[Nadav Perlman]

1. The senses are mute, they don’t tell you anything. So for something simple like “the glass is on the table” – do you infer that? Can you prove such a statement?
2. My confusion regarding consciousness having 2 attributes: The way that I understand the idea of “the nature of consciousness” is that different forms of consciousness have different natures and that Hume and Kant can’t live with that. But consciousness by itself is an axiomatic concept and can’t be broken up into components. The nature of *human* consciousness, on the other hand, has other attributes – it has access to memory and the subconscious and it can initiate physical action, etc.

[Gilles de Bakker-Peeters]

Hi Nadav,

Let me take a stab at the first question;

I think indeed you infer that statement. Your senses only provide you with entities. In order to arrive at the statement “the glass is on the table”, you have to relate those entities to the concepts of “glass”, “table”, and “being on” (i.e., inferring from the perceived characteristics of the entities to which concept they belong). As long as you accept the perceptual, and apply proper definitions, you can then indeed proceed to prove that the two entities you perceive are in fact a glass and a table, and than one is on the other, respectively.

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