“Anything you can be conscious of must be a mental phenomenon — otherwise you could not be conscious of it. And if you can be conscious of it, it will be a mental phenomenon… occurring in a mental context.

{ If you reflect on the structure of this relationship, it is clear that mental phenomenon must be »imaginal to be conscious… and this fact has a vast list of interesting entailments… }

But here’s the problem. We have the »idea that there are physical phenomenon that ‘exist’ whether or not we are conscious of them. This introduces what appears to be a crucial distinction between mental phenomena and ‘real’ phenomena.

Alas, this distinction must be misleading, because it implies that some aspects of the universe ‘exist’ ‘objectively’. This idea is useful in certain contexts, but when it escapes these… we are inclined to make catastrophic ontological errors.

Problematically, at least for human beings, ‘existence’ is, itself, an idea. To believe that something ‘exists’ without our being aware or conscious of it… is, itself, a mental phenomenon. And without this mental phenomenon, the whole concept becomes absurd or meaningless.

So we have this strange (sometimes useful) idea that some phenomenon ‘are just there’ whether we imagine them or not.

They might be, too. But not for us. Because for us ‘objective phenomenon’ don’t really exist until we imagine them (except as a conceptual category). So in what way do things we do not imagine actually exist?

In a strangely misguided (yet sometimes useful) theory, that proposes a domain of processes and objects exist independently of our thinking about or imagining them. Yet even these processes and objects must, for us, be mental phenomenon — because the idea upon which they depend is.

— infraheard