For my own clarification:

I think we are talking past each other. Now you're talking about trees rather than structures, which is not a distinction I introduced.

The issue remains the same: you're treating anthropomorphic descriptions as if animal behavior shares our phenomenology. I don't believe these descriptions serve to establish what you are claiming. It may be obvious to you, but it isn't for me.

Since this is the case we disagree at a fundamental level, so, I think it's best to move on. You can have a final say.

Well put! What you are saying closely matches my own intuitions.

It is hard because what we see is so obviously that it is very hard to step out of it.

Dogs (or other animals) do not need language to discriminate, individuate or make attributions to objects. I also, repeatedly have said that they perceive something. The issue here (as I see it) is one of thinking that because animals engage in certain interactions with objects implies shared perceptual phenomenology.

That dogs avoid running into walls or urinate on the trees only implies things like avoiding pain or easing discomfort, etc. But it is precisely when you say that the behavior of a dog in relation to a tree or a door is evidence of a shared structure, you are smuggling in what you are trying to prove: that dogs see balls as balls, or walls as walls (I am explicitly putting aside cognitive content, I am only speaking about objects we refer to as balls or walls).

The burden of proof is not on me to show what other animals think - I don't know what they think or how they interpret the world, that's why there are essays like Nagel's What's It Is Like to Be a Bat?. If you can't say (as I can't) what it's like to me (a human being), how am I in position to say what is it like to be a dog? They avoid pain. That is a reasonable, conservative guess.

Identical behavior does not tell you what is going on inside. The very same evidence that you use to argue that dogs see a "structure' of a ball, is one anyone can use in relation to the behavior of ant in relation to the ball, or fish for that matter.

If you don't understand this, I literally cannot express myself better, but we can't proceed much more.

Yeah that's fair enough. I'll give Kastrup props for making idealism a topic of debate, but there are other formulations which are more interesting.

Because (some) animals sometimes react to things in a way that resembles what we do (which says little about what we perceive when we do that thing) does not validate the argument that they perceive objects because there is a similar "structure".

At most you could say that some animals react to different environmental cues relevant to certain species-related tendencies.

This does not show that they individuate, discriminate or make attributions to things in a way that resembles our experience.

What gives you what you have is reading into animals what we do in some cases, not others.

Was that the Kurt Jaimungal episode, where Kastrup just refused to continue the interview because of what he perceived as the impertinance of Maudlin? — Wayfarer

Yep. I watched it (twice) and I thought that Kastrup does what he claims Maudlin did to others. Which is fine, but then don't complain about it.

Doesn't make his views weak or anything, but it would have been productive to see that conversation develop.

Dogs see the steps at the front of my house―they don't bump into them, but climb them to get to the verandah. They see the door into the house at the same location i do. — Janus

I don't see this. I am trying, but I can't imagine it as you describe it. I can't attribute stairs to a dog, surely as you would admit, on a conceptual level, because animals don't have concepts which require language use.

But the issue is phenomenology, I don't deny there is something there which we call "stairs", but the form or how these things are carved out, I can't say. Maybe a dog interprets whatever is out there as a gray step, instead of the whole thing.

Things become much harder if we attempt to understand what a bird or a bee might see when they encounter what we call a "stair".

By the way I'm not saying I agree with Kastrup, but I do think his kind of idealism at least has explanatory power that most other forms don't. I don't agree with him that physicalism is necessarily "baloney". — Janus

Sure, he tries to be quite rigorous and is successful to some degree. The issue is often semantic when analyzed a bit more closely in my experience.

But I don't see what that relevance that has to the point at issue, because I've been saying that only mind-independent physical existents or shared mind can explain the obvious fact that we share a world. — Janus

Sure, for each species of animals, us included, we share the same pool of empirical evidence as it were. That is, I think it is reasonable to say that humans experience the world as other humans do and owls experience worlds as owls do.

We can't see like mantis shrimp do, but another mantis shrimp very-likely see almost exactly the same thing, etc.

The point about the dog was that we assume that if one dog likes to chase a thrown object- virtually all of them will, because they are the same species.

Well, I mean I can't think of, and nor has anyone else to my knowledge presented, any other plausible explanation, but I'm open to hearing something different. — Janus

If that implies that we all see the same structure on a cross-species level is something I don't quite understand.

Was just reacting to that specific comment- don't have much to say about Kastrup because I don't understand what he means when he says that even unconscious knowledge is (or can be) conscious. His "debate" with Maudlin left me a bit sour- but he still has interesting observations.

We've been over all this many times and you have never been able to explain how just the fact of our minds being similar, but not connected, could explain a shared world. — Janus

I'm not taking sides but, is this not solved by us being the same species? As in, when we use medical trials on a few patients, we assume they'll work on all of them- with caveats.

Do these questions arise about dogs?

That Burtt book is fantastic - a must read to better understand the problems Descartes and his contemporaries were dealing with, including Newton's own shocking demolition of the "mechanical philosophy", aka, classical materialism.

The added context explains why Locke, Leibniz, Hume and Kant, etc. reacted the way they did.

[4] Scientific laws are mathematical in nature. — T Clark

That's too strong, I think. What we can know about natural laws are through certain mathematical equations, this only means that we understand the mathematical aspects of nature, not other aspects. It's not at all implausible to think there is more to nature than what our equations tell us.

[10] Something can not be created from nothing. — T Clark

It would make no sense. Would it be impossible? I don't know. Perhaps we have a misleading picture of nothing.

[19] The relation of the human mind to nature, expressed itself in the popular form of the Cartesian dualism, with an emphasis on primary and secondary qualities, its location of the mind in the brain, and its account of the mechanical genesis of sensation and idea. — T Clark

Correct, Cartesian dualism is an extension into commonsense understanding. I don't recall Descartes making the Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualities. But for a while Locke's picture was quite persuasive.

Great thread by the way.

I read this in the late nineties when I was totally unprepared for experimental literature, so I was quite confused. Even so, I think I probably read it in the first place because I'd heard it was weird. I found it fascinating and compelling, moving and haunting, and it's stayed with me. I've been meaning to read it again, although I fear it will hit much harder now. — Jamal

Oh man, it hit me like thunder and that was soon after finishing The Magus which was also shocking.

It reads like a book David Lynch would write, but with constant anxiety. But better. Heck it's hard to describe.

Shame most of his other books are not very good imo. Absolutely read it again sometime. I will do the same. It's an unqualified masterpiece.

What about you, did you find any 2-3 novels that stood out this year?

Top ten novels I read in 2025:

1) The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
2) The Magus by John Fowles
3) The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
4)The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
5) The Passion According to G.H. By Clarice Lispector
6) Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
7) The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
8) A Naked Singularity by Segio de La Pava
9) The Judas Window by John Dickson Carr
10) Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

And Hume was a mitigated skeptic to boot. He is sometimes caricatured as being a total skeptic. But this is not what he says:

“Shou’d it here be asked, whether I sincerely assent to this argument… whether I be one of those scpetics, who hold that all is uncertain, and that our judgment is not in any thing possest of any measures of truth and falsehood; I shou’d reply, that this question is entirely superfluous, and that neither I, nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion."

In light of this, yes. His attitude is quite compatible with modern science. We do not know if a different result could happen from an experiment we have done thousands of times.

Can you fully define any word, outside of mathematics? One can stipulate a definition, but it remains a definition. What a word covers is remarkably complex and is subject to expansion and change through time. I suppose the best we can do in ordinary conversation is to articulate our intuitions.

Normal, as I see it, is something like within the range of expected results or behavior. Normal often implies consistency, routine, expectedness.

But then we soon hit walls. For someone with remarkable athletic skills, say Michael Joran, a normal day playing basketball is scoring 20 (I don't know) points. That is not the average for a non-professional.

And we can expand this in all kinds of ways.

But I don't think we can provide a comprehensive definition of "normal". It's somewhat as Wittgenstein said, the meaning of a word is how we use it in language.

That's not ideal. I loved Mason & Dixon but not Against the Day.

Still going to give it a shot. Thanks for sharing info though.

Of course. We can speak ungrammatically and even say nonsense: up the well, fire chills, or whatever. We tend to follow certain rules to be intelligible.

What's interesting here is when you find yourself in that instance in which you can't find the right word - because there is no one word which conveys what you feel.

Which makes you wonder why we have specific words such as "loathsome", but not other words which convey something like joy above what God could feel, or something like that.

Maybe some things aren't worth compressing or something is too specific to merit a word?

What then does the hyper-compressed vehicle look like if not letters, words, and sentences? How does that shrug look prior to my shoulder shrugging?

Anyway, I leave this open to thoughts, efforts to clarify whatever my misunderstandings might be, and possibly to better understand what language actually is under this framework. — Hanover

I think taking a look at Polanyi's work, particularly The Tacit Dimension might be very interesting. At least the first half of the book. The second half gets quite weird.

But the mantra coming from him is "we know more than we can say." Quite right. That's why people write novels, draw paintings, compose music, etc.

As for the mentalese part, as far as I understand (which is not much, I have not read Fodor too much) it is not quite language and it is not quite thought, it's a mixture of the two.

Putting Fodor aside, we end up articulating a part of our thought through externalization. Other parts we can't.

That's why you get the phenomenon of not being able to find "the right word". There's something there we can't say. Maybe a passage in a novel gets it, maybe a scene in a movie. Sometimes nothing.

The answer to your question is, we don't know very well. Some kind of structural shortcut that can be used when we acquire a language.

I've noted the way people have defined it, but the real groundbreaker would be if someone could give examples of both what it is and isn't. — ProtagoranSocratist

What's hard about defining metaphysics as being about the (fundamental features of) world?

At the end of the day, it's terminological preference, so I can't say my "definition" of metaphysics is more correct than yours.

It's my opinion that the term "metaphysical" has to relate to what he was getting at in his book though — ProtagoranSocratist

That's fine. But why do you think that?

The issue can be debated politically and is.

The matter of fact is much harder to settle. Although perhaps too tired a point, the distinction is that between identity and sex.

One is a human-specific creation, the other is a scientific one.

No animal questions its identity, if it even has one (aside from what we attribute to it.)

Sex seems to be closer to a kind of "natural kind" distinction in biology.

The political topic is not interesting to me, the issue of identity is extremely difficult.

Green for Danger by Christianna Brand

Also dipping in and out of a book I read a while back:

I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being by Ramond Tallis

There's a further complication here because by the time Kant was using the word "metaphysics", it was already modified quite apart from Aristotle's intended discussion under the book by that name (The Metaphysics).

Aristotle was concerned with the ground of being, in modern parlance, the nature of the world. By the time Descartes uses the term, he uses metaphysics to cover a lot of the questions we would label as "epistemology", concerning the way we interpret the world.

Back then "epistemology" was not used, as this term was coined in mass contemporary usage by the late 19th century.

So Kant in talking about metaphysics discusses issues that are "metaphysical" in the ancient sense but also "epistemological" in our sense.

But I don't think Aristotle would've agreed with how the term was latter used. Not that he used the word. But the book is about the world and its nature.

I think these aspects complicate the situation.

To be fair the term "metaphysics" confuses everybody. I still am not 100% sure what it is despite studying it as a profession for several years. You are in good company.

It would be a kind of miracle if what we experience is all there is - a kind of evolutionary freak accident. So, I highly doubt that there is not more to the world than what we experience.

But - we can't know much - if anything, about it.

We have kings of a sort, those who manage the world: the people who go to Davos and are found in Wall Street and The City of London, etc.

They're kings metaphorically, but they yield far more power. But the mistake we keep committing is believing that a king (or leader) is what we need. They know no better than people what they need.

Indeed, a good part of the reason why we are burning the planet, committed to forever wars and inching closer to nuclear annihilation is because people in power think they know more than they do.

We don't have a democracy; we have fractured republics. I can't say what we should think, because there are too many topics.

We've had a good row, and I see no significant issues remaining to clear up at the moment. So, I think we are good here M. :cool:

I think I follow. True one needs other people to activate consciousness "beyond simple animal enactive awareness." But what other people do is stimulate, provoke, give something to bounce off, in our minds. The interaction comes from others, but consciousness is inside us.

We do and it ought to be evident. I think the simplicity of an act of free will can get obfuscated by big questions pertaining to who we are, regrets, life and death decisions and the like. But that's inflating the trivial and putting in a host of complications that obscure the phenomenon.

So, there is a clear and massive difference between raising your leg and a doctor tapping your knee with a hammer, and then the leg going up as a reflex.

One we control easily, the other we can't control - it just happens.

If that distinction is taken to be true as it should, because it's so trivial, then you can begin amping up this example to other cases (but not all).

Turning a right instead of left is the difference between living a normal life or being a paraplegic for the rest of it as another car slams into yours.

Going to that trip may be the difference between a relaxing vacation or getting a promotion at work. And you can expand this in all ways. I can continue writing, or I can stop. I can't do both at the same time, that much is evident.

But yeah, that you can do something because it is in your power and that you do something because you can't control it, is the difference between free will and necessity.

. Maybe the autonomic system would still work, but the cognitive system wouldn’t for lack of direct sensory input, and the aestetic part wouldn’t work for lack of feelings about things of sense, so it looks like none of what is called a priori, like your “pure thought”, would be available. But hey….probably wouldn’t be dead. — Mww

Being not dead is good. Unless you are an anti-natalist. Which if you are, well, good riddance. I suspect you may be right, there'd be almost nothing going on inside.

Again, don’t know, but given the otherwise fully equipped human, I’m convinced all thought is absent language. — Mww

I'm a big fan of the a priori. To problematize it as unscientific looks quite silly to me. You may be convinced, and I share the intuition, but I can't say what it is. Saying it's a priori is fine, but it leaves me uninformed. And when you begin to explain the a priori, you use language. So, it's a sticky issue.

Even so, I haven't been able to pin down a describable form of pure thought, as it is called by the metaphysicians, a priori. — Mww

I think that makes sense. And maybe we can say little more than this.

But when she gave her public talks, many found her bookish and limited. Maxim Gorky, perhaps unkindly, called her affected and spoilt. Someone speaking of God's disapproval of revolution in a stilted and learnt way rather than with any worldly wisdom.

I know all this from researching these kinds of "parables" and what they reveal about the socially-constructed and language-scaffolded nature of the human mind. They illustrate exactly how language – as semiosis – plays a central role in structuring what we "phenomenologically experience". — apokrisis

It is quite remarkable how much language is tied to thought. I haven't read Keller in a long time, so the critiques may be true to some extent.

But it's still a stunning, the human capacity to be able to speak at all absent eyes and ears. I suspect that people who are deaf-mute may be touching on thought (whatever it is) in a less complex way than we do, maybe getting closer to whatever thought may be absent language. But as you point out, it also impoverishes output.

They grew up in institutions where their experience was about limited to their internal spasms of hunger or cold, and the rough touch of the hands cleaning and feeding them. Years of training could get them to the level of dressing themselves, feeding themselves, using the toilet. But nothing much beyond as any grammatical structure must be connected to some matching semantic world of lived experience. — apokrisis

There seems to be a crucial development window in which children can develop "the language organ", which, if missed, renders language virtually impossible.

Incidentally this seems true of other human capacities. If a child gets no visual input by 4 or some age like that, they won't be able to see.

So consciousness is not an innate or singular property, but a learnt and developmental process. And in humans, we develop the set of neurobiological habits we would share with any large brained animal. Then we add a socially-constructed realm of language-scaffolded ideas and intellectual habits on top. — apokrisis

I don't see how it's not innate. That it requires learning, only means it needs stimulus, but it comes from inside the creature. The world doesn't "teach" us consciousness, it sharpens and refines what we already have.

"The unit of speech is a proposition," he declared. "We speak not only to tell other people what to think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is part of thought." — apokrisis

Absolutely. And we can tell in ordinary life, when we ask someone "what are you thinking", we expect propositions, not the "blooming buzzing confusion" that is happening inside our heads all the time.

If mind is computational and computation is a physical process then it would seem to follow that the mental is really a function of the physical. — Janus

And I agree with that. I do think mental stuff is physical stuff. Just like gravity is physical stuff or anything else is physical stuff. I don't see a metaphysical difference between these things.

There is no mental vs. physical. If you want to talk about something analogous in modern terms, I think it makes sense to speak of the experiential and the non-experiential. And then the question becomes, how can non-experiential stuff lead to experiential stuff?

Difference is good―I don't think we want this place to become an echo chamber. I also agree with you on not wishing to create a substantive difference between the mental and physical, even though I think the distinction is useful in some of our thinking practices. — Janus

Absolutely.

It would be boring if we all agreed on everything. Keeps the discussions alive and interesting and it keeps one sharp too, forces one to think clearly about things one may overlook or has trouble explaining.

So can we even say there’s any such thing as being comatose throughout? — Mww

Well, far from comatose, we do have examples of people like Hellen Keller, who managed to become a wonderful writer while being deaf-mute.

It's more so, what would a human be like, if they never developed senses, either by genetic mutation, or accident or some other scenario. I'd wonder if there's "something that it's like" to be that, from a phenomenological perspective, "pure thought", absent language.

Tested comatose patients were not comatose throughout, though. — Mww

That's what's interesting, philosophically.

I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between what I’m doing when I introspect and what I’m doing when I think. Notice, though, through the ages of dispute over the original, no one’s taken “introspectro ergo sum” seriously enough to argue for it. — Mww

In part because, outside of language, we don't know what non-linguistic thought is. But few would say that thought is anywhere near exhausted through language. Introspection can be explained to some degree, but it doesn't tell us as much as we'd like. For reasons you've articulated elsewhere.

I'm going to respond with another quibble. You are again referring to what we cannot introspect as "mental", whereas I think it most plausible to consider that what we cannot introspect is 'neural', and that it is precisely it's character as non-mental that makes it impossible to introspect. — Janus

It may be neural. It may be computational - below the level of the neural, as Randy Gallistel suggests. There are some who think neurons alone don't suffice to explain mental activity, hence proposals like Hameroff and Penrose who speak of microtubules.

There's also the linguistic component discussed by Chomsky a very intricate unconscious model which we can tease out into consciousness to discover its form.

But unless you want to say something, I enjoy talking with you, I think your use of mental is not problematic, as I said it's a caveat, and I mention it because I feel hesitancy to create more distance than there is between the mental and the physical. It's more monist issue.

One may even wonder why we introspect at all, it reveals little of what we would like to know...

I think what you say here supports my view. What we say is preceded, it seems most plausible to think, by neuronal processes, brain processes of which we cannot be aware. So I don't think it is right to refer to them as mental processes, given that I think the term is most apt when applied to what we can be conscious of — Janus

I get that. And that sounds to me to be a reasonable definition of "mental". All I'm pointing out is that without these unconscious processes the mental would not arise. So, it's not easy to disentangle them.

It's not so much the brain (though of course if we lack it, we might not be thinking in high quality), more so what comes alongside consciousness and thinking, which is an obscure apparatus - we cannot introspect into how we do what we do with the mental. But this is just a quibble.

Your definition is fine and I don't deny its usefulness.

You seem to be misinterpreting me to say that other animals see things in the same way as we do. I'm not saying that at all―I'm saying they see the same things we do but in different ways according to the different ways their sensory modalities are structured. — Janus

And herein lies the difference between us. I seem to be on the side that our differences are more pronounced than our similarities. You seem to say that though of course there are differences, we have some structure in common. I don't understand what you mean by structure on these levels. Are we speaking of the seemingly concrete nature of rocks, or that certain food seems to be liked by many animals?

Or is it something more abstract as in, the outline of a rock or a tree is perceivable to certain species.

As for the first case, I'd agree with it to some degree sure. It's the second option that is obscure to me.

Dare I say it? I’ve no experience with being comatose. Even the deepest sleep doesn’t turn off senses, although it’s unlikely I’d exercise my taste buds. Sure my eyes are shut, but they haven’t been debilitated; they’ve just been removed from their objects. — Mww

Ok but, there is a big difference between once having developed your senses, losing them for a while (comatose) and never having developed the senses at all, blind or sensory deprivation at crucial development times, etc.

The question here is, what would a human being's thought pattern be like if they were comatose all throughout? Would they be completely blank? Would they be able to from minimal computation as in 7+5=12? Hard to say. Fascinating though.

But we both know there isn’t a real “I”; no where in the skull can there be discovered some thing or other identifiable as such. Just as there no such thing as reason, judgement and any of those other metaphysical-ly things these words are used to represent. Hell….we’d be hard put to find even one of those representations we have insisted upon since forever. — Mww

Ah, yes. The damnable problem of confusing something that is publicly observable with what can be verified. We all have reason (to some extent I'd guess) but we can only see signs of reason in others, we only are acquainted to a limited extent with our own.

To doubt the manifest, funny beings these philosophers...

I’m afraid to inform you, Good Sir, it is inescapable NOT to have a horse in this fight. As you say, as soon as verbalization occurs, one or the other, or both, hands are active, and even though proofs are always absent, at least we can take refuge in that for which an end is possible. — Mww

I have a horse, or several, I have no illusions of being "objective", though I try to be charitable and polite - sometimes failing.

Thing is, I'm not sure what I'm betting on at the moment, so I'd don't know whether to call, raise or fold.

Yeah, right. See the contradiction? Neurotransmitters and synaptic clefts did indeed produce metaphysics, and even if there’s no proof of how, it remains that formerly determined nowhere, happened. — Mww

Not so much a contradiction as just limits of the type of knowledge we have. This would be no issue if we were angles, or God, or at least the merely mysterious would be idle banality at such otherworldly heights. We just happen to stand on two legs and believe we see further than we do.

I personally don't find the hard problem to be the hard problem. Just one of many we have to live with.

(**loosely translated as….dude, you brought a knife to a gun fight???)

If we couldn’t have some kinda fun with this, why bother doing it. — Mww

Great quote!

Maybe the guy with the knife is just crazy enough, that others might pause long enough to be puzzled and by dint of hesitancy get killed. Or maybe knife-guy just gets shot. More likely anyway. . . .

I am not understanding what you are wanting to say with your 'alien' example. I think neurophysiology clearly shows us what reasonably counts as brain and what does not. — Janus

You may have loosed what counts as brain when you say:

"the manifold of sensitive body, nervous system and brain plus the environment which acts up it."

The nervous system is then a component of a system of which the brain is a part of.

My alien example is simple, but the particulars are hard to imagine (since we are human beings, not Martians).

Suppose Martians existed and that they have more sophisticated or refined sensory and intellectual capacities. The way they conceptualize the world is different from ours. For them, what we call a "brain", is misleading slicing of what we take to be the organ responsible for thought.

On this view, one could suppose that for them a brain may be a human head, that is to say, not only the organ "brain", but also the eyes, the ears and so on, which, without these additions a brain would not be able to work properly. So they could carve out organs in a different manner- maybe radically so, I can only point to examples I can imagine, not one's I cannot.

I guess we'll have to disagree on what would be the most reasonable scope of the term 'mental'. The idea that some process could be mental and yet be impossible for us to be aware of in vivo, so to speak, just doesn't seem tenable. — Janus

What about language use? We literally do not know what we are specifically going to say prior to saying it (or typing it.) Clearly we have a vague meaning, which we can express through propositions, sometimes expressing what we wanted to say, sometimes we just get approximations.

The point is that certain unconscious processes - willing, judging, spontaneity, creativity - are things that come out of us without us being consciousness of them until they happen. And I think that without these processes, we wouldn't have consciousness as we understand the word.

Other multicellular organisms have sense organs, organs of sight, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling just as do, even though their organs may not be configured in just the same ways as ours. We also know that other animals visually detect the same structures in the environment as we do―it is evidenced by their behavior. — Janus

Yeah we have been stuck on this point before if I recall correctly. I am skeptical that they do. Not that they necessarily experience things COMPLETELY differently from us in all respects, but in some respects they do. Dogs with olfaction have access to a world we barely imagine. Mantis shrimp have 16 color receptive cones which renders the experience they have of the world very different from what we see.

There may be overlap. But I fear excessive anthropomorphizing may be limiting what we can say here.

Is reading The Blue Book necessary for this?

There’s dozens of definitions for experience, but I personally favor the one that says experience is knowledge of objects through perception — Mww

That's fine. But what do you in a hypothetical scenario in which the traditional five senses aren't working, say a coma, but there's reason to believe there is still consciousness?

Consciousness is represented by that to which it belongs, the “I” or the transcendental ego, while experience on the other hand, nonetheless a statement concerning the condition of a subject, it is so only from the sum of his perceptions, having no concern with the subject’s condition relative to his moral disposition or his aesthetic feelings in general. — Mww

I use experience as synonymous with "consciousness" because this word has been used in so many ways and brings about different prejudices that I want a neutral term.

As for the "I" that accompanies consciousness. That one is tricky. Using only myself as an example (pun intended or not) I'd say a lot of the time there is an I, for which the conscious experience happens.

But there are rare times, daydreaming or random thoughts in which and "I" is not present. Of course, as soon as you verbalize it gets reintroduced. But I'm not 100% settled on the claim that an "I" accompanies all our consciousness all the time in every possible conscious variation or circumstance, even if it applies, say, in 95% of the cases.

Don't have a big horse in that fight either way.

Thoughts? — Mww

I mostly though that Galen Strawson's use of the word - introduced in Mental Reality - was very useful. No more than that.

So thinking about climate change might cause one person to think depressing things, but cause another person to think of the girl he had a crush on in the class he took on climate changed. But in both cases, thinking of climate change caused the next thought — Patterner

Of course, I think there are instances in which we enter trains of thought which are real and causal, otherwise I don't know how we could think rationally.

People vary wildly, but that they also find themselves in circumstances in which a pattern of thought arises for each person looks accurate to me.

There's also plenty of random thinking too. And maybe here we don't find connective causes.

The difference is, the synthesis intuition uses in the construction of phenomena, re: matter and form, is very different from the synthesis understanding uses in the construction of thought, re: the schemata of relevant categories, or, conceptions. — Mww

That's probably true when seen from a more micro-scale. But I'd suspect that both acts are creative - in the broadest sense of the term. They create something - phenomenon through matter and form and understanding - applying categories (etc.) - which did not exist as we now acquire them, prior to interaction. These things, while being quite different in specifics, create something from very poor sense data, photons and other particles.

My thinking as well. Which gets us to the brain thing: there is no doubt regarding the real existence of that object between the ears, but that object is only a brain because one of us, at one time or another, said so. From which follows necessarily, while that thing may always be, and be right where it is, it isn’t a brain from that alone. — Mww

That's how I see it. More than anything, I don't take brains to be "real distinctions" in nature, it's what we happen to categorize as relevant to the mental processes of certain animals. This does NOT deny something exists, just that they aren't carved up in nature in this way.

how is it that mathematics is always synthetic cognition referencing a myriad of distinct operations, but a number is always analytic, or that conception which is called primitive, in referencing only a singular quantity? — Mww

All good questions and borrowing Hume's words (from a different problem) - "this difficulty is too hard for my understanding." I have no idea how to proceed with numbers or math.

Thus, things-in-themselves on one end, and experience on the other, stand as not mental operational constituency — Mww

I almost get that. What do you mean by "experience" here? I make no distinction between experience and consciousness.

Know what? If we follow that out to an extreme, the brain, being matter, must think, in principle, for it disguises itself in manifestations of a thinking subject.

Like I said…no need to confuse ourselves twice. Once, like this, is plenty. — Mww

Yup. But the issue keeps arising. All I say is matter is much, much stranger than what we once thought....