Do noumena exist?

[Elizabeth]

A noumena is something that is unknowable. Noumina can not be experienced, or they cease to be noumena. A reported example would be the first person experience of another that is not shared with the person to whom it would be a noumena. It would be a phenomena to the person experiencing it, but a noumena to the person to whom it is "unknowable."

Is anything truly unkowable and isolated from the experiences of others? If someone on another continent plants a tree, I might not know the person nor be aware or the specific event, but I would, in a small way, benefit from that person's labors as a result of the increase in oxygen, decresase in pollution, and healing of the ozone layer that the tree contributes to. Furthermore, I could find out about the planting of the tree, but the fact that I do not does not eliminate the possibility that I could know about it.

If an elderly person in another country has a dream and forgets about it shortly after awakening, then dies shortly after that without making any contact with anyone between awakening and dying, it is unlikely that the contents of the dream woould be knowable to me at that point, nor have any effect on me. Yet, I know that people whom I have never met nor will ever meet have dreames that they forget. To me, this disqualifies it as a noumena.

If you believe in noumena, can you convince me that they exist?

[dleviwing]

Hi Elizabeth
Is god a noumena? No one has ever truly experienced such an entity, but 90% of the human race believes it in some form. If that doesn’t convince you, then you are also an atheist like me.

BTW: Welcome to ToeQuest.

[Elizabeth]

However we define God, I don't consider That a noumena. I define God as All - everything. You are a piece of God, as is this computer, as is the refuse in my waste can - all parts of God - as well as all things in the non-physical realm, such as mathematics. Not only do we experience God, we are a part of God - and just because we can not know all of God does not mean that we do not know nor experience God.

Even the Christian God is no more a noumena than Santa Claus. There, the entities are ideas - and by knowing about the ideas, people experience the ideas in one form or another - and then by both counts, they are not noumena.


Thanks for the welcome.

[Robert]

Hi Elizabeth. I wont comment on dleviwing's God reference yet, with my post count at 666, but I would like to suggest that qualia is a better term for what you are describing. I would say that noumena is a property of a thing that cannot be perceived by our senses. A thing is, in reality, different from what we perceive it to be. The phenomena then is how we experience the thing through our senses. The qualia is what emerges in our minds as our subjective experience of this organism/environment interface.

[mkirkpatrick]

They do certainly exist Elizabeth,check out two threads here on the forum,"From noumenal to phenomenal reflections",the other thread is called;indescribable ideas of
ideation",hope these leads assist you.


regards michael.

[Lloyd Gillespie]

Hi Elizabeth, and welcome to ToeQuest. I hope you find this an interesting and engaging community. To me the noumena is that which appears in the intuitive nature of our feelings, without our concentration or awareness of. I have often experienced visions, totally unrelated to the area I may have been purposely investigating, yet these deeper, often unrelated and even foolish visions, seem to fall into my intuitiveness, and end offering the answer to something else, entirely, without my realizing or being able to realize their origins, even though I know they come from the cross-pollination of all the inputs into my self being since childhood. This is what I would consider noumena, as Husserl meant it...

Hi Elizabeth. I wont comment on dleviwing's God reference yet, with my post count at 666, but I would like to suggest that qualia is a better term for what you are describing. I would say that noumena is a property of a thing that cannot be perceived by our senses. A thing is, in reality, different from what we perceive it to be. The phenomena then is how we experience the thing through our senses. The qualia is what emerges in our minds as our subjective experience of this organism/environment interface.

Thanks for the very good points of philosophy, Robert. I've often wondered where your fundamentals lay, now, I have some idea. Philosophy and physics, correct...? Math also...?

Regards,
Lloyd