My lived experience is of being my body, within a public, externally existing world. — Inyenzi

So far, so good. My skin connects me to the world; my hands play with the world.

When I open my eyes, it is as if I have opened the 'blinds onto the world'.

"As if." The visual world is remote; the eye touches, not the objects it sees, but the light reflected from them. The contact is indirect but conducted at light-speed. Skin can feel the sunshine, but eyes cannot look at the sun without burning. But there is no real problem – one sees the glass with the eyes, picks it up with the hand, and tastes the wine as it slips down the throat. Remote and direct senses are integrated seamlessly into a convenient, delicious whole.

It is only the analogy of the window, that suggests that the eye is not an eye, but behind it is another body with another eye looking through it as a window. This has to be nonsense because it recreates the eye to explain the working of the eye and recreates the body within the body. Seeing is indirect in relation to objects that one can touch directly, but it is direct in relation to the informative play of light that is also an aspect of the world, just as sound is. But somehow the idea of one's ears as the telephone system through which one listens to the world hasn't caught on.

So what's going on here? How are my eyes 'windows upon the world', when my scientific understanding of how vision works seems to undermine this? — Inyenzi

Vison is partly data from your eyes, and partly the operation of your brain. It's possible to sort of separate the two. If you've ever done drawing, you know that when you go to draw something, ideas you have about it will interfere. When you draw a person, it might end up like this:



Notice that this is what things look like to the mind, not the eyes. You know how long your limbs are compared to the rest of your body, so you draw according to what you know, not what you see. If you tune in directly to data from your eyes, you'll draw this:



Notice that this conflicts with what your mind knows about a human. The bottom half of the body seems smaller, and this is called "foreshortening."

There are philosophers who focused on the on-going dance between ideas and visual data, if you're interested.

I have read some say it can be because what I am seeing is not a real screen, but some sort of brain generated fiction, a phantasm of my visual cortex. But this cannot be true because along with the screen I also see my body, which must therefore also be part of this fiction. And so the skepticism refutes itself. If all is phantasm, then so too are my observations of the functioning of sense organs. My eyes cannot give me accurate observations of how the sense organs function and yet also produce nothing but phantasm. What would be going on if looked in the mirror? The phantasm sees itself? — Inyenzi

I'd suggest dropping the use of "fiction" and "phantasm" and think more along the lines of...

Your brain, in interacting with the external world during childhood, developed a method of generating and intepreting brain states, that in consciousness is experienced as representative of things and events in the external world. Of course in childhood we don't have such a sophisticated way of thinking about it, and we just interpret the situation as "I am seeing the world itself."

Developing more accurate understanding of the situation requires being able to recognise that simplistic intuitive belief, "I am seeing the world", for what it is - a simplistic intuition that our brains arrive at during childhood. Then follow that recognition up with making the paradigm shift to recognizing that the qualia we work with in consciousness are a function of parts of our brains producing symbols representative of external reality which other parts of our brains are able to consciously consider.

I don't mean to suggest that making such a paradigm shift is easy to do. It may well take substantial time and effort to reach the point that the new paradigm is as intuitively obvious as your existing paradigm seems now. (And there is no guarantee one will get there. There are many cases where my intuitions don't match up well with what I know via reason to be the case.) The explanatory power that comes with being able to understand things from the new paradigm is worth that effort IMO.

Getting back to the notions of fictions and phantasms... I think those are pejorative terms that aren't very helpful in seriously considering the subject. I'd say something more like the brain symbolizes external reality for us in ways that are quite conducive to humans getting on in life. There are valuable isomorphisms between aspects of external reality and the way our brains symbolize external reality and of course people get along quite fine, for many practical purposes, looking at things with the perspective, "I am seeing the world as it is."

Yes, it is true that the way our brains symbolize the external world is in significant ways misleading, but with a perspective of understanding that this is what we have to work with, and an attitude of how can we make the best of it, a deeper understanding of ourselves and others can arise.

Your brain, in interacting with the external world during childhood, developed a method of generating and intepreting brain states, that in consciousness is experienced as representative of things and events in the external world. — wonderer1

But the issue is that if we do not sense the external world directly, but instead our senses are representational, our bodies themselves are also part of what is sensed, and therefore must themselves be representational. I see my hands, touch my head, hear myself speak. I may posit this phone I am typing on is a representation generated by my brain of a phone in the external world, but then so too must also be the hands I am holding it with - both are part of my visual field. And so the external world must not mean "the world beyond my body", but instead is a sort of radically skeptical hypothesis of a world that exists beyond the solipsistic representational bubble I inhabit. My body, being itself represented, must not have a brain doing the representing - a brain in the external world would be doing it.

But the issue is that if we do not sense the external world directly, but instead our senses are representational, our bodies themselves are also part of what is sensed, and therefore must themselves be representational. I see my hands, touch my head, hear myself speak. I may posit this phone I am typing on is a representation generated by my brain of a phone in the external world, but then so too must also be the hands I am holding it with - both are part of my visual field. And so the external world must not mean "the world beyond my body", but instead is a sort of radically skeptical hypothesis of a world that exists beyond the solipsistic representational bubble I inhabit. My body, being itself represented, must not have a brain doing the representing - a brain in the external world would be doing it. — Inyenzi

Like I said, what I'm suggesting is counterintuitive for a lot of people and it would take time and effort to make the paradigm shift. So I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time trying to convince you. A few points though.

Your body is part of the world. Your eyes take in light and output nerve impulses, on the basis of which your brain produces a model of what is in your visual field. If part of your body is what is in your visual field, your brain will construct a model based on the light reflected from that part of your body, and will represent that sensation as your conscious mind perceives it. Your perception of your body might be thought of as a symbol on a 'map' of reality your brain produces. On the other hand, your body which is a part of reality is the 'territory' represented by the map.

You seem to be confusing map and territory when you say, "our bodies themselves are also part of what is sensed, and therefore must themselves be representational". Your perception of your body and your body are two different things. To make sense of this idea it is important not to conflate the two.