QM does not undermine the mind-independent status of objects, although it might throw it into question. You seem to be jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

In any case, that has nothing to do with the question. If you and I and everyone else we might ask see an orange on the table, how could our similar cognitive setups explain the fact that we all see a table with an orange on it rather than some else altogether?

It's not about how things appear to us, but what appears to us. I am genuinely puzzled that you don't seem to get this distinction.

I'm not talking about seeing different light frequencies or seeing things in exactly the same ways or as having the same meanings, but simply about seeing the same objects in the environment. Evolved similarities of cognitive setup cannot explain that.

That doesn't seem relevant: I don't even know what it is like to be you. I do, however know that we all, you me and the dogs see the same objects; this is constantly confirmed by everyday experience.

But I think it is something along these lines: that what we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of an immediate object or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the sophisticated hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species. — Quixodian

This cannot explain how it is that other species see the same things we do. Also, we have individual intelligences, so my intelligence could not make the world for you and vice versa; and yet we see the same things. Perhaps our intelligences are connected in ways we cannot be aware of, but if we cannot be aware of it...?

Some elements of it I've had for a long time, but I keep seeing new implications. — Quixodian

Unfortunately, you never seem to be able to see the problems.

Russell's opinion misses a quality of Berkeley when Berkeley says nobody can actually question the phenomenal. Object permanence happens. God, in this situation, is not me. — Paine

Object permanence is not strictly speaking a phenomenon. All we know, phenomenologically speaking (and of course trusting our memories) is that objects commonly appear unchanged in all particulars, including their locations, when we return to them.

The individual mind could not be responsible for this, because that posit could not explain how we all see the same things in the same places and with the same features. So if it is not to be mind-independent existents then it must be connected or entangled human minds or a universal mind to which we are all connected or something else we cannot imagine.

If the human could distinguish 1,000 colours, this would probably give the brain too much information to satisfactorily process. — RussellA

If what I've read on this is accurate the human can distinguish about 10 million colours, although for simplicity we don't have many different names for them.

:cool:

I wanted to see if there as more to life than what I felt and saw around me but was never to transcend my own reality. — Tom Storm

Something like this was pretty much my motivation for involvement with a Gurdjieff group, but the "more" I was looking for, I've come to realize is right there in what I feel and see around me, not in some transcendent realm. It's just a matter of making a shift whenever possible.
I think we all want more than just glimpses, but I've come to think that is a vain, and ultimately, ironically, egoically driven form of greed.

In my case, I see a separation between philosophy and life. Although I am well aware that every person is an agglomeration of suppositions and values that are derived from philosophy, culture and socialization. Is unpacking this and reassembling our belief systems even possible or useful? — Tom Storm

I tend to agree with you, although I acknowledge this is not a good fit for many others. It seems to me that questions that you or I may find merely interesting are critical and central to crises of faith in some others.

I've toyed with involvements in spiritual organizations, but I have never been a committed believer in any of that. I came to it, because I hoped, via meditation or other exercises for the kind of transformations, only more sustained, that I had experienced via painting, drawing, writing, reading, playing and listening to music, hiking and camping in the wilderness, lovemaking and of course psychedelics and entheogens, but I was ultimately disappointed.

I've come to see personal transformation and altered states as being quite independent of philosophical thought, so I don't really think it matters so much what you think, metaphysically speaking, but I do think it matters, from an ethical perspective, what you do, because that both conditions and reflects your state of mind. Is my state of mind contracted and closed off to life or open and expansive, that is what really matters, it seems to me. The rest is just window dressing.

Ahhhh…..of course you’re quite right. I got stuck on language = ordinary lingo. (head explodes) — Mww

I actually agree with you in disliking OLP: they are like anally retentive thought police who reject the creativity involved in the idea that words can possess novel and interesting associations to be discovered, associations which may yield fresh insight.

The idea of meaning as use also begs the question: "whose use"?

Yes - I think that's a good way of saying it. — T Clark

Cheers, mate...

And I think if it is understood in that spirit, it is still a perfectly understandable principle. "We do not see things as they truly are, but only as they appear to us". — Quixodian

That's right and it is not merely that we do not see things as they truly are, but that we cannot see things as they truly are, a corrective to the human tendency to intellectual hubris.

In other words, you don't have to go as far as the idealism of Bishop Berkeley to posit a world created by our perceptions and cognitive apparatus. — Tom Storm

Exactly, but it seems some minds are not satisfied with anything that is not black or white. The world must be either completely mind-dependent or completely mind-independent; I just won't have it any other way!

That is precisely the import of A J Ayer’s ‘Language, Truth and Logic’, the seminal text of logical positivism. It too is one of the expressions of the predicament of modern culture and society. — Quixodian

Yes, but logical positivism goes too far in ruling out metaphysical speculation as being totally useless. And it was precisely here that both Wittgenstein and Popper, for their different reasons, parted company with the positivists.

Yes, all I meant by "inspiring" was something like "being a catalyst for new ideas and feelings".

I think you’re expressing the predicament of modern culture. That’s exactly what it seems, and the modern philosophers, including Kant, are who made it that way. — Quixodian

I can't see how it is not that way, discursively speaking, because the critical turn in thought has shown us that the only justifications we can find for propositional claims are either empirical or logical. Otherwise, we can exercise our imaginations and speculate as much as we wish, coming up with possibilities that cannot be ruled out provided they are not self-contradictory. But such speculations cannot be ruled in either.

I would say the modern situation is that we have lost faith in the ability of our mere imaginations to yield truth, to inform us about the actual nature of things. Is this a bad thing or a good thing? I'd say there are both positive and negative aspects to it.

But that's exactly what the noumenal world is, and why some philosophers reject it in the first place. Saying our perceptions are somehow "knowing," these things begs the question. How could we possibly prove that our perceptions are actually "of" these noumena? If we can't, why bother positing it? Once you start positing unknowable entities, why stop at any one point? Why not posit an infinite number of shadow realms?

And, if noumena can be known by phenomena, then why do the attempts to map the noumenal world as such, the "view from nowhere," run into so many problems? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll leave aside noumena, as I have no idea what they are, and just consider the question of "things in themselves". The way I look at this is that we seek to explain how it could be that the things we experience everyday are the same for everyone. By this I mean that if I see a red car parked in front of my house and point at it and ask you what you see there, you will almost certainly say you see a red car.

This is unquestionably the situation with the everyday world of objects; we all perceive the same things and since we are not aware of any "mind-melding" going on at all, we cannot but think that the objects of common experience must exist independently of us in some way. Is the independent existence of those objects physical or mental, or is that question itself really incoherent? We don't know, because there is no way of testing any of the speculative answers we can come up with.

So, we cannot but think that there is something causing us to all see the same things, since straight up phenomenalism seems absurd. The seemingly obvious conclusion is that whatever the things we perceive are in themselves, we can only know what they are as they appear to us.

Do we need to worry about "mapping the noumenal world", something which, by mere stipulation, is impossible in principle? Is it somehow demeaning to have to acknowledge our limitations?

Is abstract reasoning not all and only a matter of language use?
— Janus

Interesting. In what way would that be true? — Mww

First, I want to emphasize again that I am not saying that I believe all reasoning depends on symbolic language. Abstraction consists in making one thing stand in for another, where the thing that does the "standing in" does not resemble the thing it stands in for. So, a picture is not an abstraction but straight up representation of the pattern of thing being represented; the picture resembles what it depicts. So, we can think or reason employing images, but that thinking or reasoning is concrete, not abstract. We can also think or reason employing symbols and that is just what language is, whether "ordinary" lingo or mathematical or formal logical.

I think the answer is simpler. We all have human minds with similar capacities. Those minds are stuffed full of knowledge about the world and how it works, much of which is taught to us by other people. That's how our minds are connected with each other. — T Clark

I don't see that as being a sufficient explanation for the fact that we see the same things in our shared world. It can explain how we see things in human ways that differ from how other animals see them, but it cannot explain how we, and animals, judging from their behavior. see the same basic environmental details.

I disagree that "anything experienced has already been conceptualized" is necessarily true. I think it is possible to experience reality - noumena or the Tao - directly without conceptualization. — T Clark

But is it possible to say anything intelligible about that experience? (I'm not referring to poetic language here, I'm thinking of propositional intelligibility).

I can get what you are saying, but I don't doubt that an idealist can do science just as well as a materialist, or that a materialist can do mathematics as effectively as an idealist.

The key distinction (between the Aristotelian and Kantian) is that Aristotelian noumena are still connected to the world of phenomena and provide an explanatory role for the properties of things, whereas Kantian noumena are unknowable things-in-themselves that are entirely beyond our experience and understanding. Kant's noumena do not serve as explanatory principles for phenomena but rather as a limitation on the scope of human cognition. — Quixodian

I'm accepting what @Mww presented regarding Kant's intent, which does not equate noumena with things in themselves, but that leaves me wondering what, if anything noumena are. We know what things in themselves are inasmuch as they are thought to be what gives rise to phenomena. This means we do know things in themselves insofar as they appear to us, but we do not know what they are in themselves and can only speculate. Are they actual independent existents, or can the fact that we all see the same things be explained by our minds being connected with one another in some way we cannot be conscious of, or with some universal mind that "thinks" the objects we encounter every day? Or is there some other explanation we cannot even (at present or ever?) imagine?

Those are the kinds of metaphysical possibilities we can imagine, but we have no way to test them, or even to know if they have any relevance at all to the actual nature of what is happening. We don't know anything at all, metaphysically speaking, it seems.

They seem very much of a piece don't they? That the evolution of language and reason would go hand in hand, would it not? That would not be a controversial claim would it?

I think this aspect of Kant's philosophy - his treatment of the noumenal - is a deficiency. I'm still working out why, but the outlines are becoming clearer. — Quixodian

Yes. I think abstract reasoning and language are codependent; you could not learn to think in abstract terms without language, and you could not learn to employ language adequately without the ability to think abstractly.

So, I agree with what you seem to be suggesting: that rudimentary language which plausibly would have consisted in sounds or gestures used to indicate just particular things, moods and actions to begin with, probably would have evolved into the use of sounds or gestures to indicate types of things, moods and actions and so on, and that that would be the beginning of abstraction. Gestures might have resembled what they were meant to represent: this would be a kind of drawing with the hands and arms in the air, but sounds could only resemble other sounds, not visual phenomena.

It is generally accepted that writing came much later and probably at first consisted in pictographs, which convey meaning by resembling what they depict. Once this is possible, the ability to recognize general patterns must have already been in place. The question is whether animals have this ability to recognize general patterns, which I think they must, since they can obviously recognize their own kinds, their food or prey, water, shelter and so on. This is not yet abstraction, which would plausibly be a further development characterized by a symbol representing something which it does not actually resemble.

This is all just armchair speculation of course and it presents a probably grossly over-simplified picture of the evolution of language and the ability to reason abstractly.

They're plainly connected, in that abstraction is necessary in order to comprehend reference. — Quixodian

So, do you think abstract reasoning is possible without language?

Because abstract reasoning requires symbols, no? Note, I'm not saying all reasoning requires language.

Is abstract reasoning not all and only a matter of language use?

If noumena are not to be equated with things in themselves then I have no idea what noumena are, whereas I have some grasp of what it means to be a thing in itself as opposed to a thing perceived. Maybe the problem is we are pushing up against the limits of human understanding, and it's like the "Myth of Sysyphus": we roll the rock of understanding up to the top of the hill and it straightaway rolls down the other side.

Alternatively, the referent of the noumena is simply a thought structure of a person who buys into the idea that phenomena are caused by things we can know nothing about. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As @Mww has pointed out, and if he is right, things in themselves are not noumena. We know things via the senses, but whatever they are beyond our cognitions of, and cogitations about, them seems to be obviously beyond the scope of our experience and understanding.

So, we do not know "nothing" about them, but we know them only as they appear to us. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.

The alternative to thinking there is something "behind" phenomena would be phenomenalism, and to me that cannot explain how it is that we share a common world.

Taoism is metaphysics, not science. It's not true, it's a useful way of looking at things. — T Clark

Do you mean it is "useful" in the sense of being inspiring?

We understand what a chiliagon is only because we understand what "a one-thousand-sided polygon" means. We know what "a thousand" means, and of course we know what "sides" are and what "polygon" means. It just comes down to language competency.

Thanks...that's a very good summary Mww. Of course, it leaves a lot unanswered, but seemingly at least not about what Kant himself thought.

Which is, it seems, that we can think whatever we like, but we do not know what the limits of understanding are, from which it follows that whatever thinking we like to do, we can have no idea about its soundness except it has empirical or logical justification.

Dave Chapelle knows that Trump knows what's going on:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lNi9DIVkXpo

Good question. The answer is...

Who the fuck knows. — T Clark

I can relate to that. But if multiplicity depends on naming and cannot exist without it, then it would certainly seem to follow that, unless animals practice naming, there can be no multiplicity for them—then should we pity the poor impoverished fuckers?

Does it follow that there is no multiplicity (difference) for animals?

Thanks for your helpful answer Mww, I should point out that I edited the question from

can you give me an example of anything that would be classed as noumenal? — Janus

to read

can you give me an example of any kind of thing that would be classed as noumenal? — Janus

because I realized that it would not be possible to give an example of anything, but thought it may be possible to give an example of some kind of thing.

So, it seems noumena belong to an empty set, which cannot even be named or categorized?

For the most part, AngloAmerican commentary has viewed the Critique as a critique of metaphysics written in defence of empirical knowledge, rather than as a renovation of metaphysics designed to tether the empirical sciences to transcendental principles of intelligibility and morality. — Ian Hunter, Spirituality and Philosophy in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

I think that this is wrong as an understanding of the CPR, whose project was to determine the limits of pure reason. On the other hand, take into account the CPrR, and Kant's overall project can be understood to be aimed at determining the limits of pure reason to make way for faith (practical reason). We have no pure reason to believe in freedom Gid and immortality, but according to Kant we have practical reasons to believe in those things.

Things that appear to us, cannot be things as they are in themselves. Upon affecting us, things are no longer in or of themselves. — Mww

Right, I understand that the things which appear to us are things in themselves, but of course their appearances are not.

Causality is a derivative manifestation of a category, which is a conception but not one understanding thinks on its own accord, insofar as it arises from a transcendental deduction of reason, the faculty of principles, so also does not meet the criteria for noumena. — Mww

So, can you give me an example of any kind of thing that would be classed as noumenal?

‘Tis a wicked game we play, innit? With our opinions? — Mww

Trying to sort them out, get them right, is perhaps wicked in the sense of 'departing from the straight and narrow', but it does seem necessary...

If only objects of the senses, that is those things which appear to us as objects, are things in themselves, would space, time, causality and the perceiving subject be counted as noumena, but not things in themselves, according to Kant?

”What things things is not itself a thing”
— T Clark

Marvelous subtelty in there as well. — Mww

Sounds straight out of Heidegger.

I do think that the human race would benefit greatly if all theism and theosophism was abandoned, as the BS I think it is. — universeness

We are not going to agree about this, but that's OK.

I agree about that. But again, who involves themselves in such arguments except committed believers and equally committed disbelievers? As if religion were nothing but an alternative physics. — unenlightened

I think this is right. It's probably mostly committed believers and disbelievers who do argue for their preferred metaphysical standpoints, probably because they think that their standpoint is the "right" one to move humanity forward, or maybe just because the possibility they argue against scares, disgusts or horrifies them.

But i would also like to point out that the idea that time can be, and ought not to be, wasted in pointless activity is very much a Protestant Christian attitude derived usually from the parable of the talents. It would make little sense in any African or Indian tradition for example. All things must pass, but nothing is wasted. — unenlightened

That's a fair point: the protestant work ethic,,,we must have productivity,,,

"All things must pass, but nothing is wasted": reminds me of Shpongle's album 'Nothing Lasts,,,But Nothing Is Lost'

Perhaps so...

That's alright, I never understood the point of your responses from the start of the present conversation.

See how interesting the topic is? — frank

It may be interesting in the context of the history of ideas. I know Christianity absorbed and repurposed some Neoplatonic ideas, but there is no personal God in Neoplatonism, so the central plank is derived from elsewhere.

He had multiple proofs of God. Aquinas' proofs are modeled on them. The Christian founders approved of the use of ancient Greek philosophers in Christian thinking. What's your expert opinion on that? — frank

I already told I don't have expert opinions. I know Aristotle had multiple proofs of a first cause, a "designer", I just don't remember what they all were, and I can't be bothered looking them up. How about you present them and then we can discuss. I don't believe they were arguments for God as conceived by the Christian founders, but I am aware that they were adapted by the latter to support their Christian theology.

Anyway, I'm not seeing the relevance to this thread. I understand philosophy to be about questioning all and any presuppositions, apart from the most basic general ones which make it possible at all, so perhaps in the time of the Greeks, there were those kinds of basic presuppositions for them, which are no longer part of our contemporary set, and if so, that would amount to a "shared context of faith". Our overarching contemporary shared context of faith is not in question, it cannot be, because it is necessary for any discussion at all to proceed.

Aristotle made proofs of God as well. What's your expert opinion on that? — frank

I don't have an "expert opinion" since I am not a scholar of Ancient Greek philosophy, but the argument from first causes, for example, presupposes the ancient Greek understanding of causation. Also, unless I am mistaken, Aristotle did not argue for a personal creator God, but for a "Prime Mover" or demiurge.

Scholastic philosophers taught the skill of argumentation by having students create proofs of God on their own, and their arguments would be critiqued. For a newbie, it's very fertile ground. It's like a philosophy gymnasium. — frank

Sure, but that is "a shared context of faith": scholastic philosophers presupposed the validity of orthodox theology.

For example, Anselm's 'ontological argument' presupposes faith, and in its presentation of it he makes that explicit.