When it comes down to speculating about noumena or things in themselves there can be no discernible fact of the matter which could confirm or disconfirm any conjectures, so it comes down to what each of us might find to be the most useful and/or plausible way of thinking and talking about them.

My beef is with the dogmatic "thought police" prescriptions about what we can and cannot coherently think and talk about. For me it makes no sense to say "of course things have their own existence independent of any mind in the empirical sense, but not in the transcendental sense'. I see this prescription as dogmatic because there can be no strictly determinable transcendental sense. — Janus

The "meaning" is not different to the sounds, squiggles and neuronal events in anyway that suggests some inherent divide between physical and menta — Apustimelogist

Did you pursue this line very much? — Tom Storm

being organic is not a requirement to have memory, nor to be a thing that attempts to cope with what's coming up. — noAxioms

When it comes to consciousness, we may have a special case -- and I think that's the deeper subject of this discussion. Is there something about consciousness, and about being conscious, that calls into question this division between knowing and experiencing? We need consciousness to do any sort of seeing or knowing, including the strictest of scientific projects. A blind person can understand how the eye works, because understanding is not a true visual seeing, but a way of grasping intellectually. But can the blind person (from birth, we'd have to stipulate) know what the experience of seeing is? Probably not. — J

We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness.
— The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

Is this in fact a flaw? Does this dependence vitiate whatever explanation may result? — J

Carrol would say that the mental is nothing m9re than the physical. — Apustimelogist

The meaning of a sentence is not the squiggles used to represent letters on a piece of paper or a screen. It is not the sounds these squiggles might prompt you to utter. It is not even the buzz of neuronal events that take place in your brain as you read them. What a sentence means, and what it refers to, lack the properties that something typically needs in order to make a difference in the world. The information conveyed by this sentence has no mass, no momentum, no electric charge, no solidity, and no clear extension in the space within you, around you, or anywhere. — Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature

do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we “suffer a wisdom famine in the West”? — Tom Storm

"Esse est percipi" may be translated as "to be is to be perceived". Are the relations we perceive perceived only in the mind or perceived of the world through the senses?

Do relations exist in the mind, the world or both? — RussellA

Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object. — Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic

Chalmers is asking why, not what. — J

Would you say that, because you are alive, you are unable to know what life is? . — J

Chalmers explains what the hard problem is. "What is the relationship" doesn't really get it -- Chalmers is asking why, not what. — J

“Despite the amazing, nonstop advances in physics, biology, and neuroscience, no fundamental progress on bridging the chasm between consciousness and physical models has been made in science since the bifurcation of nature that began with the rise of modern science. Although physical and biological models are increasingly sophisticated and informed by increasing amounts of data, the chasm remains. The problem that Huxley and Tyndall highlighted in the nineteenth century is the same one that philosophers Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers identified in the twentieth century and persists today.33 Indeed, it is hard to see how any advance in understanding physical processes, described in completely objective terms at whatever scale or level, will allow us to bridge this chasm. This situation should lead us to suspect that the hard problem of consciousness is built into blind-spot metaphysics, and not solvable in its terms.

... [the blind spot] arises when we mistake a method for the intrinsic structure of reality. We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness. — The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

But you can also see what she sees, namely the eye itself. And thus for consciousness. — J

It also tells us something about the Democratic Party, — Mikie

"Noumena" for Kant is analogous to "matter" for Aristotle. They are strictly conceptual, not referring to any independent thing as people are inclined to believe. — Metaphysician Undercover

chitta chatta — Punshhh

Would you agree that the hard problem is also a problem of how consciousness emerges, and why it does so? — J

The eye can see itself, actually, by using scientific technology -- in fact, such technology allows us to see, and explain, the eye much better than we can do as mere experiencers and observers. — J

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

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

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

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

Of course they're memory-less, since atoms don't have memories. — Patterner

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

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

He says that there cannot be such existents, that they are neither existent nor non-existent. — Janus

I am not arguing that… ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

This is a different problem from "What is it like to be conscious?" The latter problem is associated with Nagel, not Chalmers. — J

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to bea conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

Again, the problem is to say how "what it's like" consciousness arises from brain processes, not to give a description of consciousness itself. — J

why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it? — J

If mind can be an object for the cognitive sciences, what does this mean? How does the attitude or program of cognitive science allow an escape from what you call "the indubitable fact that we are that which we seek to know"? Perhaps the answer lies in a discrimination between 1st and 3rd person perspectives, but what do you think? When a scientist studies consciousness, what are they doing differently from our everyday experience of being conscious? — J

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
• the integration of information by a cognitive system;
• the reportability of mental states; ...

That some awareness is an indubitable fact does not entail that it can't be explained in other terms. Yet you seem to imply that this must be so. Why? Aren't we confusing the experience, the phenomenology, with that which is experienced? — J

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

‘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

If Kant's 'idealism' asserted that appearances are mere mental contents then, it would be subjective idealism. However, Kant also asserts that there is 'something' about phenomena that it is not 'mental'. However, we are left with no clue on how that 'something' is related to appearances. — boundless

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

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

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

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