When does a thought quit being just my thought?

[C C]

[...] That because all qualia are innately private and mental, we have no ability to know if they are representative of anything real at all. Because all humans have the same bodies and brains and sensory organs, the color red MAY be consistent across all humans, but that doesn't mean its objectively true or representative of any objective thing or state.

Instead of a metaphysical belief, terms like "objective" and "outer environment" and "mind-independent" have to be grounded in the extrospective or external half of experience. Objects residing in the latter, for instance, do not obey one's personal will. They follow their own rules (independent in that context). And other people have access to those items (they're intersubjective or public, unlike personal thoughts). It's that outer-oriented part of qualitative manifestation that the idea of an ultimate reality was originally abstracted from, not vice versa.

Even science begins with things that are empirical or subject to detection, and abstract description is derived from such entities and events of the phenomenal world (not the other way around). If the abstract description is pseudo-reified because it is so useful at predicting things, then that's just methodological ontology (like methodological naturalism). Metaphysical dogma begins when -- as in philosophical naturalism -- the "as if it was the case" is dropped and the individual fully believes it without any (unobtainable) demonstration that such truly is the noumenon.

Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: Kant is an empirical realist about the world we experience; we can know objects as they appear to us. He gives a robust defense of science and the study of the natural world from his argument about the mind’s role in making nature. All discursive, rational beings must conceive of the physical world as spatially and temporally unified, he argues.

And the table of categories is derived from the most basic, universal forms of logical inference, Kant believes. Therefore, it must be shared by all rational beings. So those beings also share judgments of an intersubjective, unified, public realm of empirical objects.

Hence, objective knowledge of the scientific or natural world is possible. Indeed, Kant believes that the examples of Newton and Galileo show it is actual. So Berkeley’s claims that we do not know objects outside of us and that such knowledge is impossible are both mistaken.

[...] Another way to understand Kant’s point here is that it is impossible for us to have any experience of objects that are not in time and space. Furthermore, space and time themselves cannot be perceived directly, so they must be the form by which experience of objects is had. A consciousness that apprehends objects directly, as they are in themselves and not by means of space and time, is possible[1] ... but our apprehension of objects is always mediated by the conditions of sensibility. Any discursive or concept using consciousness like ours must apprehend objects as occupying a region of space and persisting for some duration of time.

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[1] By an intuitive intellect, Kant refers to a hypothetical non-human mind which possesses "intuitive understanding" as opposed to the sensible intuition and discursive understanding he ascribes to the human intellect. It's introduced as a kind of epistemological foil (since it can't be completely ruled out that some entity might have the capacity to apprehend things in themselves).

While our common language seems to coin that "what it's likeness" as a true reference and public fact of the world, it's really just accepted as such because it works at helping us get along and to live successfully in the world with each other. Like how we all agree our money represents the same thing for all of us even though it isn't really representing anything objective at all. It's real or true functionally or pragmatically but not necessarily objectively or semantically. Words then more like tokens objectified only in how they are being exchanged and used instead of as objectively faithful representations of or true references to objectively real states or objects.

Language (and related) is the actual set of representational affairs. The view that the outer half of experience is representative of noumena is speculative (the phenomenal world is actually what's fundamental or given without extended rational inferences). But that said, "words" are sounds, images, tactile events (braille), and potentially even odor signaling. So they are part of the phenomenal world themselves, yet they do still play that secondary, representative role of being communication tokens for the other phenomena as well as for abstract, created conceptions. Computers and AI consequently deal in nothing but representation (symbol grounding problem).

[Magical Realist]

But that said, "words" are sounds, images, tactile events (braille), and potentially even odor signaling. So they are part of the phenomenal world themselves, yet they do still play that secondary, representative role of being communication tokens for the other phenomena as well as for abstract, created conceptions. Computers and AI consequently deal in nothing but representation.

I don't think that representation is an objective property of sensory stimulations like sound or light or tactile pressures. There is nothing inherent in the sounding of the word "brown cow" that links it to the concept or object of a brown cow. It's just something we learned over the years thru repeated association of one to the other. Just like Pavlov's dog in no way understood the sound of the bell as representing food but only got habituated to associating it with the experience of eating. But maybe in time that developed into a sort of semantic shorthand of the ringing as objectively representing the dog's memory of eating, the sound and the mental ideation of food no longer distinguishable objectively while still retaining the sense of something coming from outside the dog independently of its mental state.

So this suggests to me that distinctively-felt sensory stimulations in the form of spoken words, CAN only come to represent as they have long since lost their sense of being mere triggers, thru habitual association and ostensification, of the mental events they evoke. Words only representing concepts because of the unconscious mnemonic effect of the sound to the remembered ideation. The very fact that we have thousands of different words for "brown cow" all over the world entails that there is nothing inherently true or objective about them representing the brown cow or anything at all. Maybe the idea of a thing objectively out there absolutely represented by the word is retro-constructed out of the phenomenal sense of the spoken as always coming from the outside, as what is causing sentience, thus grounding it in some kind of transmental reality. The transcendence and independence of the speaking over what is being heard and conceived of. The truth of the words from the epistemic authority of the outside speaking of them and using of them.

[C C]

But that said, "words" are sounds, images, tactile events (braille), and potentially even odor signaling. So they are part of the phenomenal world themselves, yet they do still play that secondary, representative role of being communication tokens for the other phenomena as well as for abstract, created conceptions. Computers and AI consequently deal in nothing but representation.

I don't think that representation is an objective property of sensory stimulations like sound or light or tactile pressures. There is nothing inherent in the sounding of the word "brown cow" that links it to the concept or object of a brown cow. It's just something we learned over the years thru repeated association of one to the other.

That's what I mean by them being representations: "A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, relationship, or mathematical formula."

And the dependence on memory is one reason why the other phenomena of experience (usually not serving as communication tokens) wouldn't qualify as representing noumena (or it is just a speculative possibility). Since the latter aren't available in memory. But no problem for the learned association between symbols (expressed in whatever qualitative mode) and other phenomenal events or objects.. Both can be recalled.

The word "cat" correlated to the image of the animal, or the sounds it makes, or the kind of damage it does (), etc.

OTOH, pictograms as well as mimicking the sounds that something makes, might bypass learning because they are less abstract or arbitarty representative symbols.

[Magical Realist]

[Image: images-2026-10-26T113550-837.jpg]

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The word "cat" correlated to the image of the animal, or the sounds it makes, or the kind of damage it does (Wink), etc.

The necessary subjectivity of episodic memory over semantic memory. Of the terrifying experience of a snake vice the objectified existing-in-itself animal. The Cartesian split of body and mind propagating thruout memory itself.