Stephen,

I think the sorts of things you mention are not what Kant has in mind when he speaks of noumena. For one thing, for Kant, noumena cannot be sensed; they have no sensible properties. The things you mention have temporal extension, which for Kant, along with spatial extension, is the very form of sensibility.

We are able to think of things independently of their sensible properties, according to Kant. Something may appear in space and time, but it may also be considered, independently of this appearing and the sensible conditions of this appearing, as the thing which is the source of the appearance. We can only know it (cognize it) as it appears in space and time, says Kant, but we can think of it independently of these conditions, as the thing in itself.

Some writers have taken pains not to equate the thing in itself with the noumenon, despite the fact that neither can be sensed. Part of the reason for this, I think, has to do with the role the notion of a noumenon plays in Kant's theory of freedom. For more on the distinction between the thing in itself and the noumenon see ch. 3 of Henry Allison's "Kant's Transcendental Idealism."

Stephen,

I think the sorts of things you mention are not what Kant has in mind when he speaks of noumena. For one thing, for Kant, noumena cannot be sensed; they have no sensible properties. The things you mention have temporal extension, which for Kant, along with spatial extension, is the very form of sensibility.

We are able to think of things independently of their sensible properties, according to Kant. Something may appear in space and time, but it may also be considered, independently of this appearing and the sensible conditions of this appearing, as the thing which is the source of the appearance. We can only know it (cognize it) as it appears in space and time, says Kant, but we can think of it independently of these conditions, as the thing in itself.

Some writers have taken pains not to equate the thing in itself with the noumenon, despite the fact that neither can be sensed. Part of the reason for this, I think, has to do with the role the notion of a noumenon plays in Kant's theory of freedom. For more on the distinction between the thing in itself and the noumenon see ch. 3 of Henry Allison's "Kant's Transcendental Idealism."

Thanks for your response Ian!

What sensible properties do the senses themselves have though? David Chalmers calls it the hard problem of consciousness. We don't know how physical stuff turns into mental stuff, or maybe mental stuff is totally independent, or maybe there is a dual aspect theory, where there is one stuff with two different qualities, that of physical and mental.

Using our senses, we can sense things external to ourselves, but what about the senses themselves in regards to consciousness. We can measure the space and time of the objects sensed and even of how the cones and rods in the eyes react to external stimuli. We can this follow the optic cord all the way in the back of the head to the occipital lobe. Amazingly we can even recreate images with this information given in the occipital lobe provides. However, hat takes many months to be recreated. My point is, try to explain color to a color blind person, or a sound to a deaf person. One can't truly explain it. One can point to the wave lengths the cones and rods react too but nothing about it will ever explain the qualia, the sensations and subjective experiences.

You make an excellent point with Kant's rendition of freedom. I was wondering if that was part of the noumena, too. Thank you so much for brining that to the table. Why is that? Because there are two pillars of consciousness. That of intentionality, where we get to express our freedom. The other one is called phenomena (not related to Kant's term), which is connected to feelings sensations and perceptions. Chalmer's calls the later problem the hard problem. However,he is a determinist when it comes to freedom. I would argue against that personally. I think we have a certain active power within us, which allows us to act OR forebear from acting while we deliberate on a course of action, possibly with the categorical imperative. We are able to do this at a very young age. "I can darken the world just by closing my eyes" or when a baby moves his hands and watches them get bigger and smaller as he moves them. The starry sky above me the moral law within me, ah Kant. How can we ever even know freedom if it was given at birth? We are like fish in water, do we know the water is wet? I think we can know it when our freedom is opposed, that's when a fish finally comes out of the water for a moment.

We can measure and view our actions, but we can also view and measure what is objective. The problem arises when we try to explain how these qualia occur. We can look at the brain, which is mostly fat, protein and water, which translates into dendrites, axons and synapses, but no where will we find freedom or qualia(color vision). The problem with qualia is that we can measure light's wavelengths and how the eyes work but nothing of the physics or bioelectric impulses show us how it comes about. Both of these pillars of consciousness have dumb founded scientists when it comes to explaining these powers that occur within consciousness. It's almost as if there is this realm (noumena?) that we, as scientists, just can't enter into. We can only enter into it as private subjects looking out into the world, whether it be the expression of freedom or the perceptions of qualia. The subject looking out into the world is like a black box that science can't penetrate. Am I wrong?

Please tell me more and prove me wrong. :)

Stephen,

As you know, you are hitting upon two classical entry points to the mind/body problem. And you seem quite familiar with Jackson's "knowledge argument" regarding qualia. For my own part, even as a pretty thoroughgoing Kantian, I am no longer convinced by this argument. I believe that identity theorists have given adequate responses to it (see Carruthers, Churchland and David Lewis). Mary's having "all" the knowledge of the physical processes of seeing color doesn't cause her to see color because thinking about color perception and actually having color perception have distinct physiological bases, involve different parts of the brain. She may have "all the information," but she does not have all the causal conditions met. And were we merely looking at her neurophysiological processes, we could, in principle, quite readily see how and why see is not seeing color until she leaves her room.

I don't think this shows that identity theorists are right, just that Jackson's argument doesn't get at what they are missing.

Historically, there have been two approaches to addressing the theory of mind. One that is basically Cartesian, granting that we have experience and reason, and trying to explain how that can be given our conditions of embodiment. The other is materialist. It wonders how, given the facts of evolutionary biology, minds can be fitted into the overall materialist picture. The latter is beset with problems of causation between mind and body, the relations between reasons and causes, etc. The former sees scientific theories as themselves as an outgrowth of experience and reason and, in a sense, incorporates the materialist view into its explanation as a "natural" feature of consciousness. I've been doing this for a while, and I suppose I'm at a point at which it seems to me that you pays your money and you takes your choice. Deeply held intuitions will be compromised whichever way one chooses.

One thing I admire about the Churchlands is that they have taken the second road to its proper destination: eliminative materialism. I think they are wrong. Should one wish to sustain a role for experience in knowledge, and a role for proper reasoning (inference) in thought, I think some version of the first road must be taken. A contemporary writer I like on these matters is Christopher Peacocke.

As for the Mary problem, maybe I'm drawing an iron gate around the mental qualia that Mary calls "Blue", when she is in the sun lit world, because I'm subscribing to a dualist position. Maybe that is at the root for my reasons behind why the experience of seeing blue as quite different than the complete physical causal chain of seeing blue that others such as Daniel Dennett believes the case. Dennett believes she didn't have all the physical information to see blue, but if she did then she would be able to imagine it. Is that the same position you are taking? Maybe not exactly, but from my knowledge, ID Theorists don't believe in "mental events" as mental events, but instead mental events = physical events. Why do I take a mentalistic approach to to answer my ontology? I guess I'm a bit likened to Thomas Reid here. Id rather have my philosophy match up with common sense, and not the other way around, in that it seems we do have mental events, that I have causal power to act or forebear from acting, and that the mind body problem seems to be real, or rather not a problem but that the mind and body just are different. Nevertheless I could be wrong . ID Theorists are physicalists at heart, right? Furthermore, taking an Identity theorist position means that we then ought to get rid of all our mentalistic terms, such as "pain" qua pain. Instead of mentalistic terms, Churchland believes, we should stick to scientific terms. Instead of saying it was a pain one ought to say it was the damage tissue and the c fibers firing. However, doesn't that just muddle our language up and make it weird? Is this mentalistic language that we've used for quite a long time, which properly describes the sensations we have, well don't they seem more natural? You might not take Churchland's extreme position, but why not if that is where it leads to?

Also, if all mental events = physical events then what do we say about Kant and his expressed freedom? Aren't we then like a Humean billiard ball going down an inclined plane without any freedom whatsoever, because all we are are physical events, matter in motion, also known as biological determinism? In courts of law we could then blame our neurophysiological states and instead of saying one did a moral wrong. Instead, we would then have to say that something physical went wrong here and, to take this to its radical ending, we then, in principle, blame a portion of the brain for doing that wrong, right?

One thing I would suggest is just forgetting about Kant's noumenon. Kant thought he had a brilliant new idea about how our knowledge works but many people at the time thought that the seventeenth century inventors of physics had a clearer understanding of the relation between the phenomenal and the causal dynamic and Kant simply had not grasped this. Others in the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries came to the same conclusion - Schopenhauer, Maimon, Ravaisson etc. and went on to show that Kant's whole philosophy is circular and unusable. Kant remained popular because the better alternative, as laid out by the physicists, was too counterintuitive for most people.

The key problem is that most people have a common sense idea of 'the physical' which physics itself has nothing to do with. Physics can only be about causal relations, not 'matter' in the popular sense. We had a good seminar at Institute of Philosophy in London which pointed out that if 'physical' has any useful meaning it is certainly not what people usually think. The dictionary suggests it is something that through senses such as sight or touch can give rise to an experience for us - it is merely whatever causes experience. (As Russell said, experience is the gold standard by which everything in physics is judged.) That does not make it a separate ontological category because it too might be 'experience' within the causal relations involved. Experience must be a causal relation too, if we are to know and talk about it. Mass and charge are simply causal patterns we invent to explain the regularities of the way experience is determined. By definition anything 'physical' in physics can either directly or indirectly contribute to determining the content of experience, even dark energy. So where is the duality, if all is dynamic relation? There is none, as as Leibniz pointed out. The dichotomy is between a description in terms of cause and one in terms of effect.

There is also an epistemic contrast between 'physical' and 'mental' events. Physical events modulate our experiences via our senses. Mental events modulate our experience without doing that (they are accessed via memory) - and as a result we have problems categorising them in space. It is not that they are not in space, but merely that the brain has no rulers inside itself to tell us where are thoughts are within our brains. It does seem to have clocks to tell us when they are.

What seems such a pity is that all of this was pretty well understood around 1900 by people like Russell but the war between science and arts that raged in the middle of the twentieth century split philosophy from science totally. Philosophers with no basic training in physics or physiology started building movements like materialism on naivety and ignorance. Russell had resolved a better version of the Mary problem long before. The Hard Problem is so poorly formulated that it is more or less empty. What is needed is for philosophers of mind to be expert in physics and neurobiology, because, as Ian says above, everything has to be related to detailed causal mechanisms in the brain. Broad armchair speculation belongs in the sixteenth century. But I agree with Ian that the Churchlands' conclusion is the wrong one - because there is no 'material' in physics. Everything starts and finishes with experience - as Descartes said. Maybe soon we will finally emerge into a 'post-Hard-Mary' era that gets back to competent philosophy - as that branch of science that deals with the fundamentals, not some Rylean or Wittgensteinian anti-science language holiday.

So Stephen, to be clear, you and I are in agreement about the fundamentals here. I mention my admiration for the Churchlands' position because it makes no bones about embracing the inherent commitments of materialism. Most materialists shy away from the idea of eliminating the mental from our view of ourselves, at least our scientific view, but this is the only view their position is really consistent with.

But remember one problem which has motivated many materialists, particularly identity theorists of mind: if one thinks that mental stuff and physical stuff are two different kinds of stuff, how can they influence each other? How can objects cause sensations and objective experiences? How can reasons and desires cause actions?

Jonathan seems to be partly on our side. He is certainly no reductionist, and he is keen to preserve the place of, e.g. experience, as central to our view of ourselves. "Everything starts and ends with experience - as Descartes said," he says. But I cannot tell from his description of his view, especially when he says, "That does not make it a separate ontological category because it too might be 'experience' ...," whether he is embracing a thoroughgoing idealism or not. You and I would not take that view, nor would Descartes, though Leibniz might.

Also, he is focused on causal relations, but we're not just talking about causes, as you've pointed out. I have reasons for believing and reasons for acting. Additionally, I would say, that content of perception plays an epistemic (not a causal) role in our cognition regarding perceived objects, etc. The explanation of experience requires epistemic conditions before causal conditions are relevant. The absence of this insight is the problem with pure empiricism (associationism and Hume).

Dear Ian,

I do follow Leibniz in most things but I am wary of the term 'idealism' - it will be translated differently by people with different conceptions of 'idea'. To my mind what matters about Leibniz is that he is a dynamist. Everything we need concern ourselves with is dynamic and relational. More or less that means causal, although Leibniz's form of cause is as subtle as that of modern physics - not mechanical. Patterns of causal relation are totally real in the way that people want objects to be real, and we can call them 'objects' for everyday chat. It is just that 'object' tends to imply intrinsic non-relational properties that we have no business to think exist and neuropsychology shows us that the intuitive conception of an object is just a sign generated in the brain. So this is not just Hume, and probably not Berkeley, although I never know with Berkeley and I would not want to underrate hum.

I think we have to stick to causal relations. An epistemic relation has to be causal if we are ever going to be able to report our knowledge. If I think I know of something through experience I assume that I can say so, so the knowing must be causal. And reasons for acting must surely be ideas that entail a causal disposition of a sort, even if this need not lead to the act. In neurophysiological terms all these things are going to be grounded in sending and receiving signals between neurons according to standard causal laws.

I agree that we may categorise things like beliefs and reasons in such a way that the causal power of the experience is not directly ascertainable, but that is the usual issue with mental events - that we do not have monitors all over the brain logging all the causal relations as they occur. The epistemic issue is one of lack for such events as much as one of 'private access'.

Another small point is that although Descartes had two ontologcial sorts of substance I have never seen any suggestion that either was 'non-physical'. For him matter was inert - effectively it had no 'force', whereas spirit in the form of God or man gave force. But all this was within one of his conceptions of 'physics'. (The other usage he had was more like 'engineering'.) Modern physics has more or less what Descartes wanted in terms of dichotomy, it has modes that form aggregates that take up space (more or less Fermi modes) and modes that mediate force (more or less Bose modes). Descartes got his distinctions wrong but not I think in the way generally supposed.

You imply that you are not an idealist, Ian, but I wonder what you regard as being incompatible with 'idea' at least in the dynamic sense. There is no 'stuff' about, that has become clear.

Hi Jonathan,

I would oppose or contrast with the notion of 'idea', in the context of sensation and perception, the notion of the source of the content of the sensation or perception. As Descartes stresses in the Meditations, these ideas, which clearly do not originate in me, must originate on the basis of a source of something "outside" me or other than myself: a me-independent existence, as it were. Sensation, perception and experience are, then, the ways I achieve my cognitive relation with this thing.

Dear Ian,

That sounds like a distinction between the proximal, here and now, and the distal, and in particular causally antecedent distal. It is universally found, where ascertainable, in science, that experience is determined completely by proximal causal relations. In a chain of events A to B to C to an 'observer' D, the content of D's experience is entirely explained by C. There is no need to 'carry over' anything more from A and B, their contribution being made by C. Even if we breath in air breathed out by Julius Caesar his sense of sighing does not come with it, just the smell of toast in our kitchen. So experience is the proximal. Idea is the proximal. World is the distal. We can call parts of that 'things' but actually the proximal is caused not by things but causal connections - not just the tomato but the light reflected off it.

So I see no need to make an ontological distinction between causal relations that are distal and involved in 'things' and those that are proximal and involved in 'ideas'. There is a fundamental epistemic difference, but that is another matter. Although Schopenhauer lost his way in his detailed account his view that world is both Wille (physical dynamic relation) and Vorstellung (appearance, representation or idea) at the same time seems to me very reasonable.

I agree with Ian Eagleson that intentionality and color perception do not fall within the Kantian noumenal realm. The noumenal realm contains things as they are in themselves (ding-an-sich), and the noumena as such are not experienceable. Sensations, on the other hand, are simply non-discursive, unsynthesized raw sense-data. Perceptions are at the next higher non-discursive level, and are due to the faculty of sensibility, which imposes the transcendental forms of space and time upon sensations and renders them perceptible. But experience, which is discursive and cognitive, is due to the faculty of the understanding which imposes the twelve categories that make it possible both to experience phenomena and to make judgments about ('think about', 'conceptualize') phenomena. Although one could argue that, for Kant, the content of experience (thus, color, odor, etc.) is caused by the things-in-themselves, colors, etc. are always perceived in the context of a formalized full-blown experience, within space and time and attached to a categorically synthesized object. Thus, we don't simply sense color but experience colored objects about which we make judgments (e.g., "the rose is red"). Intentionality (goals, motives, desires) are also experienced phenomena, which are regulated by time as the transcendental form of inner experience. These are experienced as intentional states of the empirical self, the subjective self that is within the phenomenal realm and that is bound by universal causality, including the causal role played by intentional states in affecting our actions.

I hope I am not intruding but I do think it time somebody introduced the notions of emergence and constructivism. Through the Paleolithic era hominids became man and developed practices of referring to aspects of the world or affordances of which they shared concepts. Over a million years or so these practices developed into language as we know it and our words for all of our shared concepts became the human world. For each of us the world of which we are aware is our 'noumena' The physical geography of Planet Earth has been changed by humankind but it is not our world, what we call our world is an emergent construct. Had our physiology been different or Planet Earth different our noumena would be different but it would still cut the world at its joints; it could not be otherwise as they have co-emerged.

Yes, I think that intentionality, that is the aboutness of the noumena   and the physical mechanisms by which we live and form our concepts fit well into the Kantian schema. He was brilliant in seeing this with the tools he had.

.

Dear Jonathan,

The thing about the proximal/distal distinction, certainly from the Kantian view, and I think from the view of the Meditations, is that it is only meaningful to talk about it with regard to what can be experienced. But when Descartes says that sensations "are produced without my cooperation and often even against my will.... [s]o the only alternative is that [their source] is another substance distinct from me," (Med. 6) he is only doing ontology. Everything we can say or know about the world, including causal relations, is built from the sensory content. The finite intellect has no access to that which is "outside of it" as it is "in itself." All causation is phenomenal. Nonetheless, sensations, since they are not produced by me, must have another source, i.e other than me. This source appears to me in certain ways, having certain causal relations, etc. This is why he proceeds with a form of pragmatism and a coherence theory of knowledge. Distal causal relations are understood as part of what can be accessed through sensation and experience (even if, through reasoning, we propose some features of that realm which we could not experience, but serve as theoretical explanation for how appearance must be put together given how things appear--they are still proposed as objects and relations within the realm of appearance).

Well, my preceding post seems to have been less than helpful, having brought this thread to a halt. Jonathan, now that I am more familiar with your work, I think that you and I have reversed explanans and explanandum. (William Cameron seems to heroically walk down the middle.) Is it the "fact of experience" from which we begin? Or is it the nature of nature? Certainly a virtue of both the Edwards and of the Cameron approach is that the question of noumena (a thing non-sensible and knowable, so knowable in principle only through reason) need never arise.

Sorry to have dropped out of the discussion, Ian. I have been involved in other things. I find the idea of a noumenon a bit unhelpful really. I have been sucked in to Leibniz's view, which for me makes Kant rather an irrelevance (as I think Richard Arthur agrees in his new very good monograph on Leibniz). I tend to focus on the neurobiological breakdown of all this and so I get a bit lost when Kant gets raised.

A noumenon, should such a thing be available to us, would be an intellectual object. (A256/B311)  But the very idea of such a thing breaches the conditions of sensibility (the possibility of spatiotemporal presentation). Yet the concept of a noumenon is not contradictory. We may deploy it; but we can cognize no object when we do. (Kant might say the concept has mere analytic significance.)  (He refers to it as a "boundary concept," indicating the limits of the understanding for cognition.)

Ultimately, it (the concept) is a structural feature of maintaining the distinction between experience and the experienced.  But the idea of a noumenon can have no cognitive significance.

It is not obvious to me that Kant could not accommodate a thoroughgoing dynamical account at the "empirical level," should physics lead us to this view. The core anti-Leibniz position comes from his position regarding space. Space, he argues, is neither relational (Leibniz) nor real (Newton) but transcendentally ideal. Any experiencer must have and contribute, he argues, its form of receptivity. This is the argument of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Space is our form of receiving "outer" presentations. 

Hello,

In a very simple manner, we can differentiate Kant's concept of phenomena and noumena as follows...

Phenomena- can be experienced using sense organs (vision,smell,touch..), differentiated using our perceptive power, falls within our knowledge and logical realm..

Noumena- Beyond our logical realm, noumenal world is out of the limit of our knowledge and perceptive power..

Thus based on these assumptions kant concludes that our perceptions are very much limitted..

this is the very very brief explanation

Regards

Stephen,

are yu identical with Stephen C. Pedersen who is the author of "Mary, Quite Contrary: Consciousness Unexplained"?