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

I am not arguing that it (the essay) means 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.

If differentiation is literally just things existing aside from one another (at all), then our perception does logically require selection into categories of those things — AmadeusD

Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies — but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life — and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

Pinter goes on to argue that what the observer brings to the picture is ‘the picture’. He says that when we gaze out at our surroundings, we don’t see featureless space. Instead, our perception registers distinct entities, arrayed in spatial relationship with each other. We recognize these entities, can identify and name them. This act of apperception interprets the world as a collection of distinct items. Without the instinctive ability to make these distinctions, comprehension would be impossible and we couldn’t think or act.

Which permits the thinking about the soul excluded in your previous argument. — Paine

The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all. That representation that can be given prior to all thought is called intuition. All manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the ‘I think’ in the same subject in which this manifold is found. — (B132)

The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given — CPR, Kant, B421

Strictly speaking, Kant is saying that the "I" cannot be experienced as "real" the way other things in life can be. — Paine

I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978, but I have never seen one when where one of the leaders — in this case Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — felt the need to thank our president about 15 times in the roughly four and a half minutes he addressed him with the press in the room. Not to mention the flattery that our other European allies felt they needed to heap on him as well.

When our allies have to devote this much energy just to keep the peace with our president, before they even begin to figure out how to make peace with Vladimir Putin; when they have to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure that Trump is not shooting them in the back with a social media post, before Putin shoots them in the front with a missile; and when our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you,” that Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor, it all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work? ....

Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.

But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency and his deputy on the advice of a conspiracy buffoon, Laura Loomer, and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence? ...

Who will tell him the truth? No one.

No one but the wild earth of Ukraine. In the trenches in the Donbas, there is truth. In the 20,000 Ukrainian children that Kyiv says Putin has abducted, there is truth. In the roughly 1.4 million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed and wounded as a result of Putin’s fevered dreams of restoring Ukraine to Mother Russia, there is truth. In the Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian drones at the same time that Trump was laying out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, there is truth.

And the longer Trump ignores those truths, the more he builds his peace strategy — not on expertise but on his hugely inflated self-regard and his un-American anti-Westernism — the more this will become his war. And if Putin wins it and Ukraine loses it, Trump and his reputation will suffer irreparable damage — now and forever. — Thomas Friedman, NY Times (Gift Link)

What is the evidence that supports that they (phenomena) are appearances? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. 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. — The Continuing Relevance of Immanuel Kant

Kant, by his own admission, knows absolutely nothing about other people in-themselves. Any appeal to shared biology or culture is an appeal to the phenomenal to explain a noumenal connection by which discrete phenomenal perspectives are the same. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Pace Kant, this is not what past metaphysicians thought they had. The category is itself modern. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've even seen Kant read as Shankara or Nagarjuna. But these seem like a stretch to me. Doctrines like emptiness would suggest that the things-in-themselves are simply a sort of error (but of course, readings of Kant do dispense with noumena, I just don't think he does). — Count Timothy von Icarus

How can anything be deduced about the in itself from "the nature of experience and reason"? — Janus

You say the argument is not inductive or deductive (or I imagine abductive) and that it is "transcendental". Merely labelling it tells me nothing — Janus

As I said, I simply want any kind of argument clearly laid out that demonstrates that space, time, differentiation etc. must be confined to the world as cognized. I'm still waiting. — Janus

The existence of anything we can imagine presupposes space and time, and you are right that doesn't demonstrate that space and time exist beyond perceptual experience, or that they are caused by the in-itself. But it also doesn't demonstrate that they cannot belong to or be caused by the in itself. — Janus

gallolithotheratophenomenology — Pierre-Normand

In The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, the authors (mainly Hacker) point out that the use of the term "consciousness" in its contemporary use is fairly new and philosophically charged in a way that gives rise to such problems as the epistemological problem of other minds or the idea of the conceivability of p-zombies. — Pierre-Normand

Cudworth developed his theory by reflecting on Plotinus’s Enneads, where Plotinus makes use of the Greek term synaisthesis (literally: “sensed with”) to distinguish lower natures from higher. Cudworth translates this into English as “con-sense” or “consciousness” (True Intellectual System 159). It is by working out a particularly Platonic metaphysical theory that Cudworth develops his account of consciousness. — SEP 17th C Theories of Consciousness

If you then go on to say that there is no space and time absent perception an argument is required, and that is just what is not to be found. It doesn't follow deductively that if space and time are forms of intuition they therefore cannot exist outside of that context. It also doesn't follow inductively, because all our science tells us there must have been space and time prior to humans or even percipients in general. — Janus

And here it is again―a claim without an argument to support it. — Janus

I have already said at length why I think it ('The Blind Spot of Science') is pointless. I think it is pointless because the natural sciences cannot deal with the subject. — Janus

I want to hear an actual argument for why space, time, differentiation, form, matter and all the rest cannot exist beyond the context of perception. — Janus

if they aren't going to send their own troops to a fight then it's because the issue doesn't matter that much to them — boethius

We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all the constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which therefore does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being. — Kant CPR, A42/B59

we might find it plausible to think that differentiation is a real feature of the in itself, even though, since we can, by mere definition, only observe things as they appear, we obviously cannot certainly demonstrate such an inference to be true. — Janus

I know about the 'blind spot' book and the prior article, the latter of which I read. I thought it was a pointless argument. — Janus