It's true that saying that we have "access" to the contents of one's mind, is fairly misleading, because to a large extent we are it. But it's also true that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, impossible to be directly experienced.Polyphemus Arnold wrote: ↑Mon Jun 06, 2022 11:50 am A thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is an object as it is, independent of observation. The concept of thing-in-itself was introduced by Immanuel Kant. The concept led to much controversy among philosophers.[1] It is closely related to Kant's concept of noumenon or the object of inquiry, as opposed to phenomenon (its manifestations).
But the fact is that the “invisible thing” becomes visible as soon as we cast over it our nets, the nets of our organs. These organs exist in function precisely of making visible that WHICH IS NOT AN IMAGE.
To say that we cannot know the thing in itself is absurd since we spend all of our time and effort doing just that. “But you always obtain images, never the thing!” Some observe. But that is not true. I can obtain “the thing”, cook it and eat it, and that is not simply an image.
If we define the thing-in-itself as that which is considered independently of being seen, and then complain that you cannot ever see it. Well…you see what I mean. An embarrassment which I had to go through with my thirteen years old daughter when I tried to explain the concept to her.
The couple, thought-reality is called a “relationship”, as if reality depended on thought. The reverse is true, there is no thought without a reality, namely of the subject that thinks, and the organs he thinks with. And also, incidentally, of a world he thinks about.
Perception is not a “relationship”, at least not a reciprocal one. It is an act upon the world that produces knowledge. How great is this knowledge, which its limits are, we do not know, and presumably, cannot know.
There is a relation, a proportionality between the real and the images we produce, otherwise, those would be useless. Our mental images are good indeed, and they allow us as real beings to act in a real-world, to act upon it, and extract from it all sorts of nourishment and companionship.
The statement, endless repeated, that “ One can only access the contents of one’s mind and not reality” is wrong in several aspects.
First of all, we find here a fallacy of ambiguity. The word “access” ( which implies the possibility of its opposite, lack of access) is used here in reference to mental images, whereas there is no way I would not have access to them, they are me, to a large extent.
When “access” is used properly (and negated), the assertion is false in many instances. The fact is that I do have an access to the real, and this access is precisely the mental images mentioned before.
So the phrase “One cannot access reality but only the contents of one’s mind” could be translated as such: “One cannot access reality but only the images that are the means to access reality”. This phrase manages to be redundant and contradictory at once.
But then there is the question of accessing reality “directly”, without any effort to explain what this would possibly mean.
Access implies means of access, and through those means, we do access reality.
Furthermore, we are reality, and we live in it. And it is not an image, so it is a grave mistake to ever treat it as an image. We may produce as many images from it as we can, but it will not make of reality an image, or from an image reality. Life is not a narrative, nature is not a book
Because the human mind is sort of a miniature model/replica of reality, while also being a part of reality.