I am looking at that question, and the answer I see is "it has no worth". — Banno

I see. No greater motivation for joining a philosophy club, eh? Analytic philosophers are in it for the "fun" of puzzles, and are generally bound to clarity and logic. But Continental philosophers can be quite different, sincere and intuitive. Trouble is, Continental philosophy is hard to read, though here is the foundation of basic inquiry as to the issues of the self, meaning, value, reason, and so on.It is unfortunate that important things are so difficult. Oh well.

I feel bad that I haven't responded before this. I really like talking to you. I think we share a common outlook, an openness, on many of the issues we're discussing. It's just that you are playing on a piano, maybe a pipe organ, and I am playing on a three-string banjo. This old banjo is just right for the song I'm trying to sing. — T Clark

If you read what I wrote and find agreement, then by all means, feel free to disagree here and there. "Play" as you please.

We don't need phenomenology in order to explain how a prism works. Indeed, it adds nothing. — Banno

It adds nothing in terms of explaining how a prism works. Nor does it explain how a prism is taken up as an amusement for a child, or how rainbows inspire or romanticize, or how the gaseous content of stars produces different spectral analyses, and so on. Looking at matters such as these are not the "how" of philosophical analysis, which is, as with all the above mentioned, distinct and assessed according to a different set of standards.
The question you should be looking at is, What is the standard for assessing the worth of phenomenological philosophy? Prior to this, one has to look at philosophy itself, and inquire as to where the value lies here.

If Heidegger invented the light bulb, I'd use it. It actually has a use, and a beneficial one, apart from its inventor. But I don't read him merely because he was a loathsome man. — Ciceronianus the White

But he is a beneficial one, philosophically. It's just easier to turn on a light than it is reading Heidegger. This is the essence of the matter.

Perhaps it is, and what you are doing isn't.

Either way, this stands:
You take this as implying that light is manufactured in the brain. That's an obvious mistake. — Banno

This is pure flippancy. And arbitrary. If you put something out there, then you have to explain it. I mean, go into it, and don't be shy about it. Either way it stands???? How so?

You claim it is a phenomena; I claim it is stuff in the world.

I can explain how it bends in a prism.

Can you, using only phenomenal analysis? — Banno

But this is not philosophy's job. Obviously.

No it doesn't. Light is not phenomenal. It's a thing in the world, not a sensation. In so far as phenomenology treats things that are not phenomenal as if they were, it is wrong. — Banno

So tell me how it is not a phenomenon.

You take this as implying that light is manufactured in the brain. That's an obvious mistake. — Banno

It depends on your level of analysis. A five year old will not understand the idea at al but simply talk about light i a natural way, but then, material reductionists talk like this all the time. Phenomenologists will say both are right, but rightness and wrongness depends on context. They do think, however, there is one context called phenomenology that looks at light as phenomenon, an eidetically formed predication. Here, one is not using light in the "naturalistic way" as in "turn off the light when you leave" but rather as reduced to its features as a phenomenological presence. The more reduction, the greater the presence, says Jean luc Marion.

I've read enough of Everyone's Favorite Nazi to satisfy me I'll not benefit from reading him further, and enough Kant as well. As for the others, I fear that if they focus on what you describe to be the purposes of philosophy, they'll have little to say about us as living creatures in the world in which we occur and how we actually live our lives and should live it. So, I'll pass. — Ciceronianus the White

A flimsy rationalization for not wanting to do the hard work of reading perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. If you found out that Edison was a child molester, would you simply stop using light bulbs?

In the utmost respectful way possible I find Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy teaching in my personal opinion outdated. It was probably more applicable to that generation and culture of there time. — SteveMinjares

You have not, I suspect, read Kant? to understand existentialists, one has to understand phenomenology, this requires Kant. Of course, existentialists are not rationalists, but, you could say, post rationalists, and in some ways in opposition to rationalism. To get this, you go from Kant, to Hegel to Kierkegaard to Husserl to Heidegger, and others along the way. Then the move can be made to post modern thinking like Derrida, and beyond.

Analogies work like metaphors, so if you say my mother is a tiger when she gets angry, there you have my mother and then the borrowed quality of the tiger, hence, a functioning equation. However, when such devices are applied to the metaphysical, there is no object to which the borrowed trait applies.

Is Infinite Reason, Infinite Thought, or Infinite Spirit (as per Hegel) simply a biased form of abstract anthropocentric terminology being used to try to humanize a transcendent reality which, in fact, may be better described as being nothing more than a completely non-rational, thoughtless, blind Will-to-Live (as per Schopenhauer)? — charles ferraro

But to speak at all is an anthropomorphic attempt, which is the point. You are close to Wittgenstein, are you not, in suggesting that to speak of foundational matters is nonsense, for such things are not among the facts of the world, states of affairs. Reason as an absolute? Well, that would require something other than reason to determine, but then, this other would require something other to ground it, and so on. Will to live? What can this language be about if it were, well, the way things "really" are? And how would one establish this; what would give, in turn, this new verifying language its validity? No, this would require yet another dimension of determination.
So you can see there is no way out of this impossibility of affirming in language something that is not language. Language, its signifiers, can only be self referencing. UNLESS: Reason really IS grounded in some impossible ultimate language reality, like Hegel's. If this were true, and it is not impossible that it is, then what we say and think could be significant in the Hegelian way. But how to go about this, that is, at least giving this idea the minimal presumption of "truth"?
Only one way I see: Take the Kierkegaardian motion of the eternal present (Witt approved), and consider that even here, standing, if you will, in the light of a phenomenological reduction, and all schools in abeyance (as Walt Whitman put it): this present, I submit, is undeniable, notwithstanding post modern, post hermeneutical objections, yet there we stand, eidetically aware! Question: Is this actually happening? Is it a finite event? Or is it infinite.
I could continue, but only if you are interested in this strain of thought.

Even 'metaphysical idealists' are only speaking in analogies when they speak of "ultimate reality". — 180 Proof

Heh, heh...analogies for what?

A common line of reasoning against God's presumed omnibenevolence goes like this:

If God was omnibenevolent, there wouldn’t be ... any earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, floods, wars, children with genetic dysfunctions, ... and in general, there wouldn't be any suffering.

But why should the absence of these things be evidence of God's benevolence?

Based on what reasoning should we conclude that the presence of those things is evidence that God (if he exists) is not benevolent? — baker

Quite right . We invented that the issues of theodicy by imagining a God with all powers, like a person, only unqualifiedly more. These notorious "omni's" create contradictions, but they are no more than logical constructions: manufactured ad absurdum.

I know you dislike empirical science, or at least its pretensions as alleged by some. But when you ask what makes physics or any science possible I don't know what you mean. Are you asking a question about we humans--what is it about us that caused us to create science, or how we did so? Are you asking a question about the universe--how it came to be subject to scientific analysis, investigation, with predictable, testable results? Are you asking about both? — Ciceronianus the White

I love empirical science, and took enough courses in college to know well what it is. But it is not philosophy. A scientist asks, how do we understand a fossil according to the applicable classifications? Philosophy asks, what is the structure of the thought that perceives at all? How is knowledge possible? What are concepts qua concepts and what is their relation to things? What is this substance that comprises all things?
Before you even get to science questions, you have more basic questions about what science takes up as a world. For example, look at experience and its structure: When I talk about a star's spectral analysis, I am talking about light. But any high schooler knows light as a phenomenon is manufactured in the brain. You know, visible light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and some parts of this are reflected, some absorbed, and the reflected parts are received by the eye, and there are cones and rods that process for color and intensity, and this goes to the brain that manufactures the phenomenon in clusters of axonally connected neurons. So it goes. The scientist will of course admit this, because what is " really" happening "out there" is not color, but waves; but then how do waves get internalized and what is this internal event that allows us to "know" what is out there?
Consider further that when a perception occurs, it occurs in Time, and this makes a perceptual affair one with a temporal structure: I "see" light but then, I am not a feral entity, nor am I an infant, whose world is "buzzing and blooming". When I register the seeing, it is learned language and its logical operation that makes this a knowledge event, and without this, there would be no understanding of light; and this knowing is predelineated, it issues from memory. This makes an actual present matter one that is not present at all, but a construction in time,with a past and a future; in deed, this is right up Dewey's tree, because this temporal dimension is the forward-looking nature of a pragmatist's theory of knowledge. Pragmatists, the old school, are necessarily phenomenologists.
Etc., etc. To really go into an analysis like this, look at Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, and so many more. There was a century of post Kantian philosophy, which turned into existentialism, which became post modern thinking with its deconstructive post structuralism. It is a massive enterprise. Rorty thought Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein the most important philosophers ever, and all three were, in some way, phenomenologists.
All of which science has little or nothing to say because this is not its job. Scientists are not philosophers.

I'd ask you the same question. I suspect my confusion results from my lack of familiarity with the mysteries of phenomenology. I'd apply to an appropriate hierophant for admission, but have my doubts it would be worth the effort. If initiation is required, we may well use words differently or mean different things when we use them. — Ciceronianus the White

Phenomenology is what existentialists are.When theories of natural science break down the the level of basic questions, one can only turn to phenomenology and hermeneutics for foundational thinking. This latter insists that knowledge is inherently interpretative, that is, language which is the medium for understanding the world, does not, at this level of analysis, simply observe this world, it literally constitutes the world. So it is not as if there is the world there, that tree, those shoes on the floor, and so on, and there we are to take in its nature as it informs us as to what it is; rather, there is no world at all until an experience constructing agency is there to make it. BUT: it is not as if there is nothing at all whatsoever there prior to this agency making an appearance; but rather it is not "a world". It is entirely other than a world, and I want to say for obvious reasons.
So talk about the world, philosophical talk, is talk about this very complex horizon that is reducible to phenomena. These are considered foundational because beyond this kind of talk is ismply more hermeneutics. Derrida calls this "difference": an endless system of deferred meaning in which one concept is contingent on others, and so there is NO affirmation apart from this.
And so on. For Rorty, this foundation of interlinguistic (wd?) reference is pragmatic, grounded in what works. I think this right.

We participate in the world by being part of it, but also by living. Living isn't merely beholding. By living we eat, drink, reproduce, think, feel, see, hear, create, make things out of other things that are in the world--we do everything we do, and interact with other constituents of the world, things and creatures. We shape the world and it shapes us in this fashion. Cats participate in the world as well; they do what they do, and so interact with us and other creatures and things of the world. Cats and people participate in the world. There's nothing remarkable about this. We don't ask how we get in the brain of a cat; why ask how a cat gets in ours? — Ciceronianus the White

I agree with everything you say, except for one: That there is nothing remarkable here. It all gets very remarkable at the more basic level. You say we it is where we eat, drink, and so on, but I ask, what are these things?, and you think I've lost a marble or two. But it is here where centuries of philosophy BEGIN. It begins with the father of phenomenology, Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason. Once you have read this, you will see what all the fuss is about, this "Copernican Revolution" of philosophy.

There's nothing lying between us and the rest of the world--no sense datum, or whatever. We're just creatures of a particular kind. We experience the world as humans do, given our physical and mental characteristics; cats experience the world as cats do, given their physical and mental characteristics. The world we live in isn't different from the world cats live in; we're just different from cats. — Ciceronianus the White

What you have here is empirical science's view point. I wonder why. All of this has an underpinning of presuppositions, and philosophy's job is to expose these and analyze them. What makes physics even possible? Do you think the logic that identifies things in the world is actually IN the world apart from the perceptual act?
The greatest philosopher by analytic standards, not phenomenological, is Wittgenstein. Yes he was a phenomenologist, of sorts.

The BIV scenario takes for granted that there is an outside and an inside. — baker

Does it? Keep in mind that the scientists are supposed to be the truly real, but then, the purpose of this challenge is to insert doubt into this very idea. How do the scientists know they are not brains in vats, themselves, being controlled and experimented on by other scientists who could also be brains in vats? This makes the BIV a metaphysical problem, for there is nothing foundational presented. See the difference here between this and say some standard problem where doubt has asserted itself, as when you turn the key and the care doesn't start. Here, the assumption is not questioned according the premises of the condition given, for once the doubt is relieved and the battery cable secured, there is no metaphysics to deal with.

I agree, but is that all of philosophy or just metaphysics, including epistemology? — T Clark

That is pretty much what philosophy is about. But it is, in my view, very important to know that in doing this, philosophy is an existential matter, and not merely an abstract logical exercise. The world is literally made of thought and habits and the familiar, and the nameless intrusion that gives rise to all of this is utterly transcendental. Ideas are not abstractions, but are as real as any sensory intuition. So, when we talk about truly basic assumptions dealing with the truth, reality, value and ethics, and so on, we are restructuring reality. As I said earlier, in a letter Husserl once wrote that his readers, many of them, were inspired to turn to religion because his "epoche" had an existential enlightenment dimension to it. Husserl himself didn't seem to get it, and few do, for it is after all, strangely, well, mystical. Wittgenstein knew this, as do the current French post modern theological thinkers like Jean luc Marion and Michel Henry.
This kind of thinking is generally something confined to the mystical arts of Eastern thought. I read through much of the Abhidhamma arguing with Baker in another thread, and was taken as to how the Buddha could be seen as the ultimate phenomenologist.

Thoughts are, to use a metaphor, the threads of the living fabric of the world, and hence, when we think, we do more than interpret or define' we "make" our world, and the epoche takes one into its core (though always keeping in mind what Derrida says about the text. Tough issue to discuss here).

I like this. I might even agree with it. I'll think more about it. Except, for me, there is no "givenness of the world. — T Clark

Such an interesting thing to say, for it places you right in the middle of a very important, post modern debate that deals with has been called the "metaphysics of presence". It is a long historical argument, but the entire affair rests with Time: To see and know is an historical event, the past and all of that language acquisition moving into the "present" to define, interpret, make familiar, and so on. How can one ever affirm a present in the midst of all this? All of this that is essentially anticipatory, forward looking in the structure of knowing itself?
But then, take a lighted match and apply it to your finger. Is this an interpretative matter? "When" is it? Is there not a present that itself intrudes into the stream or conscious events? So much going on here. Derrida says we are stuck in "difference".

The idea of "qualia" does not match my experience. This is my objection to much of western philosophy, even phenomenology, acknowledging my limited knowledge. Philosophers say it's from experience, but it's not. Not directly, anyway. They take experience and cover it with jelly and syrup and marshmallow. Rational jelly and syrup and marshmallow I guess. It obscures true experience. — T Clark

Qualia is tough because when w talk about it, it vanishes, which is why Derrida writes "under erasure". You find the same thing in Wittgenstein who in the Tractatus insist he is speaking nonsense in drawing a line between nonsense and sense. We find ourselves at a crossroad where actuality and language "meet" and we cannot speak of it, but cannot deny actuality. Buddhists tell us to put the entire enterprise down, and "ultimate reality" will step forward (Abhidhamma).

Spooky. But there is something to this, I know. Something powerful and sublime about being a person, and it hangs there just beyond the threshold of our everydayness. Try to think it, and it slips away. I think, again, that language is pragmatic, and cannot hold actuality (Kierkegaard).

I'm not sure how to respond to this long paragraph. It feels like the Constance philosophy train has switched tracks and is headed off in a different direction than mine. We probably were on different tracks to start with. — T Clark

I thought you mentioned religion and how your views were not expressed in something I said.

I think most of what we know, understand, use is not knowledge of facts or propositions at all, i.e. justified true belief; Gettier; etc. I think there is a model of the world built into each of us. The model is built up from our interactions with the world, our parents, language, education from the time we are babies. It probably also includes factors that are hardwired into us. I feel this model of the world in myself very viscerally all the time. I recognize it as the source most of my day to day decisions both consciously and unconsciously. I guess you would call it intuition. Generally, new knowledge has to get incorporated into that model before it is used. That is vastly oversimplified. — T Clark

You are in Heidegger's world now. He calls it dasein. Being and Time takes your thoughts here and gives them hundreds of pages of penetrating thought. Hardwired is a problem, but cannot explain Heidegger here. All is hermeneutics.

I took two courses in philosophy in my first try at college back in 19(mumble, mumble). The first was "The Mind/Brain Identity Problem." I remember thinking in my first week of class "This is all bullshit." And I was right. That set the stage for the rest of my experience with western philosophy. I have maintained this bias to a certain extent up till today. I found a home of sorts with Lao Tzu and Alan Watts. They were talking about things that really did match my personal experience of the world.

Since I've been on the forum, I've met several people, yourself included, who've convinced me that western philosophy can be a powerful tool to understand what is going on. I've found some of the discussions moving. People have showed me that they have the same goal I have always had, but their paths have been a little different. In some cases, I've felt that philosophy saved those people. Gave them a ladder out of confusion and despair. It's hard to argue with that, even though that path definitely doesn't work for me. — T Clark

Analytic philosophy is very bullshitty. Smart, but entirely outside the substantive issues. Gettier problems? Barn facsimiles and severed heads?? Such a disappointment. Continental philosophy is profound, but it takes work (what doesn';t?). Being and Time might just convince you.

You assume that we're somehow apart from the world, and then ask why we seem to be a part of it. That's an unfounded assumption, to me; it's not something we can we merely take as a given. — Ciceronianus the White

I don't mean to complain, but I find the above suspiciously unresponsive. If you are clear in your position, why not just tell me what it is?
Apart from the world? What is it you mean by "world"?
As to my assumption, I merely raised a question, not an ontological thesis about different kinds of being. It may turn out that judgment about the epistemic distance between me and my cat is perfectly compatible with not being apart from the world. But I don't know what you mean by world, nor what you mean by being a part of it.
Of course, not everything is the same, and things certainly stand apart from other things, like dogs from cats from Chinese pictograms; I mean, things being what they are rests with difference, so I'm at all sure what not being apart is about.

If you accept that we're part of the world, our brains aren't outside the world. What we think is part of the world. What we know is part of the world. Our emotions are part of the world. There's no outside world except in context. In other words, no one speaks of or thinks of a cat as being "inside us." We think and speak of it as "outside us." It doesn't follow that we're not in the world with the cat and everything or everyone else. We're not inside looking out, in other words. Dewey criticized what he called the "spectator" theory of knowledge. That theory uses the metaphor of vision, of seeing, as the model of knowing. Knowing becomes passive, objects known are "out there" and are impressed on us in some fashion which must be explained. But we're not spectators. We're participants. — Ciceronianus the White

But then, what does it mean to be a participant? Of course, no one thinks of a cat being inside us. This idea is just a way of showing what it might be like if knowledge and the justificatory conditions for knowing actually were about things that were independent of phenomena. That "aboutness" would have to stretch to the thing in some unimaginable way, like spooky "action at a distance". I mean, if you can't say in any way that the cat I perceive is beyond the phenomenological presentation, then you might as well just say so and call yourself a pragmatic phenomenologist. As I am. As Rorty was, though Rorty misses the boat in ways I won't go into (pragmatism is not descriptive at the most basic level of apprehending the world).
Frankly, when you say "in the world with the cat and everything and everyone else" I think you nailed it. But if this kind of thinking issues from an empirical scientist's "world" then no; in my view it all gets very peculiar: I do see that there is this "otherness" that is presented in and among the phenomena of the world which cannot be explained on a simply physical model. Putnam argued with Rorty on just this, saying when he looked at his wife, it is simply patently implausible to say all that is there is a pragmatic phenomenon. There is this very mysterious Other, other people, things, things NOT me that have a presence that is unquestionably "out there". Don't really know how far Rorty went, but his idea of ethics and pragmatic truth simply fails utterly (Simon Critchley argues) . THEN: how is it that we explain knowledge of this OTher? This metaphysical OTher? There must be, as you say, an underlying unity of all things that does indeed connect the world in unseen ways, One thing the Brain in a Vat counterexample to knowledge does is it makes us aware of the metaphysics of ordinary affairs.

You have a point and I detect pragmatic undertones in your approach. Why bother about noumena at all; after all we can never know them (epistemic distance is for all intents and purposes infinite).

However, ontologically, we're not warranted to dismiss noumena - we may doubt it à la Descartes & Harman but we may not assert that noumena don't exist. — TheMadFool

The other way to look at this is through the concept of time. This is front and center in phenomenology, for apprehensions of the world are temporal events, which is why pragmatism is good way account for things: there are no "things", just events, with beginnings, middles and ends, and so the "real" is sought in the reductive "eternal present". This gets way over the top but it is THE principle ontological claim of 20th century Continental philosophy.
All roads lead to phenomenology. And the quest for truth in phenomenology leads, I claim, to one place: meditation, an existential destruction of the world whereby language as a dogmatic perceptual determination is annihilated. This sounds very weird, I know. But did we really think the world was not a weird place at the level of basic assumptions?

I see it as a problem of identity. You are “wired up to receive the world”, which is presumably hidden beyond your vat, the skull. In this story you identify as the brain or some locus within. If you expand your identity to include the rest of you, you’ll find that you are in direct contact with the rest of the world. From there “essential epistemic connection to make out there come in here” falls apart. — NOS4A2

so are you saying the solution lies in this expansion? And I would say the world is what we experience, not what is beyond this. We are wired up to something, but then, this something is beyond the language we can use to talk about it. So where does this put "wired up to receive"? In this matrix of experience, "wired up" makes sense, but to talk about things that are outside of language, logic and sensation, and beyond time and space? What is the basis any meaningful statement?

I understand that all we have to work on are phenomena but that doesn't mean noumena don't exist. That's like saying the only philosopher I can understand is Wittgenstein; ergo, the only philosopher there was/is is Wittgenstein. — TheMadFool

Well, it is not that there is nothing, its just that this is entirely beyond conceiving, because it is supposed to be outside of experience. Forget Wittgenstein, because we don't need him to tell us that two things in the world cannot have an epistemic nexus between them. To me, it is as simple as the opacity test. Just how opaque is a brain? I give it a 10, and a zero for transparency. All who object to this avoid the simplicity of it, and I think it is because there is a blind assumption in place that to know a thing is as plain as a thing can be, which is true, until the question is raised as to what and how. Then it falls apart instantly. What do we usually say about such things that have no explanatory basis? It is not that we simply doubt them. that would be like doubting the earth is round. No, we flat out dismiss them.
I am convinced that the epistemic distance between me and my cat is infinite at the level of basic analysis, that whatever that is is completely Other.

What does this mean, really? Why even speak of the cat "getting into" the brain?

You seem to assume the existence of something in the brain, which we are to be addressing. You seem to believe that "thing" must be explained. This appears to distinguish the brain and the things within it or which are a part of it from everything else, or at least in this case from the cat or whatever it is, if anything at all.

Why do you believe there's a cat-thing in the brain? It would seem to me you must establish that there is such a thing before demanding an explanation for it. — Ciceronianus the White

But how does one explain knowledge? this idea of getting the cat in the brain is just a way saying how absurd it would be if such knowledge were possible. Simply put, according the language of neuroanatomy, a bunch of neurons connected by axonal fibers firing together is not a cat. But it goes further than this: in order to even conceive of neurons firing, one has to have other neurons firing to do the conceiving. So, even on this model of neurophysiology, knowledge about the "outside" world doesn't even begin to make sense. What is "outside" anyway, but phenomenon generated by brain matter? But again, to call something a brain is no more foundational than calling something outside, for both are equal as phenomena. There IS no "out" to this if we follow the very simple and accessible logic here.

Agreed but that doesn't seem to negate the existence of noumena. The point of BiV gedanken experiment is only to show that our total dependence on phenomena raises the possibility but not certainty of the absence of the noumenal world.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, neither Descartes' nor Harman's thought experiments prove the nonexistence of a physical world out there. All they do is cast doubt on it. You need a good reason to go from possible that not there to certain that noumena not there. — TheMadFool

Noumena?? Whos is talking about noumena? You understand that Kant said nothing about this unknown X save that he was compelled to bring it up. It is not in space or time, certainly NOT the "physical world"; it is unthinkable, as it is beyond the conceptual world. No sense can be made of noumena at all. It's just that in order for representations to be what they are, they have to be OF something. kant goes to great lengths to steer us clear of bad metaphysics in the Dialectics. But Harman knows this and all analytic philosophers know this. Kant was an idealist, and he was never refuted, only ignored, and they very well know that it is categorically impossible to generate an epistemic nexus between "noumena" and the conceptual/sensible intuition object one observes. One would have to grasp noumena as a causal entity!! One would have to fit noumena into an observable sequence of events tracing one to the other. Is causality an "out there" feature? Nobody holds this. What they do is assume causality in discussions about things because they claim, with Wittgenstein, that factual "states of affairs" are the only things that make sense. But Witt never for a moment thought one could talk about conditions that are free of logical structure.
The point is, no sense can be made of an epistemic connection between transcendental object and observer because one can use phenomenological models of possible connections to talk about things that are not phenomena. And all we have are phenomenological models.
Finally note how the question posed is entirely ignored. It is intended to be a very simple thought construction in "how does anything out there get in here?" You seem to want some kind of qualified knowledge of the cat. But it is worse than it seems: it is using the physicalist model of the world, the (standard, putting aside quantum entanglement) empirical scientist's model, that knowledge becomes impossible for knowing my cat, for there is nothing epistemic about causality, and tracing a causal sequence from the cat to my receptive faculties says nothing about how knowledge is related to the cat. Indeed, it shows just the opposite. I know my "cat" as well as a dented car fender "knows' the offending guard rail.

The assumption is that something exists between perceiver and perceived, that some kind of medium makes what appears to be direct observation of the world, indirect observation. So what is it exactly that prohibits you from directly observing the world? What is it, exactly, that exists between you and what you perceive? — NOS4A2

Neurons?? What do you mean?

The sticking point of the BiV thought experiment is that we can stimulate specific combination of neurons in ways that mimic to a T actual experiences. For instance, I could apply an electrical current to the pressure & temperature sensors in your hand and give you the feeling that you're holding a hot cup of tea. There is no hot cuppa! A little extrapolation and you can now think yourself as a nothing more than a brain in vat whose entire reality is simply a supercomputer causing specific combinations of neurons to fire. Like the cuppa isn't real, neither is the world the brain perceives.

I recall pointing out once in another thread roughly half a year ago that there's only one thing we can be absolutely certain about - mental experience. The so-called physical world could be an illusion/ a simulation. Compare that to how there's no plausible way we could cast doubt of a similar nature regarding the mind. To doubt the mind is to admit there's mind; how else can you doubt it? — TheMadFool

Actually, it goes beyond this. It is NOT a matter that all that can be affirmed is mental activity. There is only one conclusion, and I mean only one, that issues form this radical hermenuetics of the brain in vat problem: Nothing whatever can be affirmed outside phenomena, thus, the inside and outside of the brain in a vat is nonsense, for it is nonsense to speak of an outside to something all possible insides and outsides contexts of which are bound to a singularity. It would be like talk about the extension of a point, or angels on the head of a pin. Just nonsense. It can only not be. You would have to reach out, beyond phenomena.
Near death experiencers talk like this. But then, they borrow language from the singularity called the world.

Viewing humans as living organisms in an environment (which is what we are, I believe), I can't help but think this is tantamount to asking someone to explain how our food gets into our stomachs. — Ciceronianus the White

I see, but don't you see the difference? It would be as if explaining how food get in the stomach included an explanatory dead zone, and so there would be nothing to say. Explaining how the cat gets into a brain, BEGINS with a brain phenomenon, not with some affirmation of something that is not a phenomenon. The cat out there the knowledge of which you are trying to explain is not a phenomenon, but is supposed to have an existence beyond phenomena, something there that is discoverable to which you knowledge has found access. But how can this discoverable thing every make its way into that which makes it into a phenomenon, when to affirm this would require you to affirm what-is-not-a-phenomenon? How can a phenomenal system affirm what is not a phenomenon? Or even make sense out of such a thing? All thinking, causality, anything posited at all, is a brain event, so even when you start talking about electromagnetic waves being absorbed or reflected by the cats fur, you are stopped right there: How does light and its properties ever make it into the explanatory matrix of a brain? to be used to explain how the cat gets "in there"?
There is simply no non question begging way to affirm this.

If one’s identity is expanded to include the entire body, beyond the surface of the brain and nervous system to the surface of one’s skin, observation of the external world is direct. There is no longer some medium or veil between perceiver and perceived. — NOS4A2

This, of course, moves along with the assumption of physical science. So, there is this cat thing over there, and my brain thing here, and my awareness extends all the way to the outer edge of my skin. Pls proceed to explain how it is that my cat gets "in" the brain thing. Note that the moment you begin explaining how the electromagnetic spectrum is of different wavelengths, some are reflected, others absorbed in a given material, in this case, the fur of my cat, I have to stop you: How did you brain thing come to understand those electromagnetic spectrum wavelength things, and how did THEY get in the brain thing?
All references to out there, are really references to events "in here". It is not that there is no out there; the question is, how is it possible to make this claim?

I strongly suspect this is not an epistemic act at all, but rather a distinction brains are hardwired to make. Witness organic brain disorders like schizophrenia where this distinction breaks down.

Instead of discarding as "bad metaphysics" what is called naïve realism here, why not instead bracket it with the disclaimer that this is not absolutely certain, but rather our best guess at the state of affairs. And describe why this qualifies as the best available guess (i.e. why brain in a vat can be cut away with Occam's Razor).

After all, whether or not we are envatted (love this coinage) is an empirical fact of the world, and empirical facts cannot, in principle, be proven with absolute certainty. All we can ever do is construct models which explain what we experience at the phenomenological level.

Absolute certainty is one of the great chimeras of philosophy. — hypericin

Best guess is the way of philosophers like Searle, and, as far as I've read of analytic philosophy, it is dismissive merely. It is hard to put this into a paragraph, but analytic philosophy, grounded in the assumption that meaningful language ends where clarity ends (a positivist leaning) altogether misses the point of philosophy. There is no Wittgensteinian hard line between facts and nonsense. Rather, the world is fluid, thought and its experiences bleed, if you will, together in the known and the unknown, and this can lead to bad metaphysics, which is all too clear to require explaining, but Good metaphysics is a different matter. It is what emerges out of the attempt to move beyond a long history careless thinking, and to discover what is there, in the world, presupposed by all of this and is the foundation of it. Wittgenstein loved Kierkegaard! And Kierkegaard is the father some very penetrating metaphysics.

And what is there at the "phenomenological level" you mention? This is the question. What is there in the everydayness of our world, analytically inaccessible because foreign to familiarity? Husserl's epoche, in a letter he wrote, is said to have inspired students to join the church. He was no metaphysician (putting aside complaints later on), but simply wanted philosophy to to return to the "things themselves" and it was Husserl who brought matters to the phenomenological level. What can be religiously inspiring about this very rigorous (see Husserl's Ideas I and II. His Logical Investigations I haven't read much of. But The Idea of Phenomenology opens his later thought) and "scientific" (not empirical) turn? The answer is that it brings attention to the world apart from the empirical explanatory models as a qualitative move, that is, a very different content. This suspends all knowledge claims that would otherwise take hold, which he labels the "naturalistic attitude". What rises out of this is existentialism, aka, phenomenology.
As far as absolute certainty goes, then concept itself is chimera, and while logical necessity (certainty) certainly is there, clearly a structure of meaningful utterances (all logic is tautology, say Witt) one has to see that this and actuality run on a collision course (Kierkegaard). Logic words like certainty do not possess the world, but are an essential part of institutions that pragmatically take up the world. The world, its loves, hates, passions, motivations, compulsions, miseries, joys, and so on, are NOT tautological constructions. They are actual, not eidetic, merely, and this actual world is our metaphysics (of course, the same holds for logic itself: unknowable in its generative source, for, as Witt tells us, it would take logic to conceive of this source, which begs the question).

If philosophy is nothing more than our everyday experience and actions, then it is really nothing at all. At least nothing worth mentioning. You talk about philosophy consisting of analytic approaches to truly basic questions. Much, most, almost all of our daily experience is non-analytical, and good thing. It seems to me, without being able to point to specific evidence, that the only presuppositions to most of our daily experiences are more related to the structure of the mind than to analytic propositions. — T Clark

Look at it like this: Philosophy asks the most basic questions. About what? Everything. Then what are basic questions? Questions that underlie everything. They sit quiet as assumptions in a place that gives all knowledge claims there foundation. The technical side of philosophy lies in the disciplined body of theory and inquiry regarding all things at this foundation. E.g., the way analytic philosophy goes after the givenness of the world lies with Dennett's "pumps" that examine qualia to see if the term makes any sense. Where do we get this qualia idea? From ordinary experience. Continental philosophy handles it much differently, but the source is always everydayness, Heidegger's "always, already there" that is the starting point of any inquiry: our everydayness is the beginning of any philosophical question.
Of course, there is that nagging history of metaphysics that plagues inquiry, but everybody wants to be rid of this. Nietzsche blames it on Christianity, Kierkegaard on Christendom, Heidegger on the Greeks, Dewey on rationalism, and so on.

I don't share your... prejudice against religion, but it has always bothered me that the existence of God is considered a metaphysical question. That's because the existence of a monotheistic God present as a conscious entity is a matter of fact, true or false. That takes it out of the realm of metaphysics to me. I think other aspects of Gods and religions are appropriate subjects for metaphysical discussion. — T Clark

It depends on what you mean by religion. If you are talking about the an anthropomorphism that has a will, a wrath, who is king of all and bows to no one, who insists on obedience, who does this and that like people do, then religion is just interpretatively superfluous, to put it nicely. You know, a lot of narrative accounts that fill an empty space that needs filling. But if you mean the jumping off place where the "totality" of our understanding leaves off and all that is meaningful and important is left hanging for want of a foundation, then I can think of nothing more important than religion. Metaphysics is now real, I claim. But where does it make its appearance? In experience. For example, in the question, Why are we born to suffer and die? Such things are handily dismissed in philosophy given that no empirical answer shows up and Wittgenstein made it clear language cannot talk about value. But then (See Critchley's very interesting account in his Very Little....Almost Nothing) there is something powerful and profound about the question, for once the context is taken out of familiar contingencies, you know, explanations that rest with science, with evolution (suffering is conducive to survival), with biology, with historical narratives, and so on, all of which fail entirely because they beg the ultimate question where Why?, then one is without context, and dreadful suffering simply sits there, and expression of Being, a reality not generated by language and culture, but by the "world" itself, THEN religion becomes a very different affair. This I call good metaphysics, this standing at the threshold (See Levinas' Totality and Infinity: the idea that is exceeded by the ideatum; the desire exceeded by the desideratum) is, well, beyond merely humanizing. There is deep philosophical discussion that brings this to light. John Caputo's Weakness of God and his Prayers and Tears of Derrida; and there is the recent French theological turn with Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion and others. These play off Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, as does all existential philosophy.

Agreed, except I think that science has presuppositions beyond those for other modes of thinking and experience. If not, you've diluted the idea of metaphysics, including epistemology, to insignificance. — T Clark

Not sure what other modes of thinking would be. As I see it, science is in all we do and think, for it is at the basis for understanding. I am referring to the scientific method, the conditional proposition, if....then that is the structure of thought itself. This may sound odd, but one has to consider that the world is Time, it is Heraclitus' world, so a thought is a temporal event, and so its analysis looks at a beginning, a middle and an end. Dewey called this the consummation. All knowledge is consummatory. Ciceronianus the White, above, thinks like this.

This is a metaphysical position. I think very few scientists have this kind of abstract understanding of what they do. Maybe I'm wrong. — T Clark

I think they don't care, and the matter is alien to their concerns. If pressed, they would have to concede, would then dismiss it. Most analytic philosophers hold with Wittgenstein: philosophy simply has nothing to say about it. The world doesn't rest on metaphysics, for metaphysics is just nonsense talk. I haven't read anything lately from this side of things, but I suspect nothing has changed. Obviously, they are mistaken.

To me it is not abstract at all. Two people face to face in conversation. "Between" them is palpable mystery. Metaphysics has to be seen this way, and the way for this is in the concept of "presence" or "givenness". The infamous phenomenological reduction of Husserl. See is his Ideas I, his Cartesian Meditations. Then Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Extraordinary, these are.

I've enjoyed this discussion. I am skeptical of the role you give phenomenology in your philosophy, but my understanding is based on reading summaries rather than primary sources. — T Clark

I apologize for all the philosophers I threw out at you. But they are what I think. These guys are simply too interesting not to mention. Phenomenology is, as I see it, the only wheel that rolls in philosophy.

Dewey as I understand him thought of knowledge as the result of inquiry. He thought it was an error to characterize each of our encounters with the rest of the world as a "knowledge" relationship or event, or as the result of a process by which we "know" something. When we see something we've seen thousands of times before we don't engage in reasoning in order to say we've seen it, or to see it. We recognize it. When we believe we undergo or engage in a process to "know" each time we perceive something, we misunderstand what we are and what the rest of the world is, and how we interact with it.

It's clear to me that Dewey thought ignoring context was a fundamental problem of philosophy. Reasoning, experimenting, is something we do to know something we don't already know--that's how we learn things about the world around us. But we don't do that all the time, because we don't have to. And the fact we do so or don't do so has nothing to do with the existence of the rest of the world.

As for Rorty, I think he departed from Pragmatism because he never accepted the respect both Peirce and Dewey had in method, specifically the scientific method and intelligent inquiry, as a means to resolve problems and questions, to understand and act. That's something I believe is essential to Pragmatism. No absolute truth, but "warranted assertibility" based on the best evidence available. This is what I think "saves" pragmatism from claims of relativism. Also, while Rorty thought Dewey was right to criticize metaphysics and metaphysicians, he also thought his effort at metaphysics was misguided. — Ciceronianus the White

Rorty is a post modern philosopher, which sets him apart from the old school of pragmatism, and this means he is looking at language and vocabularies as the foundational discussion about the world. Dewey and the rest did not think in terms like this, but what I think is the essence of pragmatism is what connects them, and this is in the scientific method, which is the foundation: the hypothetical deductive method, making the basic structure for thought and Being the conditional proposition, If...then....What is the concept and the proposition reducible to? What works. Look at what Rorty says about contingency:

For Kant and Hegel went only halfway in their repudiation of
the idea that truth is "out there." They were willing to view the wodd of
empirical science as a made wodd - to see matter as constructed by
mind, or as consisting in mind insufficiently conscious of its own mental
character. But they persisted in seeing mind, spirit, the depths of the
human self, as having an intrinsic nature - one which could be known by
a kind of nonempirical super sciencecatled philosophy. This meant that
only half of truth - the bottom, scientific half - was made. Higher truth,
the truth about mind, the province of philosophy, was still a matter of
discovery rather than creation.

He goes on to emphasize that any such "discovery" notion is shear metaphysical nonsense. Consider how this goes: If you think there is something "out there" that our knowledge is telling us about, that this aboutness that we have as our knowledge condition includes actual features of that object of knowledge, then you haven't understood pragmatism's unavoidable "truth" structure, viz, that all the understanding every has, is the pragmatics. On the ontological end, it is just familiarity, reified familiarity, so in the end, the present moment , that very powerful sense of reality and presence one has about the cat being on the couch, the couch being blue in color, and so on, is a synthesis of the pragmatic conditions that give knowledge that famous forward-looking anticipation about what a thing does, the If.....Then.... conditional structure, and the simple "presence" that is familiar (habitual beliefs, says Dewey) since childhood.
The difference between Rorty and the traditional construal is focus on language, which makes him a post modern pragmatist. And what is language? Language is a pragmatic construction that is foundational for our "being in the world" and it is not as if Dewey actually talked like this, I don't think he did (reading through Nature and Wxperience. I have read others, like Art As Experience, some works on education, others? Don't recall), it's just that post modern thinking puts the burden of the real to language's language's interpretative nature, but giving full due to the things Dewey thought essential to a comprehensive accounting of the world, the non cognitive dimensions of affect, desire, motivation, fantasy and imagination and so on. Note that that Rorty's pragmatism, following Heidegger (if you like pragmatism, Heidegger's Being and Time is the perfect existential counterpart), makes the everydayness of the world and all of its affairs equal in their descriptive relevance, but when it comes to talking about what all this is, philosophy, then all eyes are on language and its meanings, as so an analysis of language is paramount.

I guess you're right, and Rorty does not follow Dewey and Peirce, but he does follow through on them in post modern themes. And there is no room at all for any positing an exteriority apart from experience, apart from t he language and logic that construct thought. The thoroughgoing pragmatic position cannot support any notion what ever of an "out there" to things discovered in experience.

Consciousness = soul, god, self, identity, presence, here, now, experience, evidence, omniscience, eternity, infinity, etc...

All those things are intrinsic to it. So self is not a problem. Self and consciousness are the same thing. You don't need to think to exist. Read/Watch some Eckhart Tolle. — hope

My objection is that this is free of analysis. All of what you mention are extremely problematic, each one; and each one has to be gone into. It is certainly NOT that what Tolle says is wrong, but you can't accept what someone says and call it truth. Consciousness is eternal? Of course, what else. But the matter simply begs for analysis. This requires reading people who analyze experience in competent ways. Kant is a good start.
Btw, I have listened to Tolle and found him an inspiration, but certainly not a substitute for research into phenomenology.

Mind = thoughts and beliefs

Consciousness = awareness, being, presence. — hope

But then, how can one be aware without having beliefs? The trouble lies here: if there is an utter vacancy of thought and belief, there is no you, even if you take the self to be a kind of existence that thought cannot comprehend, if thought is not conceived to be in any way a part of it, then all terms of identity become lost. How is this so? Try to imagine such an independent existence and you will find thought to be an integral of affirming it. What remains is nothingness, that is, a thoughtless transcendental ego. You would have to invent something to make consciousness conscious that is not understanding, and this would be nonsense; that is to be conscious yet not to "know" this things in any way. Perhaps in the way a rabbit knows there is a carrot somewhere: non cognitive, or better, proto cognitive, yet the concept of agency is radically reduced, and there would be non cognitive, instinctual knowing, but this kind of thing is hardly where you want to go. You want to affirm something sublime and profound, so one imagines a disembodied soul without thought but endowed with something else, like unthinking divinity, beyond thought. A kind of agency that is intuitively "aware". The question here is, can you make sense of this withou going over the deep end of metaphysics? I mean, to think philosophically is to take what the world presents to us, and establish a basis for understanding it at the most basic level. Where is the justification for positing something that cannot be even made sense of: this thoughtless consciousness?

Not really. I am discussing two models of the relation between myself and the world: the common sense brain in a skull, and far fetched but technically possible brain in a vat. In the first, it is just a given that there is a perception independent real world. — hypericin

I claim there is no real difference. The brain in a vat, as a descriptive scenario for a counterexample to naive realism, is descriptively incidental. Brain in vats, mechanical brains, electronic brains, virtual brains in vats, shoe boxes, I mean, this kind of thing has no bearing and the difference is really only one: in the conditions set up for the brain in a vat, there is the aspect of there "actually" being such things as brains, scientists and their vats. In the philosophical counterpart, any claim at all about such things would be what I call bad metaphysics. Positing, if you will, beyond the inner conditions of the "brain", is nonsense. this doesn't by any means, I further claim, deny the validity of metaphysics, but the good kind always prevails, the kind that sees an exhaustive examination of the world must include, as Putman put it, the existential affair where the words run out, and interpretation stunningly falls on its face, and yet, there we are in the midst of what utterly denies language's hold on things, for it is not a thing, but....thingness, or Being in the world, of the world.
This brings philosophy to its only recourse, which is phenomenology.

Is the mystery here the hard problem? Because otherwise I don't really understand what's not to understand. — hypericin

I suspect philosophy rather gets in the way of the simplicity of the issue. Is it a causal process that delivers an object to conscious recognition? There is my cat, and I know it, but how does, and this is the question of all questions, this opaque brain thing internalize epistemically that over there that is not a brain thing or any of its interior manifestations?

when you try to answer that question, you will see why claims about any exteriority of objects are impossible to justify. It is not a denial of naive realism in play here, but its most basic assumption that objects are all there, in some space and time that is beyond the margins of thought and experience (regardless of how modern science wants to construe this) that leads to the conclusion that such extra-experiential positing is impossible. That over there, my cat, is certainly NOT synapses firing into axonal fibers of physical brain connectivity. They are, of course, not simply different. they are radically OTHER.

No it doesn't.

Consciousness and mind are two very different things. — hope

That would be a problem to demonstrate. Most would say impossible to demonstrate, as well as undesirable. Consciousness without thought and understanding reduces consciousness to a kind of thing, like a tree or a table. A different kind of thing, no doubt, but a thing that is just there.
But then, I would need your account of how it is that consciousness and mind are different. Where is the line drawn such that being conscious and knowing (cognitively) are different?

First off, I get annoyed when people claim that each new discovery calls for a reevaluation of our understanding of reality. Does quantum mechanics require us to rethink metaphysics? My first reaction is to say no. I want to keep my metaphysics separate from physics. But on the other hand, I'm wonder if I'm being rigid. — T Clark

I know how you feel, of course, but there is the an essential element missing from the objection, inevitably: the question, what IS philosophy? It's not love of wisdom, because that begs the same question. What is wisdom? What sets philosophy apart from other disciplines is its desire to know the truth at the level of basic questions, which is why all categories of thought are inherently philosophical regardless of way they differ in content. Going through your mail and doing quantum mechanics share that same foundation of structured thought and experience taking up the world. What does it mean at all to think, to solve problems, to experience pain and pleasure or art and music. Not this art or that love affair, but At ALL, how does one analytically approach those truly basic questions that are presupposed by all the things we say and do?
Metaphysics? There is bad and good metaphysics. The former asks about, say, God's angels, actions, responses to sin, his kingdom, accessibility through prayer, God's omniscience, omnipotence, and so on, and so on. This kind of thing is usually accepted on faith and dogma. Good metaphysics is found in phenomenology's analyses of time, metavalue, metaethics (what is the nature of suffering? A non-natural property??), analyses of the concept of presence, the possibility of pure phenomenological understanding of the world, and so on.
Empirical science? This is the naturalistic attitude. Philosophy is about what is presupposed by this, what assumptions are in place for this that make it possible to think and experience at all. Otherwise, you just doing scientific speculation, not philosophy.

Doesn't this point to a weakness of understanding in the scientists? Shouldn't they be interested in the metaphysical underpinnings of what they study? Can you effectively study something without being aware of your presuppositions? How can you apply the scientific method unless you understand it? Doesn't that mean that physicist's language does have a place in philosophy?

Am I talking about the same things you are? — T Clark

Physics is already, and has for some time (such that I've read, which is little, except for my college course) understood that an object is a synthesis of overt, observable, features, and the contributions of the observer, and ponders the question as to whether there is any epistemic connection at all between out there and in here.

What they usually do is take the naturalistic world, assume there is a connection, and simply move forward with that, putting aside any presuppositional objections. They are usually qualified materialists or physical reductionists and know nothing of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and others.
Yes, you can effectively study something and not be aware of is presuppositions; in fact, there is no though without ignoring presuppositions. As I type, I am not aware of the analysis ot typing, the language and its execution and many things. Were I to become aware of these, I couldn't type. Doing philosophy is not doing science, or, when a scientist does science, if she starts wondering about underlying philosophical issues, to that extent, she breaks away from her discipline.

It's easy to say something is a waste of time when apparently you don't understand that something. — 180 Proof

Glib, but confrontational. Not a good combination. You need more than this. Don't be shy, spell it out: what is it I don't get?

the brain is just an a pattern of color in the mind

look and see

but dont look with your eyes. look with consciousness — hope

What does this mean? It means look with your understanding, and here, where ideas convince, structures of consciousness change, that is, if the ideas in question are not trivial, but momentous, like realizing you actually are a brain in a vat: suddenly you look around and realize that all along all there was was a laboratory fabrication. Imagine if voices issued from the sky one day announcing the news.
But then, and this is the rub, if you will, this is exactly the way reality is, for our brains are in vats of blood in skulls.
Now, you can't say the brain is just a pattern of color for our affairs are organized and consistent as we "see" them in daily life. But the real question is, what does your understanding tell? I claim it tells you that your finitude is the foundational condition of neuronal representation, and the reality is infinity. As I lift my cup from the table, such an event is eternal.

fyi – Neil Degrasse Tyson is also a physicist and so speaks their language even when he's speculating. And Daniel Dennett has conceived of a variation on phenomenology he calls "heterophenomenology". — 180 Proof

Which is my complaint about both. Physicists' language has no place in genuine philosophy. And Dennett does not deal in Husserl, Heidegger, and the phenomenological body of texts. Therefore, he misses the boat. That may sound dismissive, but analytic philosophy is a waste of time, for the most part.

We have to dig deeper to find the essence which Wittgenstein believes (mistakenly?) doesn't exist. — TheMadFool

He looks exclusively to logic and the necessary conditions it imposes on knowledge. This will not allow the world to "speak" and mostly, he is right about this. Do you know the color yellow? If you do, then you can say so, like knowing what a bank teller is. But no saying so, no knowing. Wittgenstein and Derrida are close here, in the way logic and language have no application in basic questions about actuality. But in the end, and Wittgenstien knew this well, it is Hamlet who wins the day, for "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."