To notice anything at all, there must be some intelligible sense of contrast already. So yes, for even the vaguest sense of there being "something", that means there is an intelligible contrast in play. Something stirs just "there" in our sensorium, and not anywhere else. The law of the excluded middle applies to our perceptual state.

Well, that would be the story for attentive awareness. You then have habitual or preconscious level mental processing. When we drive, we can process complicated traffic patterns without any sense of noticing or remembering for reasonable periods while our attention wanders on to other thoughts.

So there is the possibility for real dissociation too.

At a neural level, the nervous system is still set up to process the perceptual in terms of the intelligible. The automatic brain is still relying on understanding the traffic flows in terms of well-learnt contrasts. But now it is more dominated by keeping things constant and unchanging - always the same distance from the car in front, always the same distance from the edges of the traffic lane, etc. So in fact, the brain is managing to ignore the world by making it boringly predictable. The sensorium - as it relates to the task of driving - is so utterly intelligible that it lacks any change or surprise. If contrast is predictable - that constant flow of the world around us - then it falls out of the picture.

Thus you have a complicated story. The whole nervous system is predicated on intelligible contrast from the bottom-up. And then within that, there is a new kind of contrast that can be manufactured between the changes that are predicted and the changes that are not. The brain begins by responding to every contrast, then filtering out as much of the contrast as possible in a forward-modelling fashion, so leaving only the unfamiliar and the unexpected contrasts as that which grabs out attention, and so that which is having to be made intelligible by a higher set of mental processes. We have to seek a fit that works.

So in terms of the sensorium being the limit of intelligibility, the brain can't even get started unless it has imposed an expectation of finding contrast on the world. It begins with the question of whether anything different is happening. Sensory receptors are tiny switches waiting for something to trigger them.

But then there develops a contrasting push and pull. As much as possible is pushed into the category of the constant and predictable. It is pushed outside the sensorium in terms of being some collection of intelligible objects. Normally when we see a shelf of books or your worn path, it is being pushed into the background of our awareness. It is made a literal backdrop - so as to give whatever instead pops out attentively, an intelligible context.

We have to see the majority of the sensorium as the insignificant back-drop to reveal some part of the sensorium as having some basic level of significance. And then within that higher level game, we sometimes know exactly what it is we are seeing. At other times we might be really confused and puzzled, only knowing that there is something right there at that point of our sensorium that needs conceptual clarification.

The hierarchical nature of this contrast building exercise rather defeats any simplistic dualisms.

At times our ideas and our impressions can be miles apart - as when we zone out in our own thoughts while driving on busy but familiar roads. Or when we have just noticed some kind of sensory disturbance, and have yet to figure out what the heck it is.

And at other times, our ideas and impressions are so connected that there appears no proper division at all. We are aware of that book, or this path, as a single concrete act of attentive aperception. We see the object without needing to figure anything out.

Can one properly and in the long run distinguish the senses from ineligibility? — InternetStranger

Do you mean 'intelligibility'?

Assuming you do mean that - the Greek tradition generally distinguishes intellect (which is the faculty that grasps intelligible ideas) from sensory perception. The seminal word nous, sometimes translated as 'intellect' or 'intelligence', is a term from classical philosophy for the faculty of the human mind necessary for understanding what is true or real or 'what truly is' (following Parmenides). English words such as "understanding" are sometimes used, but three commonly used philosophical terms come directly from classical languages: νοῦς or νόος (from Ancient Greek), intellēctus and intellegentia (from Latin). To describe the activity of this faculty, the word "intellection" is sometimes used in philosophical contexts, as well as the Greek words noēsis and noeîn (νόησις, νοεῖν). ¹

As to whether this is different from sense perception - emphatically, yes, because it enables the intellect to 'grasp concepts' which are different from either perception or sensation.

'As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, "intellect" is that faculty by which abstract concepts (like the concepts "man" and "mortal") are grasped and combined into judgments (like the judgment that "all men are mortal"), and then to reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man" to the conclusion that "Socrates is mortal").

Intellect is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of your mother, an auditory mental image of what a song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the disposition of your body, and so on).

Intellectual acts are different from, and irreducible to, sensation and imagination ².

So you say even when "we", as the one who lives in conscious apperception, become expressionistic as it were, phase out into daydreams, the soma goes on treating everything as if it were intelligible?

What about the case when one merely feels something solid or hard? Is it not in a way, sense experience proper? In other words, what is one to say the word sense means if not solidity, color, sound? However, in clear sense, these things are determined as other than each other, sound is not color.

All the talk about what goes on in the body, or brain, is intelligible. The various constituents of the brain are distinguished. And activity is determined against inactivity within a specific topos. Each are understood under the general idea brain, which is thought as having a function corresponding to one's apperceptive life. The compound idea of correspondance of brain and experienced life is constantly at work in the study.

"Do you mean 'intelligibility'?"

Yea, thanks.

What about the case when one merely feels something solid or hard? — InternetStranger

You mean, as intelligibly opposed to the penetrable and squishy?

There is never a monistic "merely" about it. All judgements are contextual or dichotomised in a figure~ground Gestalt fashion.

As the skeptics noted, if you put a cold hand in a luke-warm pitcher of water, you feel something different from when you stick a hot hand in the same water. So judgement is relative. It is up to us to divide reality into a figure and ground every time.

The division just gets made in contrasting fashion itself. Some divisions are hardwired in at the level of fixed sensory habit. Others have to be attentively constructed. This is why the nervous system in fact has a complex hierarchical structure.

It is the same mechanism in operation at all times - imposing an intelligible division on reality is the start of any claim to sensation. But as evolved and developed beings, we can rely on a vast weight of hardwired aperceptual structure to get the game going. Then higher attentive level processes can come in over the top.

This supports a dissociation of perception and conception. There does seem to be a sensorium that founds the intellect because habit level responses seem so fixed, and attentive level responses are the very opposite.

But look closer at how the nervous system is structured and it is a structure of intelligibility being imposed all the way down to the individual sensory receptors standing on the front line. They are already designed as switches poised to signal a contrast - flip one way for "figure", the other way for "ground".

"As to whether this is different from sense perception - emphatically, yes, because it enables the intellect to 'grasp concepts' which are different from either perception or sensation."

Plato doesn't speak of concepts. But of the pattern or idea, think of the the case that in seeing a lion's tail, we see a part of the lion, leads Aristotle to say, when the tail is cut off, and no longer part of the lion, it is no longer part of the form, idea, or genus, lion, but it still has the hyle.

You know, when we speak of taxonomic ranking, we need a big leap in order to say that humans don't really exist as a specific point in Evolution, that a tag like Homo Sapiens Sapiens is in some way just a "concept", rather than a physical fact about a manner of existing things intelligible under a peculiar faculty of the soul or life of the human being, the thinking animal.

I think the Thomistic sense you bring up has to do with syllogistic logic. I.e., with the intellect understood as the power to make inferences from established premises. The premises themselves bring us back towards the world. I.e., someone says, Crete is an Island. It simply is so, it takes a theory to say that a specific faculty of the mind establishes it logically as a judgment based in a psychology. That the judgment might be defective, as in the case of a mad person. And so forth. This all pastes a web of assumed thought over the discussion in Plato, which we ourselves have a hard time not superimposing through thousands of years of habit and breeding into this thinking according to a selection which Plato was not the product of.


"Intellect is to be distinguished from imagination"


Of course one does make that distinction. And yet for no clear reason, we perhaps simply "know" to. There is a second issue of the ineligibility. Because we know what a human being or a gigantic piece of granite is, in dream and memory, just as in the surrounding world. In this sense, it is hard to understand how one has a sensorium in dreams. One sees things, for instance, in a dream. In a dream, we are still in a whole, as it were, where all things distinguished are significant according to the whole, and belong together in it. Each is the same insofar as it is one of the things in the world or dream.

Why, then, is there not sight in a dream? Or, how then, is sight in the surrounding environment to be distinguished? What is the cardinal or demonstrably knowable difference?

It's interesting that, indeed, in machines that translate brain data into images, the same result is got from waking images as dreams so far as the reproduction is made. Such machines work by the correspondence of visual images to brain data, through building an encyclopedia of brain states correlated to images.

So, you say all things are as much intelligible as "nomadic"? Or, no 'monad' is ever without its intelligible character?

Or, no 'monad' is ever without its intelligible character? — InternetStranger

Yep. No figure without a ground. And the mind has to produce both in the same moment when making a sensory distinction.

It's the Law of Form - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form

And yet, in a certain sense, the conception of the whole, seems boundless, or without form. Does it actually bound anything? Each thing belongs to the whole, as what is one of the things in the world, but the world posits the set of all sets problem. Which, though it can be set aside through the rule of non-self reference, for the sake of operative methodology, can not merely be set aside by the human being. Everything is said to be part of the whole, but the whole is undetermined.

And yet, in a certain sense, the conception of the whole, seems boundless, or without form. — InternetStranger

Sure. In a certain sense.

If we have a sense of the intelligible, then it is only intelligible that we attempt to understand that itself in terms of an intelligible contrast. And so the very idea of intelligibility calls for its intelligible "other" - the radically unintelligible. The vague or indeterminate potential. The classical apeiron or aperas. The prime matter.

So that is certainly the metaphysical position I am pushing - the one that founds itself in the boundless and formless. It is what makes sense of the intelligible because why else would intelligible contrast even be a thing unless it is precisely what gives form and bound to existence?

So we can conceive what was necessary as the antithesis of necessity itself. Step forward pure unbounded contingency - the condition so vague and limitless that it looks like nothing at all.