Short essay on dualism, idealism, & materialism as concerns Q: What is a table?

[Mudhammam]

Yup.  There were tables before you were born, and there will be tables after you die.  Your individual experience doesn't seem to be doing anything to prop the existence of tables up.

By "the existence of tables" I understand you to mean the nominal definition of "table" that you gave.  But that definition is derived only from one's experience of "tables."  Individual experience "doesn't seem to be doing anything to prop the existence of tables up" insofar as we postulate them as objects that exist in a reality that is independent of my experience, but I do not see that I am able to say anything positive about their phenomenal appearance which isn't contingent on how it is that my hominid brain evolved to organize and translate discrete bits of sense-data into what feels like a unified stream of conscious experience; and at least some of what this involves, for example, color, smell, sound (and others would add texture, shape, solidity) etc., is not in the both the object and the mind (and how lucky we must be if these are to be conceived as existing in a perfect one-to-one correspondence, like a reflection in a mirror! -- how this could be explained short of invoking a miracle, I'm not sure) but in my mind only.

Like, talking about a table in another room, that you cannot currently see, for example?  Or talking about something which cannot be experienced?  The noumenal world, as it were, lol?  

Whether we speak of the table as it exists when momentarily unperceived, or as it exists in objective reality as opposed to subjective appearance or representation in perception, perhaps comes to the same thing; the question that both must confront is, "Can we know what are its properties as a thing-in-itself?"

You'd find it difficult to set your dinner plate on the idea of a table, there's something different about the impression you have of a table in front of you that goes beyond fuzziness or abstraction in thought or memory.   Don't you think?

Yes, of course.  That sense impressions seem so radically different from concepts of reason or images in memory is one of the chief stumbling blocks that I encounter when trying to reconcile the latter with eliminative materialism.