Answer

You do indeed know what the stone is. That knowledge is a translation of the stone’s properties into the terms of our consciousness. These matters are explained very clearly in my books Two Carts and Truth and Not Stable.
Kant, who spoke about our inability to grasp the thing-in-itself, is not properly understood. He did not mean that this is a limitation; rather, that this is the very essence of perception. Every perception is a translation of the perceived thing into the terms of the perceiver. The object itself has no color (not that we cannot know what its color is); rather, color exists only in our consciousness. In the world itself there are no colors and no sounds. What exists in the world is an electromagnetic wave and an acoustic wave. When these strike our sense organs (the retina in the eye and the eardrum in the ear), they are translated inward, in our consciousness, into colors and sounds.
And from this it follows that when a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, it makes no sound. And anyone who thinks it does (= almost everyone) is simply confused. When the tree falls it creates an acoustic wave, but before that wave strikes the eardrum of a hearing creature it is not translated into sound, and therefore there is no sound there (because in the world itself there are no sounds, only in consciousness). Moreover, if you connected your eardrum to the visual center in the brain, you would see sounds rather than hear them. So sights and sounds exist only inside us. But that does not mean our perception is limited or mistaken. That is what perception means: translation into our concepts. Any other creature that perceives reality also translates it into its own concepts, exactly as we do (even if its concepts differ because its sensory apparatus produces a different picture from ours).

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Questioner:
But my question is whether the stone that I translate into the terms of my consciousness would be translated the same way into the terms of another person’s consciousness. If we human beings translate reality into our own terms, then if I see the color red, when another person sees that same color, would it also be interpreted by him as red (assuming he is not color-blind)? If we translate reality into the terms of our consciousness, then shouldn’t we be translating different colors when you and I see, say, the color red? Thank you
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Rabbi:
That is the question known as “the philosophers’ chestnut,” but it is unrelated to what Kant and I are saying. We have no way of knowing whether what I call the color red is what you see when you speak about the color red. And if you extend this further, the same applies to every sensory experience.

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Questioner:
I understand that the experience of pain is subjective, meaning we experience it directly. Our understanding is subjective. But when I call an object red, isn’t that what you would call it too? After all, we would both describe it as red. I assume our brains would translate the electromagnetic wave for both of us as the color red (again, assuming we have the same number of cones and neither of us is color-blind). Isn’t that so?
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Rabbi:
Hello Erez.
No. There is no evidence at all that we see (that is, translate) in the same way. You can of course raise hypotheses, but they remain only hypotheses. Look online about this problem.
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Questioner:
But doesn’t the very fact that we both experience the same color indicate that we see in the same way?
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Rabbi:

What does it mean that we both experience the same color? That is the question—whether we both experience the same color.

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Neriya:
From what the Rabbi says, it seems that one can make a distinction between how we perceive the world (colors and sounds) and how it really is (electromagnetic waves and acoustic waves).
But the truth is that the description of electromagnetic waves and acoustic waves in physical terms also comes from us (it is part of our perception of the world).
So apparently we do not really have the ability to make the distinction between how the world really is and how we perceive it. Everything we know about the world is through our perception (senses and intellect).
How does this fit with what the Rabbi said?
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Rabbi:
Hello Neriya.
You are repeating my words and then asking how that fits with my words? That is exactly what I said. Acoustic wave or electromagnetic wave are names for phenomena, but whatever you say about them will be said in the terms of your cognitive language. That is indeed true. But there is something in external reality itself, and we call it an acoustic wave or an electromagnetic wave. It is the cause of the cognitions that we experience within ourselves.

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Neriya:
What I meant was that there is not necessarily something in reality itself that corresponds to an acoustic wave or electromagnetic wave. Maybe everything is an illusion and maybe not. Even to say that there is something in external reality itself that corresponds to an acoustic wave or electromagnetic wave is a factual claim about the world itself that is not necessarily true.
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Rabbi:

Now we have already entered the territory of skepticism. The question of skepticism or philosophical idealism (the view that there is no external world) has nothing to do with everything we have discussed here.
The basic distinction between the problems is this: the question of the thing-in-itself does not arise from skepticism, but from a sober understanding of the nature of our consciousness. In other words, this is not a question but an answer. The understanding that colors and sounds exist only inside us and not in the world itself is a simple conclusion from everything we know, not a skeptical puzzle. By contrast, the question whether there is something outside that causes all this is a completely different question, and it arises from pure skepticism rather than from knowledge.
That does not mean there is a good answer to the skeptical puzzle, but the question is fundamentally different. If you are a skeptic (and I personally don’t really believe there is such a person), then you are a skeptic.

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Neriya:

The wondering about the external world does not necessarily stem from skepticism—at least not skepticism in the sense of the postmodern view. The point is that this is an area to which we do not really have access, and therefore we do not have the ability to discuss it. Any subject related to the world as we know it can be examined, investigated, experienced, and then one can reach some evaluative conclusion about it (true, false, good, bad, etc.). But regarding the external world, we have not had and will not have any datum there that can help us reach any conclusion about it. Even doubting something is usually accompanied by some datum or explanation that justifies the skepticism. In the case of the external world, even that cannot be done, and it seems we do not have the ability to conduct a discussion about it.
I hope I understood the Rabbi’s answer correctly. In any case, thank you for the response, and Happy New Year.

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Rabbi:

That is incorrect. We have full and clear access to the world outside (unless you are a skeptic). As I explained, the cognitions formed within us construct the image of the external object in our terms, and they are themselves our access. I explained that this is not a limitation; it is precisely what “access” or “perception” of something out there means. The claim that its color or shape or anything else exists only in our consciousness does not point to a limitation in us, but to the fact that cognitive terms like color belong only to consciousness inwardly and not to the world.
I further explained that this is a simple fact and not a skeptical opinion. Skepticism casts doubt on something that could be true and is assumed to be true, without arguments that support the skeptical thesis, but merely because of the worry itself that perhaps we are mistaken. When physics tells us that a body cannot exceed the speed of light, we will not accept testimony that there was a body that exceeded that speed—and this is not skepticism but a reasoned claim based on facts and knowledge. The same is true of the thing-in-itself.

If we return to doubting the existence of things out there, that is pure skepticism and has not the slightest connection to Kant. Kant’s doctrine (as it is called, although it is really just a collection of simple and agreed-upon facts) does not lead to any doubt of any kind. There is no doubt about the color of the object, since the object in itself has no color, and in my consciousness I see what its color is. That is not doubt. And certainly there is no doubt at all about the existence of an external world (the thing as it is in itself), at least not doubt beyond ordinary skepticism. Therefore it is incorrect to cast doubt on this for Kantian reasons, but at most for classic skeptical reasons.
I hope my words are now better understood.
Happy New Year.

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Gezer:

A question. Since all the entities that appear in our consciousness—whether electromagnetic waves or stones—are a translation of human concepts in response to an encounter with an external being that produces them in consciousness, why divide the world into many entities rather than suffice with one entity whose different characteristics are interpreted by us in a variety of phenomena and modes (which appear separate to us only in terms of time, distance, color, depth in space, etc., all of which are in consciousness)? In the absence of a need to separate between entities, can one speak only of the thing-in-itself = noumenon, and not noumena?
(By the way, does this weaken the wonder at the unity of the laws of nature in the universe?)

Maybe there is also a physical “angle” to this, a field I’m not especially knowledgeable in. But isn’t it accepted that an electromagnetic field or wave actually “exists” throughout all of space? Since all matter can in fact be translated into energy / was energy at the time of the Big Bang, it follows that the whole world is really one electromagnetic field? Basically I’m asking whether there is an ontological consideration (because it seems to me physics will not yield a proof) in favor of a multiplicity of entities.

A follow-up question—perhaps the thing-in-itself is the infinite being called God, and contemplation of Him generates the cognitions, and no objective reality (= world) was ever actually created, but only human cognitions? For after all, in any case there is a translation into the terms of consciousness. Or is there a difference in the capacity for translation depending on whether the unidentified object is a world or an infinite spirit?

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Rabbi:

Hello.
I did not understand the first question. On the face of it, this seems to be only semantics. Call it different aspects of one entity or different entities—what practical difference does it make? For example, is a person one entity or many entities (cells, or molecules)?
I also did not understand the connection to wonder at the laws of nature.

The second section mixes together different concepts and claims. A field can exist throughout all of space, and it can also not. A photon, which is a massless particle that carries the electromagnetic field, exists throughout the universe, and even that is only with respect to the theoretical concept of the photon (which has well-defined momentum). The translation of matter into energy is something entirely different. This is the equivalence Einstein found (E=mc^2).

In the last section again this is semantics. If you call all the entities outside “God,” would that change anything? It is merely a name. Thus pantheism (which identifies the world with God) is nothing but atheism in different terminology. In any case, we do not know how to say anything at all about the thing-in-itself (because every property of it is described in our terms). So what difference does it make whether you say it is spirit or matter or God or many entities or one entity?