that's true because these are the numbers you will read when you make a measurement.

Yes, it is highly abstract. And folk still want to have their intuitive mental pictures. They want to imagine atoms bouncing about or forces pulling or whatever. They want a biological level of feeling - or sign.

But still, science reduces reality to a pattern of numerical signs. And we know that really works. Functionally, it has been immensely productive.

Again the protest will come, but what about experience, what about feeling, what about actually awareness of the world as it really is? However there is good reason to privilege the mathematical representation of existence.

Hence this OP. There must be a reason why physics has turned information theoretic. Counting is actually physically meaningful. We might as well admit that reality is a pattern of bits, a set of numbers, as far as we can tell. That is certainly a more accurate ontology than thinking of it in terms of a realm of "medium-sized dry goods", as is the usual "realist" case.

There must be a reason why physics has turned information theoretic — apokrisis

Yeah because QM broke the atom, that's why.

The historical process was not so much about atomism, although that plays a role. The key development was the ascension of nominalism, which means that ‘types’ or ‘Forms’ are no longer considered real; they’re simply names we give to objects that have something in common. — Wayfarer

Ah, I think you misunderstand me. I don't mean atomism. I mean the tendency to understand the truly existent as that which is fully present as a clear and distinct intelligible unity --something like a form.

In my view, physics offers its own version of this. But these forms that are understood to govern the flux of experience are experienced as inhuman necessity (as amoral). So the idea is that we humans are alone in the machine of nature. So for me it's really a change which forms we regard.

In the older view, because things have a final cause - a ‘telos’ - then the world is naturally intelligible, it is suffused with purpose. — Wayfarer

This is perhaps the central issue. Is there purpose beyond the individual and/or his culture? Are humans responsible to or informed by a purpose beyond their own concerns?

It's not my central issue, but to seems to set the feel of a culture. I think we'd agree that the intellectual mainstream understands us to be on our own. Personally, I don't know --but I live as if we are alone down here. Of course I strive for virtue and value the Christian heritage especially.

So for example here, I would counter that experience can't simply exist. It requires someone that it exists for. — apokrisis

What comes to my mind is our ability to get absorbed in a task. We become the task. We forget that we are 'subjects.' This is admittedly complicated. In some sense consciousness is being itself, so that the 'pure subject' is name for being. But we can just as easily talk about a pure object that includes the empirical ego in its nexus.

On the other hand, the 'freeze frame' understanding of this loses the dynamism of being there. It's an old theme, the problem of the concept system trying to grasp continuity.

So as an epistemic basic, I agree with the idealists that we can't transcend the conditions of experience. We don't get to peek at the Kantian thing-in-itself in any direct perceptual fashion. — apokrisis

Right. In a worldly epistemic mode I'm a quasi-Kantian, too. But I would stress that the interpretative scheme is far more fluid. Maybe there is a 'hard' core that isn't subject to historical evolution (biologically determined), but for the most part the 'lens' through which we see the 'thing-in-itself' is liquid, which is to say linguistic. It's not just linguistic, though, but perhaps even involves the way we get around in the world. We navigate the concrete jungle. We stand a certain distance from others. To live in a culture largely requires a kind of know-how that may be the dark foundation of our consciously theoretical mode.

When I see the red of the post box or smell the perfume of a rose, these are just habitual signs that anchor my interpretations of the world. They form my "umwelt". — apokrisis

I like this, but I think lots of our seeing is peripheral. I'd also argue that perhaps the situation is more holistically understood in our non-theoretical mode. We have learned to isolate objects, to rip them out of context. By imaging these rip out objects in the same 'box' of experience, we don't recover the original unity. The 'deep' unwelt would (in my view) involve this original unity and the dynamic sense of time. The pre-theoretical object is perhaps act rather than object. 'The world worlds.'

The theory predicts that I will discover my instruments will show certain numbers if I take a look.

All the bogus stuff about "seeing the thing-in-itself" is completely abandoned. There is no pretence, like there still is with talking about seeing red or tasting sweetness. Science deals directly in full-on signage. It says this is how nature works. And that's true because these are the numbers you will read when you make a measurement. — apokrisis

I like this conception of 'full-on signage,' but I don't see how this negates sensation. After all, we have to see the sign, read the number. And we only care about the number because we interpret in terms of the expected presence of something that is not just a sign. The practice of science utterly depends on the basic knowhow of living in a group. Our sloppy ordinary language is still the receding background in what the sharp abstractions can function and be learned in the first place. This doesn't degrade science but only situates it in human reality as a whole.

Yes, it is highly abstract. And folk still want to have their intuitive mental pictures. They want to imagine atoms bouncing about or forces pulling or whatever. They want a biological level of feeling - or sign.

But still, science reduces reality to a pattern of numerical signs. And we know that really works. Functionally, it has been immensely productive.

Again the protest will come, but what about experience, what about feeling, what about actually awareness of the world as it really is? However there is good reason to privilege the mathematical representation of existence. — apokrisis

There are strong practical reasons to privilege the mathematical representation of existence in the appropriate sphere. But I personally don't see why philosophy should present its rump to any fixed understanding of existence. We aren't just practical. We are the 'animals' who can and do kill ourselves, and in that sense we aren't just animals. Humans are uncanny. We think of our own deaths which are likely decades away. In cold blood we can calculate the sacrifice of our own lives and of murder. Don't get me wrong. I like philosophy of science. But whether we call it philosophy or not, I think it's deeply and maybe essentially human to ask radical questions, dream up daring understandings of the human situation, etc.

Hence this OP. There must be a reason why physics has turned information theoretic. Counting is actually physically meaningful. We might as well admit that reality is a pattern of bits, a set of numbers, as far as we can tell. That is certainly a more accurate ontology than thinking of it in terms of a realm of "medium-sized dry goods", as is the usual "realist" case. — apokrisis

I have to disagree. The medium sized dry goods as we make and buy and use them have a certain priority to patterns of bits. But really I'd say that it's all real. Reality is medium sized dry goods and patterns of bits. And it's debates about whether reality is dry goods or bits. No doubt certain purposes suggest an exclusion of this or that aspect of experience.

It may be represented, or it may not be. — Wayfarer

If it is not represented then it is not information.
The world is as it is. From time to time humans get interested in it and that interest becomes information. It's just an abuse of language to say that information is some pristine objective quality of the universe.
Information is nothing if not a set of ideas, partial, incomplete and interested. We can never get at the thing in itself, we can only say things about the world we perceive.
Information is not "OUT THERE", it is that which we extract and collect, measure and codify.
It is about the world, but it is of us.

If you do not allow that the potential for the existence of an object precedes the actual existence of that object, how do you explain becoming? If the potential for a particular hylomorphic substance doesn't precede the actual existence of that substance, how does such a substance come into being from not being? Do all hylomorphic substances have eternal existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

I was referring to the first (primary) hylomorphic particular per the cosmological argument. It can cause subsequent particulars to exist but there are no prior particulars to cause it to exist. Per hylomorphism, only particulars exist and universals are immanent in particulars. So there can be nothing (whether particular or universal) logically prior to the first hylomorphic particular, including time or potentiality.

All of those text strings mean the same thing; it’s not ‘sophistry’ but a simple statement of fact. — Wayfarer

They don't mean the same thing to me, and that's a fact. Perhaps they mean the same thing to someone else, but that person would have to make an argument for this, referring to some principle of identity, and demonstrating how the meaning of each was the same, according to that principle. Even then, since this demonstration would be based solely on what the text strings mean to that individual, it would simply be a matter of opinion. This matter of opinion is what you assert as a "statement of fact". I say that's sophistry.

This is why I keep coming back to the law of identity. In common language use we use "the same" in a number of different ways. It may mean "the very same", "of the same type", or even "similar". As a premise to a logical argument, "the same" has a very particular meaning according to the law of identity. To smuggle a sense of "same" from common usage, which really means "similar", into a logical argument, where it is implied that it means "the very same" is sophistry.

The simple fact is that if we adhere to the sense of "same" which has been smuggled in, meaning "similar", the conclusion of the argument does not follow. The conclusion only follows if we equivocate to the sense of "same" according to a proper law of identity. Therefore the conclusion is made through equivocation. It is a similar equivocation, in reverse, to what Wittgenstein exposes in the so-called private language argument.

So I say pay attention to how you go about constructing some third person point of view about the very thing of "forming points of view". — apokrisis

It cannot help but appear to be a "third person account" when I talk about it; but in itself it is not so. That is what you are not getting here. And you misunderstand the subjective experience by saying it is "in here", The experience I speak about is prior to any separation of "in here" from "out there"; it is the experiential condition out of which the subject (in here) / object (out there) duality (or "dichotomy" if you prefer) is constructed; thus it is prior to any such construction.

If it is not represented then it is not information. — charleton

That is interesting, I will consider that. Perhaps there's a distinction to be made between 'information' and 'idea'. However what is required to understand and translate information is the ability to understand and interpret ideas.

They don't mean the same thing to me, and that's a fact. — Metaphysician Undercover

You’re saying that purely for sake of argument. If you were employed to do the job in the thought-experiment, you wouldn't have any latitude. 'What do you mean, "Greek ship"? What do you mean, "Three Masts"?' If it were a very much more complex set of instructions, then any variations or differences will result in the information not being conveyed. The information is either conveyed, or it's not.

The experience I speak about.... — Janus

What experience are you speaking about?

The experience that is prior to any speaking.

Appealing to experience as the basis of philosophy, is simply empiricism - — Wayfarer

This is such a simplistic view. Phenomenology is not empiricism (unless you think along the lines of something akin to Jame's "radical empiricism") because it attempts to deal with the nature of experience and consciousness itself. It wants to return "to the objects", but not to a third person consideration of what might be thought to be the 'objective properties' of the objects, but rather to an examination and analysis of how they are experienced, of how we are affected by them. The question of their objective, independent existence is deliberately bracketed (the Epoché).

in order for experience to mean anything, there must already be the categories of the understanding, — Wayfarer

According to this no non-human animal's experiences can mean anything, and I think to say this is obviously absurd.

Have you read A Man Without Words? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words

The experience that is prior to any speaking. — Janus

But the linguistic framing begins when we are infants and becomes an engrained habit. So this is not about what you report to me using words. It is the very fact that you have the habit of "reporting on states of experience". Your thinking is culturally framed at base.

According to this no non-human animal's experiences can mean anything, and I think to say this is obviously absurd. — Janus

But the discussion is about the ability to understand and interpret abstract ideas. It is not absurd to say that animals are not able to do that. And animals don't reflect on 'the meaning of experience'.

The experience that is prior to any speaking. — Janus

I practice Zen, which is what this sounds like, but this thread is about Platonic realism.

Your thinking is culturally framed at base. — apokrisis

'There is, however, an unconditioned, an unmade, an unfabricated. Were there no unconditioned, unmade, unfabricated, there would be no escape from the made, the conditioned, the fabricated' ~ The Buddha (paraphrase).

I haven't denied that the modes of our experience are culturally mediated, but there must be raw experience that underlies that. You can experience that yourself if you just gaze out your window without thinking about anything.

Phenomenology is not empiricism — Janus

This thread is about Platonic realism, about which you show little interest. I have owned up to not being highly educated in that field, but at least throughout this thread, I am trying to relate whatever comes up to the Platonist principle of 'the reality of abstract objects'. I find that a genuinely interesting problem of philosophy. I just don't see how either phenomenology or meditative experience has any bearing on the thread. Perhaps you might start one on those subjects.

But the discussion is about the ability to understand and interpret abstract ideas. It is not absurd to say that animals are not able to do that. And animals don't reflect on 'the meaning of experience'. — Wayfarer

I practice Zen, which is what this sounds like, but this thread is about Platonic realism. — Wayfarer

And yet earlier you said this: " I’m interested in the formal study of the Western philosophical tradition. It has an experiential dimension which I think is largely forgotten and is certainly hardly taught any more. :s

Also you referred to "objective idealism" which is not Plato (which is rather a form of Conceptual Realism) but predominately Hegel, and following him, Peirce.

If the "reality of abstract objects" could be known, then it could only be known experientially, no? By the experience of so-called "intellectual intuition" perhaps?

Then that comes into the province of phenomenology and meditative experience. Otherwise it remains empty conjecture; "they are real", "no they're not", "yes they are", and so on ad nauseum.

And animals don't reflect on 'the meaning of experience'. — Wayfarer

And yet it seems obvious that animals' experiences do have meaning for them. One does not have to reflect on one's experience for it to have meaning, and reflection on the meaning of experience (whether it can be other than merely symbolic) is part of what this thread is about.. And this fact of animals' experience being meaningful for them does relate to the OP, because "is information physical?" could be paraphrased as "is meaning physical?". Is the meaning of an animals experience physical, then?