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."

Rorty isn't necessarily representative of Pragmatism, as I assume you know. Susan Haack doesn't believe he is one, and I have my doubts as well. Anyone who claims Dewey is a postmodernist may have trouble understanding Pragmatism in general. — Ciceronianus the White

You would have to explain to me how Rorty is not a pragmatist. Dewey a post modernist? But then, what is it to be this? Such terms. Post modernism? Such a wide concept, but what does it mean essentially? A denial that modernism fulfilled its promise to pin things down. Nothing pinnable like this. Certainly not ethics.
Anyway, does Dewey qualify? Why not? Pragmatists do not believe in absolute truths or any theory of truth that is beyond problem solving. Nietzsche is the first post modernist, they say. He was late 19th century, so being postmodern doesn't really have a period, a time limitation. Truth is something other than agreement with reason, and there are things that are more primordial than truth, though nothing is really primordial at all. The problem would be separating the post modern (in philosophy) from existentialism. It is the idea of epistemic indeterminacy that marks the post modern, and Dewey certainly qualifies.
There may be reasons to say Rorty may not be a pragmatist, but I would have to hear them. As far as I see it, pragmatism is the thesis that the most basic account of truth and the world is problem solving, a forward looking process that takes the consummatory event (Dewey) of a problem solved as the essence of truth.

We don't "discover" the world of course, being part of it. But neither do we "make" it--again because we're part of it. We seem inclined to either consider ourselves separate from the rest of the world or consider ourselves creators of the rest of the world. But we're neither. — Ciceronianus the White

It's not a thesis about what we are, but about what it is to know something. Pragmatism will not allow to posit anything about what the world is, for it is bound to a ubiquitous epistemology that does not yield up things and there presence. Such is impossible, like walking on water. All the understanding can ever know is the forward looking end of a problem solved. Anything beyond this is just metaphysical hogwash. And problems and their solutions are manufactured in the process of engagement. See Dewey's Art As Experience: both the aesthetic and the cognitive issue from the consummatory conclusion of a problem solved. To know, in other words, is to put something to use successfully. This is a "made" affair.
dont understand why the world can't be made if we are part of it. The matter goes to knowing, and to know the I of me or you is to encounter it as a problem to solve. Look, there is not way out of this. All apprehension of the world are knowledge claims, and knowledge is pragmatic.

Wittgenstein, it seems, was misled by superficial differences in morality - he failed to consider that there might be an underlying principle that connects an apple's fall and the revolution of the planets. — TheMadFool

Wittgenstein's failing, if you ask me, was that, and this refers to the Tractatus, in ethics and aesthetics, he considered language to be suitable for designating empirical matters, but thought metaethical, metaaesthetic Good and Bad to be nonsense. So, you put the Good in view, music or falling in love, and then note its parts, features, the "states of affairs" then, he says, there is this residual that cannot be spoken: the Good of it. Weird, I grant you, this Good, but: it is no less sewn into the fabric of existence than empirical facts. It CAN be spoken, but speech (logic) is with all things qualitatively different from the actualities of the world (he gets this from Kierkegaard, whom he adored).
Why not talk about the Good and the Bad of ethics? Sure, no one can "see" these, but their presence is undeniable. (What does one actually "see" anyway? We speak here of sensory intuition. But doesn't one intuit the bad of pain with not equal, but more lively sense of it??
W is a bit maddening, for his line drawn between what is and is not nonsense set the stage for analytic philosophy's positivistic outlook. And has become just boring and irrelevant.

Whether or not what we've left behind is a room is another, or rather the same, metaphysical question. People may find it "impossible" because it's hard to see beyond language. As long as "room" is hanging around, it's hard to conceive that the room itself may not be. — T Clark

Then we put aside what is hard to conceive, acknowledge the argument at hand, and admit: once the room is vacated of perceptual presence, the matter turns to metaphysics.
Now, after having said this, I am aware the there is an Other to things around me. I am not a chair or a pen. This is where talk of brains and vats has to end and it gets very weird, for we are in phenomenology's world now, and things are not grounded at all. In my view one has to yield to this conclusion: our finitude is really eternity. "Truth" is really eternal.
Very controversial, of course. I would only go into it if you are disposed to to do so.

Witnessing and apprehending are not immediate or at the very basic level. They are up the ladder of mental processing from the place where objective reality is encountered. Unless there is something more basic, which makes sense to me. — T Clark

Now you're talking. It gets sticky from this astute observation; I mean, what phenomenologists are doing where I find interest is taking the matter of the phenomenological reduction, a reduction of the world to its "barest" phenomenological "presence" (what Derrida calls the metaphysical present. He, like you, insists, rightly, that IN the perceptual act itself, of any kind, any construal possible will never be free of the text, and text is this diffuse gathering of associated ideas. Think of brain storming in creative writing. This is the "text" and there is no genuine, singular, positive affirmation of a thing).
thinkers like Husserl believed (some disagreement here) that at the level of phenomenological apprehension, where one suspends all presuppositions and, well, stares at the object as the "thing itself" to encounter is qualitatively different than ordinary (naturalistic) perception. One is now truly aware of the object in the most primordial way. THIS kind of thing is at the heart of existential thought.
Husserl is criticized for the very reason you posit: nothing is free like this. Impossible.

But one has to wonder, and indeed, just allow the reduction to reach its end: it is true that there is NOTHING in the simple apprehension of an object that is there in an absolute way? How about this spear in my side? Is that pain truly not presented to my cognition in a "presence" of apprehension?

Big issue, fascinating, really.

Not at all transparent, but how is that different from a brain in a skull-vat rather than a glass-vat? — T Clark

Right. Not different. I think, by this physical model of vats and brains, things are the same.

I imagine a baby "thinking" to itself as it holds it toes - "Hey, when I hold these things, I can feel something. Hey...wait a minute - I think they are part of me." So, anyway, I guess that means we learn inside from outside the same way we learn everything else. Why is that a mystery? It seems plausible to me. — T Clark

Actually, I don't think this happens at all. This kind of thing comes much, much later. First there is the unconscious laying down of a foundation for language and its question, assertions, denials, universals and so on. One cannot say anything to oneself when one has not developed the ability to think. the word "I" has to be modelled, contextualized, assimilated, and so on.
No mystery when you put it like this, in a very familiar way of referring to things. But assume, if you like, that there is such a dialog going on inside the infant's head. Toe? How does this term, this recognition "KNOW" that digital extension? It takes in the sensation of the presence which is done in TIme: first there is the sensation, THEN there is the, oh my; what is this? This association between speech and phenomenon is what is in question.

I think the relationship between the organism (a human, in this case) and the environment it which it lives is far too close and interrelated to come to such a conclusion. The "boundary" between the two is far more permeable than this conclusion would require--it would require it to be fixed and impermeable. We have no reason to believe that the rest of the world is so different from what we interact with every moment of our lives as to be inconceivable. — Ciceronianus the White

But philosophy is open, because everything in the world is open at basic questions. You have EVERY reason to believe the rest of the world is so different, for everything, when followed to basic assumptions, falls apart. I mean what do you do with this condition that is laid before you? One thing I do know, and it is that yielding to pragmatic phenomenological ontology takes an existential revolution, I refer to putting down the text and letting its re-interpretation of affairs to take hold. Rorty though Heidegger, Wittgenstein Kuhn and Dewey were the most important thinkers (See his Irony, Contingency and Solidarity where is most transparent), all phenomenologists of sorts. There are many great things he says, but there is one principle one that leaps to mind (which, of course, is constructed out of Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, and on and on): We MAKE the world; we do not discover it (note how this demonstrates the logical reasoning of a pragmatist's view). An act of perception is an act of apperception, and when I see my cat, there is no "mirror" in my head simply taking in the world, as if the world were simply giving itself to me, as if the cat just impossibly entered my head. Note that even on the simple materialist's model, it makes no sense at all not to acknowledge this.

As Rorty famously put it, on this very familiar model of the materialist/physicalist (regardless of how this is construed), how does anything out there get in here? Trace it: there is my cat, here is my brain thing. Proceed. You will find a reductio ad absurdum in your very first substantive premise. Put aside what SEEMS to be the case. Nothing is this.

Thanks! It's always nice to find I'm at least wandering down a path others see as well. I do intend on at least reading over the lecture on the ethics. What little I've gleamed is he seems like a secular phenomenologist. I read a stack of paper produced by Hegel and could only tell you he wants to see what God sees in order to make sense of things to humans. I think Einstein's approach of accounting for what things look like from the subjective and then explaining it from the objective was the reconciliation phenomenology required. Thanks again for the references; I'll look forward to seeing what the developed form of my objection entails. — Cheshire

I am reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit fully for the first time now. Always put this off because he requires work and time. The reason why he is important to me is because I want to understand Derrida, and this brings phenomenology into play, for one has to altogether stop thinking as an empirical scientist, and regard the thing before you as an "eidetic construct". Intuitively, one has to turn affairs around completely, and there is little desire to do this when analytic philosophers are so dominant and adamant in their rejection of existential thinking.
The extraordinary result of getting immersed in all this is one can read with understanding interpretations of the world that have foundational insights.
Einstein read Kant when he was 13, so he was no niave realist. But phenomenology has only one conclusion, and that is deconstruction. Soo interesting, Derrida is.
that Lecture on Ethics needs the Tractatus to see where gets his insistence on the division between sense and nonsense.

No. Familiar perceptions do not reveal the world as it is. "Perceiving the world as it is" is a contradiction in terms. But, they do reveal mappings from the real world onto perceptual planes. — hypericin

Begs the question: Real world??

That is the difference between brain-in-a-skull and brain-in-a-vat. BiaS can still count on its perceptual machinery being functions on reality of some sort: given the output of these functions, things about the input can be deduced. But with BiaV that link is severed completely: perception tells us nothing about reality whatsoever, where reality is the world beyond the vat. — hypericin

You are steeped in murky waters on this. To defend it, you would have explain how it is that anything out there gets in here, AT ALL, such talk about reality independent of perceptual machinery can make sense. A tall order; an impossible one, really. As to complete severance, it only makes sense if you can delineate what is being severed from what, and you can't, because all of you talk is necessarily confined to phenomena.

The true course to reality is within, where the world begins, that is, where generative springs produce emerging phenomena.

Skepticism is not contradictory - "...defend both sides..." All it states is given a proposition p, it can't be known whether p or ~p. In other words, the doubt (p/~p) can't be cleared. It definitely doesn't claim p and ~p which would be to "...defend both sides..." I can't stress this enough. — TheMadFool

I will grant you that in the end what becomes evident is a kind of skepticism, but the philosophical thrust of it all depends on the arguments and how they work out in a positive thesis. Scientific materialism, assumptions about what is there independently of cognitive, affective, pragmatic systems, make no sense at all. Such a strong statement carries the matter far beyond the wishy washy skepticism of doubt as a deterrent to belief. Demonstrate that p is nonsense, then one does not simply become skeptical of p. One dismisses p altogether.

That's only true if you're certain that there's no objective reality. That is a luxury we can't afford. — TheMadFool

But then what do you mean by objective reality? This is the rub. Phenomenologists do not deny objective reality, they simply redefine it, for this is a philosophical concept, and is at issue at this level of analysis.

I believe that some philosophers were of the opinion that sensible propositions are those that can be verified by which I suppose they meant the proposition should be amenable to testing. — TheMadFool

But then, what is it to test? This is a philosophical question. Consider that one tests what stands before one, some thing of event. What are these at the level of basic assumptions? This is not a scientist's question, but one of science's presuppositions. Neil Degrasse Tyson has no insights to offer as a physicist, and the standard scientist's assumptions are out the window. they don't (typically) step outside their world to discuss questions like, What does it mean to call an object real at all? The ones that do end up speaking nonsense. (Keep in mind that someone like Daniel Dennett is not a naive realist. He simply doesn't read phenomenology, and in this he IS naive).
So, when it comes to brains in vats and the epistemic issues it raises, the matter turns decidedly against naïve realism, and does not preserve its standing at all, standing that would allow, well, doxastic resistance at all. It is relegated to the bin of moribund terminology, like a flat earth or cranial phrenology.

As I said, once a proposition is formulated, it's either true/false. Not nonsense! — TheMadFool

Not propositions and logical validity. Looking for a way to epistemically connect P to S is nonsense if P is not analyzable as a singular entity. P's ontological status is bound to justification, that is, what it is cannot be removed from what it means to know it.

There's your problem: "out there" vs "in here". — Banno

How so?

So that's what Pragmatists think!

I was under the impression that Dewey generally wasn't inclined to accept that there's an "out there" and an "in here." So, I think it's inappropriate even to refer to an "external world" in his view. We (including our minds) are parts of the same world, and our experience the result of our existing as a living organism in an environment and interacting with it. He's neither a realist nor an anti-realist as I understand him. I don't think he ever denied the existence of other components of the world. The "out there" and the "in here" merge as part of the manner in which we live in the same world, to put it very simply. There's no question of not knowing what's "out there" as a general proposition, i.e. it doesn't arise in general, though it may in particular.

That is in any case my interpretation of Dewey.

We interact with the rest of the world as we all do and have always done regardless of metaphysical concerns we claim to have. — Ciceronianus the White

Pragmatist epistemology is, well, pragmatic, so my "knowledge" relationship with the world is pragmatic. What is it that I know? I know pragmatics, not objects and there outer presence, but the pragmatics binds me to them. I don't "know" in any other way but the forward looking nature of the relationship. Walking down the street, my knowing all things around me is reduced to a pragmatic familiarity as to what they DO, like the sidewalk giving required support for each step and everything else duly anticipated. Pragmatism is a temporal epistemic theory about what things do when encountered. No metaphysics regarding some occult knowledge of things themselves.
Referring to an external world is perfectly fine. It is only at the level of basic questions that the nature of one's knowledge relationship is revealed. The world doesn't change in its natural relationships. One still walks and talks very naturally about the world out there, but ask philosophical question about what underlies all this, and there is no "out" or "in" at all. These are merely pragmatic terms that work. they have no import beyond this.
So I think this agrees with what you are saying. the real and the anti-real yield to this final reduction: everything is known by it forward looking effects. What is nitro? Well, take some, throw it against a wall with a certain force, observe. That is "what" it is. The "what" is thus no more than the "what it does".

This may seem innocuous enough, but then, consider: when you leave a room, and take all possible experience generating faculties with you, what is left behind is by no means a room, or anything else you think of. Most find such thinking impossible.

Well, you have a point but the error in judgment you commit is that now you've swung to the other extreme - to believing in subjectivity. This is not the intent/aim/goal of skepticism (Cartesian & Harmanian). What Descartes and Harman want to accomplish is to only, I repeat only, sow the seed of doubt in the garden of epistemology. This seed of uncertainty has germinated and is now a healthy (dose of skepticism) plant in full bloom but...it in no way diminshes the value of the other flowers (knowledge) that it grows alongside. If it does anything, it makes us unsure as to whether the flowers present are real or fake. That's not a bad thing if you take the time to realize artificial flowers are so well-made that it's impossible to distinguish them from real ones. If so, does it matter subjective or objective? They're identical insofar as our ability to tell which. — TheMadFool

Well, planting seeds of doubt is a far cry from what is being defended here. Look, if it were a seed of doubt "merely" then you would have recourse to to defend both sides with some margin of credibility. But there is none here. Phenomenology is the only wheel that rolls. That is, unless you can make the case for its opposition. But this simply isn't possible, and there is not an analytic philosopher worth his/her ink that will even try. Kant was never refuted only ignored, after a century of post Kantian fixation. they just gave up, took Wittgenstein seriously when he drew the line between sensible and nonsensible propositions, and proceeded with the assumption that empirical science is the best we can do, and epistemic issues can go hang. Just look at those absurd Gettier problems: they care nothing for P being a nonsense term, and simply proceed as if all were well.
As to subjectivity: all apparent dichotomies sustain and are not challenged, as long as the analysis doesn't attempt to make a claim about basic questions. At this level, subjective and objective lose their meanings, though talk sometimes suggests otherwise.

It gets complicated, and phenomenologists vary. I read, lately, the French theological post moderns like Michel Henry and Jean luc Marion, and Levinas, and others. Massively interesting stuff, but the old vocabulary of subjective/objective is replaced by other terms altogether.

The pain itself probably is not guessing since we seem to experience it. The guessing seems to come into it when we are trying to explain how contact with the sharp glass translates itself into the sensation of pain, who or what it is that perceives and interprets it and why, etc.

As the way we perceive things tends to change from one individual to another, and from situation to situation, at least some of it seems to be subjective. — Apollodorus

I would remove "probably" above, agree with the idea that the "guessing" lies with the explaining, but then to say "some of it" seems to be subjective cancels the progress made in the statement. the explaining is interpretative, and it is here, when we talk, we complicate what is simple. Pain is simple as pain, but open your mouth about it, and you have to explain the context in which the event is thereby placed, and what is immediate and unquestioned now becomes bound to language and context. The pain that is there speaks very clearly as an injunction NOT to bring this into the world. This I argue, is a nonlinguistic phenomenon that "speaks".

Not sure what "epistemically opaque" means. How is that different from our brains? — T Clark

Take, say, a Hubble mirror as a model for perfect transparency (just a model of something "passing through" with near perfect accuracy. Then there is opacity: a piece of granite? A brick? Anyway. Now ask, regarding an object's "passing through" to meet and inquiring brain-thing, how opaque or transparent is the brain as a receiver of the object as it is, unmodified, undistorted; how epistemically transparent of opaque is this brain? Of course, it is absolutely opaque, and one has no more "knowledge" of the object than a dented car fender has of the offending guard rail.

This doesn't seem right to me. What's the big mystery about getting stuff from out there in here? We are wired to the outside. Signals come down the wires. Our nervous and other systems process the signals. That processing is called "the mind." We send signals back. — T Clark

the big mystery is this: outside?? Talk about an outside implies one has the means to affirm what is not inside. Take a typical physicalist reductive position and say thought is reducible to brain activity. But how is it that "brain activity" is itself anything but brain activity? The "real" brain is supposed to be the truly real, yet one never gets "out" of the perceptual matrix to affirm it. One is always, already in that which is supposed to be reduced to something else.
I know, we witness things as if we know, but this knowledge's outside/insideness can never be anything but inside; therefore, there is no inside/outside at this level of analysis.

I agree with this. The idea of objective reality can be really useful, but it's not true. Or false for that matter. That's how metaphysics works. — T Clark

Unless the idea of objectivity is also turned on its head: What does this mean if not agreement, and what gives itself to agreement better than the immediacy of what is directly apprehended. As an empirical scientist, I agree that the sun has a greater mass than our moon, this is an evolved, historical idea, a thing of "parts," that is, analyzable. Prior to it becoming a scientific term, it is a phenomenological one, reductive to sensate intuitions, thoughts and a long history of scientific "revolutions" (Kuhn), and, as Kuhn tells us further, there is no reason to think these present theories along these lines will continue as they are, after all, nothing ever has.
What is objective, then? The matter turns to certainty, and degrees thereof. Let us now say the sun is best defined as a phenomenological aggregate of predicatively formed affairs (Husserl) which are witnessed, at the very basic level, as phenomena, first, logically prior to anything being taken up in an empirical theory. Science, of course, continues its course, but at the level of basic questions and assumptions, the entire business is turned on its head.

Suffering is the challenge we as a species need to go through to weed out the weak and make sure only the strongest survive. The purpose evolution. — SteveMinjares

No, rather emphatically. Evolution is not a purposive theory, and there is no guiding hand in nature pushing for the survival of the fittest. Random mutation of genes has no purpose.

So we don’t have to do the dirty task ourselves nature does it herself and goes through the process of elimination. This is not by societies choice but by design by evolution and nature to give the human race the greatest chance of survival. — SteveMinjares

Nature has no such design. You should stop thinking like this. It is an anthropomorphizing of nature.

Is the ego of humans to believe we don’t abide by the same rules that of the other creatures of this Earth.

Yes it hurts, and yes it sucks but it been working for millions of years so who are we to question it.

Yes people will suffer others will experience the heartache of witnessing such things but by each passing event that happen the next Generation becomes better, stronger and wiser.

Is the individual that disapproves this cause they desire a easier alternative. — SteveMinjares

This is all too familiar and beneath the level of inquiry presented here.

Oh, they've been given far more than their due, I would think. For good or ill, we're part of the world just like everything else--even that little homunculus in our head some people assume exists. — Ciceronianus the White

But this ignores that issue at hand altogether. If you hold a materialist of physicalist view (or some convoluted compromise about these), then pray tell, how does anything out there get in here? this is a simple question, and certainly not one that invokes scientific responses. It is a prescience question that goes to the presuppositions of science, not science itself.
And keep in mind, if you are a pragmatist, then you do not hold the metaphysical view that there is some knowable stuff out there.
It seems such a thing has been given more than its due because it remains an issue after all the theoretical smoke has cleared. Analytic philosophers typically don't take it seriously as they don't read phenomenology. As a result, they go no where, but very slowly. It is a burned out approach.

I think that the 'out there' being 'in there' in the brain is probably captured in the idea, which goes back to Plato, of the microcosm and the macroscosm. The brain is so complex as the neuroscientists show, and if there are deficits, it affects the whole wiring, and psychedelics can create transformations, as suggested by Huxley's 'Doors of Perception'. But, we cannot step outside of our brains to perceive true objective reality, as suggested by Nagel in 'The View From Nowhere'. — Jack Cummins

How does one ever affirm a "true objective reality" is has not encountered such a thing to even talk about? this becomes an entirely metaphysical affair, and the only direction there to address inquiry that remains open when doors are closed to some "exterior" affirmation, is toward interiority. This "outwardness" is now not even speakable, a nonsense term, say some (Rorty, e.g.) It is not nowhere at all, but being somewhere has undergone a dramatic shift on the order of a Copernican revolution.

I see no difference between what you say here and what Descartes and Gilbert Harman are implying with their thought experiments. The idea is to rattle the cage of dogmatists (?) - grasp them by their arms firmly and shake them hard till the come to their senses or simply slap them across their faces until they come to the realization that certainty is the aporia in the sense that it's impossible.

Am I sure? you might ask. Exactly, I would reply! The answer is the question! — TheMadFool

But Descartes escaped uncertainty with God. And it is not the rattling of a cage, as I see it. It is a revolution of the way we see the world. Science's assumptions about an independent and knowable exterior world is now completely untenable. Phenomena are now the true epistemic foundation, and so inquiring eyes turn here. The subjective world, largely ignored by empirical science, is now front and center, and meaning becomes first philosophy.

Maybe it's time to change the vat. Or its contents, as the case may be — Apollodorus

Genetic engineering?

Or then, maybe it's time to realize it is not a vat or a brain at all. And in doing so, an awareness of existence as such creeps forward, not knowing what to affirm anymore, but clear that talk about brains in vats is itself a constructed idea, and the more language is given authority to give the world to paragraphs and theses, the deeper fall into the same error that our common categories that inform s about what it means to be here are the closest we can get to understanding the world.

After all, it is the proposition that holds reality in place, that fixates one's gaze.

Correct. When it comes to things like consciousness, how it operates, and how it produces cognition, perception, experience, etc. it is all guess work. — Apollodorus

It is guesswork? A bare phenomenological encounter is not this. Step barefooted on sharp glass, this is not guessing there is pain (putting aside Derrida, unless you don't want to. I mean, deconstruction has its limitation in metaethics). The "how" of things is never forthcoming at the level of basic assumptions as one comes face to face with the "what" of things, the "givenness" of things.
Anyway, it is at the level of acknowledging the world, the phenemenological level, where indeterminacy narrows and qualitative experience steps forward, that the guesswork becomes, not more pronounced, but less so, for the phenomenon is closer, perhaps even absolute.

The brain in a vat is simply Descartes' deus deceptor given a modern sci-fi makeover. The point seems to be everything could be an illusion. In Descartes' gedanken experiment, the only certain knowledge is the self as a thinker, thinking thoughts. In the brain in a vat scenario, the "self as a thinker" is the brain. Come to think of, Gilbert Harman (the originator of the brain in a vat thought experiment) must've wanted to convey that such a horrific possibility remains alive even if physicalism were true. — TheMadFool

Not quite. Not that everything could be an illusion at all, not even in the running, not withstanding what analytic theorists say. Talk about illusions implies talk about what is not an illusion, for there can only be the one with the other. So from where comes the basis for something Other than what is there, in experience? Well, there is no basis, for anything you can imagine is purely phenomenological. It's not as if one can reach beyond phenomena into a "real" world, affirm what it is, then return with a thesis about illusions and reality.
Descartes opened to door to aporia, but did not walk through, cheated, as it were, his way out of the very doubt he posited. But here, we are more genuine to the assumption, and it is not merely doubt anymore; it is a theoretical impossibility to establish foundational knowledge of something outside the phenomenological world.

Morality is a form of social survival, humans depend on people to survive. And morality is a set of rules you need to follow to benefit from the community protection and care. You don’t follow the social rules you get exiled and you will have to find another community that thinks like you. Hopefully, you can benefit from there protection and care.

These moral rules is to prevent chaos, distress or presenting a threat to a community. Both physically and emotionally.

People tend to forget that the origin of morality comes from evolution and it serves an almost technical purpose also. Is not just all religious or political and such.

Morality was meant to be a set of rules to help the group corporate together to fend off threats and predators. Maximizing the greatest chance for survival.

But as we evolved as a civilization it became more complex. That emotional transgression coming from our peers became the predator.

Morality became almost like a filter to weed the undesirables out.

Morality is not just about character. Is a biological evolutionary mechanism to help humanity survive challenges we may face. — SteveMinjares

Perhaps all this is true. But why should one do what is part of an evolutionary mechanism? Preservation of the species? Is this what you tell someone regarding the meaning of their suffering? As the plague blackens the finger tips and boils cover the body, we say, well, alas, this suffering is conducive to survival and reproduction! There, you have it?
You see the absurdity of explanations like this? The real questions in ethics go to more fundamental level, as with Why are we born to suffer and die at all? why does existence throw us into suffering at all as a condition for survival at all?

How does he account for these statements if he can't say anything? I suppose that comes up at some point. Observing a deficit is something if I can speak about it. I used to have the same intuitive opinion concerning ethics, but I've been talking about it for a week, so something is clearly there; strange we would hold something in such high regard and not manage to attach words to it. I might wait and see if the world produces a genius that writes more readable books. Thank you for the recommendations. — Cheshire

Right at the outset, he makes that cryptic statement about passing over in silence that which cannot be spoken. There is a lot written about your objection, and I mean a lot! Recently, I have been reaading Michel Henry and Jean luc Marion, and Jean luc Nanci and the theological turn of phenomenology, putting a great deal of emphasis on Husserl. Husserl's phenomenological reduction suspends judgment to allow the world to become phenomenologically clear. Was Wittgenstein a phenomenologist? Maybe.