As Peirce said: " "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts". — Janus

Notice the C S Peirce quotation at the top of the Medium version of the original post:

…to decide what our sentiments ought to be towards things in general without taking any account of human experience of life, would be most foolish’ — C S Peirce, Philosophy in Light of the Logic of Relatives.

Yes, it all comes down to experience. The world we experience is the real world, and it is a world shared with the other animals. It is a world that existed long before we did and will exist long after our passing (an advent which may not be too far off the way we are going).

Even though I agree that this is perfectly evident, it is still not the point at issue, but after 12 months and many thousands of words, I am no longer going to beat a dead horse.

After reading many thousands of your words I am still not clear what you think the point at issue is if it is not whether or not this life is all there is. Because if this world is all there is, and beyond our experience there can only be 'something' the nature of which we cannot do more than vaguely imagine, then I can't see the point of all those thousands of words. If they were poetic words that would be a different story because we "do not live by bread alone", and the creative imagination is, the arts are, of high importance. The arts are liberating, and religion is binding.

Like you, I believe altered states are a real thing, but unlike you I draw no ontological or metaphysical conclusions about what they are showing us. Fiction or reality? I don't really care because what is of primary importance is the enriching effect on present experience and imagination.

After reading many thousands of your words I am still not clear what you think the point at issue is if it is not whether or not this life is all there is. — Janus

OK. Well, a few pages back you said

I have no doubt I've read more Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Merleau Ponty than you. — Janus

I will draw upon your expertise in these matters to comment on the following passage from Merleau Ponty which seems close to the point that I'm pressing:

For what exactly is meant by saying that the world existed prior to human consciousnesses? It might be meant that the earth emerged from a primitive nebula where the conditions for life had not been brought together. But each one of these words, just like each equation in physics, presupposes our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this reference to the lived world contributes to constituting the valid signification of the statement. Nothing will ever lead me to understand what a nebula, which could not be seen by anyone, might be. Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world. — Phenomenology of Perception, p456

.

I understand what MP is saying of course. We can only speak in terms that come from and refer to our experience. To say that nebulae or dinosaurs existed prior to humans is only to say what we would have experienced had we been there. I don't see that as a problem for realism.

The issue is their existence independent of humans or any percipients. — Janus

That is not the issue. I don't think anyone here is questioning the existence of the independent reality. The question is whether that independent reality is as we sense it or not. Once we recognize that sense images are creations of the living system, created as representations, then we can understand that the independent reality need not be anything like the sense images, just like the word "dog", as a representation, is not anywhere similar to what it represents.

After reading many thousands of your words I am still not clear what you think the point at issue is — Janus

Plainly.

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etc. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.”

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. Any individual object, Husserl wrote:

“Is not merely an individual object as such, a ‘This here,’ an object never repeatable; as qualified ‘in itself‘ thus and so, it has its own specific character, its stock of essential predictables which must belong to it … if other, secondary, relative determinations can belong to it.”

Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness, and “everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too…” — The Natural Attitude

This aspect of Husserl influenced Heidegger, even though the latter criticized some aspects of his mentor's philosophy. Husserl emphasized that all instances of being are encountered within a broader horizon of meaning, one that includes but surpasses the empirical. This horizon reflects the structures of consciousness, which condition how any entity can appear as meaningful. For Husserl, facticity (the empirical givenness of things) is always embedded within a context shaped by the transcendental structures of consciousness. (This is exactly what I meant in the OP, where I said that every statement about what exists contains an ineluctably subjective element that is not available to empirical observation.)

Heidegger took this idea further by situating the horizon of meaning in Dasein's existential structure—the way human beings are always already engaged with the world and interpreting it. Heidegger reinterpreted this in existential terms, arguing that Dasein is not just a passive observer but an active participant in the disclosure of Being. Heidegger’s notion of “Being-in-the-world” builds on Husserl’s insight that Being is never encountered in isolation but always within a lived context.

I don't think we will proceed much here. We going to keep going in circles.

I think that is a very strange claim, why are the use of concepts necessary for perception? I would not invoke conceptualization for any reason other than to describe the use of syntactic language, which is an ability only humans and arguably one or two other animals have. — goremand

I think there has to be a minimal intellectual component in terms of memory, otherwise I don't see how a creature could perceive without constantly forgetting.

That is not the issue. I don't think anyone here is questioning the existence of the independent reality. The question is whether that independent reality is as we sense it or not. — Metaphysician Undercover

What could that mean? Taking sight as the primary sense involved in describing things, are you asking something like whether the things that appear to us look the same when they are not being seen?

After reading many thousands of your words I am still not clear what you think the point at issue is
— Janus

Plainly. — Wayfarer

You asked me to comment on the MP passage, I did that and you didn't respond. Do you have a point of issue with my answer. If so, do tell.

I don't think we will proceed much here. We going to keep going in circles. — Manuel

I don't see that we.ve been going in circles other than that you have been misinterpreting some of what I have written. Do you disagree with my last post addressed to you? If not, we agree, if so, please explain. Or if you don't want to that's fine.

Taking sight as the primary sense involved in describing things, are you asking something like whether the things that appear to us look the same when they are not being seen? — Janus

I am asking in what way might the representation (the visual image) resemble the thing being represented (the independent reality)? And, I am answering, that it is not necessary for there to be any resemblance whatsoever, as indicated by my example of words.

I am asking in what way might the representation (the visual image) resemble the thing being represented (the independent reality)? — Metaphysician Undercover

The appearnce could only resemble the thing that appears when it is not appearing if the thing that appears is an appearance when it is not appearing, which is a contradiction. So I think the question is ill-formed, incoherent.

Ok, here goes:

The dog sees the ball as something to chase, the doorway as something to walk through, the wall as something not to walk into, the tree as something to piss against, the car as something to get excited about going in.

So the 'somethings' have roughly the same characteristics for the dog as they do for us. "Wall, 'tree'. 'doorway'. and 'car' are just names, but the things they name certainly seem to be real mind-independent things with certain attributes. — Janus

Let's minimize human attributions to animals. The dog chases something, walks through something, pisses against something, etc.

What characteristics of something makes us chase it? Is it the roundness, the colour? Surely not, for then we would be chasing globes or round candy. We don't do that. These things are round (to us), but we don't chase them.

What characteristics of something causes us to urinate on it? Dogs urinate on other things as well.

We don't know if a dog experiences a ball as an object which is separate from the environment. It looks that way to us, but that doesn't mean it's something like the dog picking something up in a continuous stream of stuff or things. Maybe some things trigger the dog to go chasing and other peeing.

That doesn't mean there is a specific property that resembles anything we have that causes them to do what they do. They chase things that are thrown. They pee on things that make them mark territory.

That does not mean they chase something because it is like a ball or pee because it is something like a tree. It's a disposition in the dog to act a certain way given certain environmental cues. Maybe motion triggers the running, not the shape, maybe scent triggers the peeing. You can say ah, yes, but the scent is given off by trees, maybe, maybe it's the earth or concrete or anything else.

The appearnce could only resemble the thing that appears when it is not appearing if the thing that appears is an appearance when it is not appearing, which is a contradiction. So I think the question is ill-formed, incoherent. — Janus

I think your reply is ill-formed, irrelevant, and unintelligible. First, "the appearance" and "thing that appears" seem to refer to one and the same thing. So it makes no sense to talk about one resembling the other.

All that is irrelevant and a poorly formed reply, because I was talking about a representation and the thing represented, not any "appearance".

The representation is the sense image, which a person has within one's mind. The thing represented is the independent reality. The question was, in what way might we assume that the representation would resemble the thing represented. And the answer was that it need not resemble it in any way. Therefore we ought not assume any resemblance between the sense image and the independent reality.

I don't have time for a more detailed reply right now. You ask what characteristics make a dog chase, piss, avoid and so on. Of course we are not compelled to chase balls, and I'm not claiming we should be compelled to piss on trees if both dogs and we see the same trees. The point is only that given the way we perceive things the dog's manifest behavior towards those same things makes sense.

We know we cannot walk through tress or walls, but we can through doorways. We know we can chase balls but not walls or trees and so on. We can observe that dogs see the same things we do, and additionally there is a consistency there between how we see things and how dogs see things which is demonstrated by their behavior towards those things. I don't see how that can reasonably be denied. That's all I'm saying, and what I'm saying has nothing to do with the names of things.

You asked me to comment on the MP passage, I did that and you didn't respond. Do you have a point of issue with my answer. If so, do tell. — Janus

OK. You said:

To say that nebulae or dinosaurs existed prior to humans is only to say what we would have experienced had we been there. I don't see that as a problem for realism. — Janus

It is not at all what Merleau Ponty said or meant. It wouldn't even be worth stating, it would just be common sense. And how does that square with:

Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world. — Phenomenology of Perception, p456

A commentary on that passage is that:

Merleau-Ponty is not denying that there is a perfectly legitimate sense in which we can say that the world existed before human consciousness. Indeed, he refers to the “valid signification” of this statement. He is making a point at a different level, the level of meaning. The meanings of terms in scientific statements, including mathematical equations, depend on the life-world, as our parable of temperature and our discussion of the dependence of clock time on lived time illustrate. Furthermore, the universe does not come ready-made and presorted into kinds of entities, such as nebulae, independent of investigating scientists who find it useful to conceptualize and categorize things that way given their perceptual capacities, observational tools, and explanatory purposes in the life-world and the scientific workshop. The very idea of a nebula, a distinct body of interstellar clouds, reflects our human and scientific way of perceptually and conceptually sorting astronomical phenomena. This is what Merleau-Ponty means when he says that he cannot understand what a nebula that could not be seen by anyone might be. Nothing intrinsically bears the identity “nebula” within it. That identity depends on a conceptual system that informs (and is informed by) observation. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s last sentence is exaggerated. Given the “conceptual system of astrophysics and general relativity theory, Laplace’s nebula is behind us in cosmic time. But it is not just behind us. It is also out in front of us in the cultural world, because the very idea of a nebula is a human category. The universe contains the life-world, but the life-world contains the universe.

Do you at least see some convergence between this line of argument, and that of the original post?

If the world is mind-created, why is there so much misery in the world?

For example? — Wayfarer

Well it's impossible to give you a specific example of pre-conceptual reality, because that itself would involve conceptualization. But I think it is necessary to invoke the idea of a shared reality to, for example, explain how we're having this conversation.

I think that amounts to a kind of illustration, doesn't it? — Wayfarer

No, I don't think it's necessary to invoke the idea of conceptualization in geese in order to explain the behavior you're describing.

I think there has to be a minimal intellectual component in terms of memory, otherwise I don't see how a creature could perceive without constantly forgetting. — Manuel

Of course animals have intelligence and memory, but how does that necessitate the use of concepts? Memories are just impressions made by particular events, for example an animal doesn't need the general concept of a "child" in order to remember that they have children to feed.

Well it's impossible to give you a specific example of pre-conceptual reality, because that itself would involve conceptualization. — goremand

Bingo. You win the lucky door prize. I have no objection to there being a shared reality, in fact, I think consciousness is collective in nature, even though each of us only ever experiences it in the first person.

If the world is mind-created, why is there so much misery in the world? — frank

Because of ignorance, of not seeing what is real, and being attached to what is unreal. And that goes for me as much as anyone else.

Because of ignorance, of not seeing what is real, and being attached to what is unreal. And that goes for me as much as anyone else. — Wayfarer

How did you rule out that the world just is a miserable place?

How did you rule out that the world just is a miserable place — Tom Storm

For me, the world is not a miserable place, I quite enjoy it. That some see it as miserable is strong evidence against what Janus says, that we all see the same thing.

Janus' argument is deeply flawed. That a number of people can point to the same place, and agree to call what is at that point, at that time, by the same name, is not proof that we see the same thing. Such a conclusion involves an equivocation in the meaning of "the same thing" which is based in the well known category mistake of confusing the particular with the general.

"We all see the same thing" is asserted by people like Janus, as a general statement. What is really meant by that general statement is "we all see the same things". The problem though, is that this proposition would obviously be false. There is very significant variance in what two different people see when looking at the same 'scape. So the people like Janus, who argue this point, compose the general statement as "we all see the same thing", where "thing" (singular) is a generalization representing a multitude of things (which we do not all see the same of), and is sometimes just called "the world". Then, as supposed proof, or justification of this general principle, they refer to instances where a number of people will point to "the same thing". In this case, "the same thing" refers to a particular. In other words, a multitude of "things" is presented as a "thing" (the world) implying generalization, or inductive reasoning.

So, the category mistake based equivocation is very evident. What is asserted is that "we all see the same thing", where "thing" is a generalization of the multitude of all things, known as "the world". But what is argued as proof of this, is that "we all see the same thing", where "thing" means one particular within the multitude. If we deny the equivocation as constituting an invalid argument, what we are left with is a very faulty generalization, faulty inductive reasoning. Particular instances of a number of people seeing the same particular thing, are used as evidence to support the general principle "we all see the same thing". Clearly, if "the same thing" is argued as a generalization of all particular things, as is the case when "the same thing" means "the world", it is a faulty generalization.

We do not all see the same "world", as each person perceives, is interested in, and apprehends, very different particulars. We are all unique and different in the things which grab our attention and pique our interest. Therefore, perception, and understanding of "the world", is unique, and specific to the individual. This is very evident in threads like this where we do not get any agreement as to what "the world" signifies. And that is also very good evidence that each person's mind creates one's own "world" which I believe, is the argument of the op.

If the world is mind-created, why is there so much misery in the world?
— frank

Because of ignorance, of not seeing what is real, and being attached to what is unreal. And that goes for me as much as anyone else. — Wayfarer

Is this a Buddhist take on it?

The point is only that given the way we perceive things the dog's manifest behavior towards those same things makes sense. — Janus

Of course, it would make sense for us we are analyzing the world through our human-centric perspective. One cannot help but see dogs chasing balls or peeing on trees, it absolutely makes sense for us to interpret animal actions in a way we can understand. It would be quite impractical (in everyday life) to attempt to "be a bat", to use Nagel's phrase, because we aren't.

The point is not the words, it's the animals experience. My point is not that dogs chase balls, but rather that dogs chase movement. You can throw any object you wish and most of the time the dog will chase it.

Likewise with peeing, we experience it as a dog peeing on a tree. The dog might experience it as marking territory in this place because of particular smell or an ingrained propensity to do this.

. We know we can chase balls but not walls or trees and so on. We can observe that dogs see the same things we do, and additionally there is a consistency there between how we see things and how dogs see things which is demonstrated by their behavior towards those things. I don't see how that can reasonably be denied — Janus

It can be reasonably denied if you assume, as I believe is correct, that dogs have a different experience of the world. This consistency we see with our interpretation of the dog's behavior does not mean that we are accurately describing what dogs actually do, it does describe how we experience dogs.

I should add, that going through a door and chasing a ball at best shows that concrete stuff (stuff you can't go through) is a real thing - concreteness exists. But this says very, very little about animal experience. That's why we need to do animal science, to try to understand, to the extent we can, why they do what they do.

Bingo. You win the lucky door prize. I have no objection to there being a shared reality, in fact, I think consciousness is collective in nature, even though each of us only ever experiences it in the first person. — Wayfarer

But isn't that a form of metaphysical realism? And is this "collective consciousness" how you conceptualize reality? If so, what does it signify? Is it like Bernardo Kastrups "Cosmic Mind"?

Of course animals have intelligence and memory, but how does that necessitate the use of concepts? Memories are just impressions made by particular events, for example an animal doesn't need the general concept of a "child" in order to remember that they have children to feed. — goremand

True. I should have been more careful. I don't know if animals have concepts per se, maybe they have some sort of pre-conceptual awareness.

But they have representations unique to them. The issue I wanted to highlight is that I think it's kind of hard to imagine having perception without some minimal intellectual capacities, because then it seems to me it would be hard to retain the perception.

Examples of animals suffering from abuse and being fearful of humans for a while seem to suggest some degree of association, which goes slightly beyond "mere" perception.

I have no objection to there being a shared reality, in fact, I think consciousness is collective in nature, even though each of us only ever experiences it in the first person. — Wayfarer

But isn't that a form of metaphysical realism? And is this "collective consciousness" how you conceptualize reality? If so, what does it signify? Is it like Bernardo Kastrups "Cosmic Mind"? — goremand

Stanford Encyc's description of metaphysical realism: 'According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do.'

My take on collective consciousness more akin to Hegel's 'geist', which describes the way geist (usually translated as mind or spirit) manifests collectively in culture, history, and shared institutions. While consciousness is realised individually, Hegel argues that this individuality is always part of a larger, evolving reality as an expression of geist (indeed the lovely word 'zeitgeist', spirit of the times, is something from Hegel that has filtered through to popular culture.) Unlike metaphysical realism, this view sees reality (or Being) as inseparable from the processes of mind and meaning. And yes, it is convergent in some respect with Kastrup. I've listened to and read quite a bit of Kastrup.

The collective nature of consciousness shows up in the way humans as a species and culture, inhabit similar (although never identical) meaning-worlds. Our senses are overall similarly adapted and we operate in a framework of shared meanings. That is what makes inter-subjective agreement and scientific discourse viable. Hence philosophical idealism is not incompatible with science but it's also not limited to what can be objectively established by science. The SEP entry on idealism says 'the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact … a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality.' That includes the reality of numbers and universals in my view (although that is not something explored in the original post.)

Is this a Buddhist take on it? — frank

It is.

All that is irrelevant and a poorly formed reply, because I was talking about a representation and the thing represented, not any "appearance". — Metaphysician Undercover

What is the difference between a representation and an appearance according to you?

It is not at all what Merleau Ponty said or meant. It wouldn't even be worth stating, it would just be common sense. And how does that square with:

Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world. — Wayfarer

I didn't claim that what I said was an explanation of what MP was saying. What do you think MP means in his comment there about Laplace's nebula? It seems to me only to refer to the phenomenological context, and in that context I agree with it. But the phenomenological context is from a particular perspective, so I don't see it as being discordant with what I said. Where we seem to disagree is that you seem to think we can only meaningfully speak from the "for us" perspective, whereas I think we can bracket that and speak meaningfully from a context that conceptually excludes us.

Merleau-Ponty is not denying that there is a perfectly legitimate sense in which we can say that the world existed before human consciousness. Indeed, he refers to the “valid signification” of this statement.

This shows that what I said is not at odds with MP.

The meanings of terms in scientific statements, including mathematical equations, depend on the life-world, as our parable of temperature and our discussion of the dependence of clock time on lived time illustrate.

This is just stating the obvious, and you should know I have never disagreed with it.

Furthermore, the universe does not come ready-made and presorted into kinds of entities, such as nebulae, independent of investigating scientists who find it useful to conceptualize and categorize things that way given their perceptual capacities, observational tools, and explanatory purposes in the life-world and the scientific workshop.

This is contentious. I don't believe that we carve up the world arbitrarily but that the ways we carve it up are constrained both by the nature of our sense organs and the nature of the world we are sensing. Of course I can't prove that any more than anyone can prove the obverse. No empirical observation can prove either case and neither case is logically self-evident. It comes down to what you think or feel is most plausible.

Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s last sentence is exaggerated. Given the “conceptual system of astrophysics and general relativity theory, Laplace’s nebula is behind us in cosmic time. But it is not just behind us. It is also out in front of us in the cultural world, because the very idea of a nebula is a human category. The universe contains the life-world, but the life-world contains the universe.

This I agree with because it presents both the 'for us' and the 'absent us' perspectives.

You can throw any object you wish and most of the time the dog will chase it. — Manuel

If I throw a chair I doubt the dog will chase it. I'll try it when I get back home from my holiday and report the result. I have tried throwing sticks too large for the dog to pick up. Or bricks. He will chase them but as soon as he realizes it is too big or hard to pick up in his mouth he loses interest straight away. In any case when you say the dog chases movement it seems you agree that the dog and I both see something moving at the same place and time and in the same direction and the same distance.

It can be reasonably denied if you assume, as I believe is correct, that dogs have a different experience of the world. — Manuel

I have never denied that the dog has a different experience of the world. I have no doubt he experiences the things I experience differently, but the difference is not all that radical and can be made sense of by considering the differences between my constitution and the dog's constitution. The dog sees his food bowl as 'to-be-eating-from' and his bed as 'to-be-laying-in' and given the way I experience those things in terms of size, shape and hardness the dog's behavior towards those things is consistent.

Where we seem to disagree is that you seem to think we can only meaningfully speak from the "for us" perspective, whereas I think we can bracket that and speak meaningfully from a context that conceptually excludes us. — Janus

Well, that's where we differ, and I think also where you differ from phenomnology. I agree we can see the world as if there is nobody in it, for specific purposes, but when that is taken to be a true account of the nature of being, then it goes too far.

I don't believe that we carve up the world arbitrarily but that the ways we carve it up are constrained both by the nature of our sense organs and the nature of the world we are sensing. — Janus

It's not arbitrary, but it is contingent, both on what there is to see, but also on how we see it.

What is the difference between a representation and an appearance according to you? — Janus

Representation: an instance of standing for, or corresponding with, something else.
Appearance: a form as perceived.

The difference therefore, is that "representation" implies something else which is being represented, while "appearance" has no such implication.

So when you said "The appearance could only resemble the thing that appears when it is not appearing if the thing that appears is an appearance when it is not appearing...", you have no distinction between two things, like "representation", and "thing represented" does. And this renders your phrase unintelligible. Like I said, there is no distinction between "appearance" and "thing that appears". These refer to one and the same thing, "appearance" is a form as perceived, and "thing that appears" is also the form as perceived. So it makes no sense to talk about whether one resembles the other, they are the same.