Comment by procflora
17 hours ago
In what way is dark matter not a phenomenon? Just because we don't know what it is doesn't make it a noumenon.
17 hours ago
In what way is dark matter not a phenomenon? Just because we don't know what it is doesn't make it a noumenon.
It's that it demonstrates that some sort of noumenon can likely have partial but not 'full' overlap as we understand it with a phenomenon.
To elaborate, the noumenon can have properties that are unknown to us and outside the purview of certain senses (if not all) but still have partial phenomenal effects such as gravitational effects.
Given partial overlap, we could, and likely should, surmise that overlap, if partial, can also be zero. In fact, partial overlap with certain things (such as the gravitational field) but no sensory experience is exactly what we'd predict if this were true.
The mistake is thinking I'm asserting that things are phenomenon or noumenon when that's not quite right. Mostly, the supposition is that things can exist and have either 'full' (unlikely I think), partial, or zero overlap with our sensory experience. Things that demonstrably have partial overlap suggest a wider world of things. I simply find the idea that our evolved sensory experience encompass even a sizable fraction of reality to lack epistemic humility.
This is obviously speculative.
A good example of this would be the scope of our sense of sight as it relates to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We can't see things like UV or Gamma radiation, we can only infer their existence by their effect on things we can see. The reality is that those phenomena might not actually exist in any perceivable way. The only thing we know, strictly speaking, is that the effect happens, and we have a plausible mental model for why the effect happens that predicted other effects that we also observe. But we can't prove that the mental model is reality.
This is at the heart of the Allegory of The Cave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave. What we're discussing is a kind of "Natural Philosophy" or Physics, the study of that which is.