Here, the claim is that the flame on your finger carries a non empirical, non discursive or irreducible intuition of a metavalue, i.e., an ethical badness. — Constance

Your experiment is self-refuting. If I were to put a match to my finger, me doing this would demonstrate that I do not believe it to be an ethical badness, and so it is not a metavalue.

I must admit though, I really don't know what you mean by "metavalue".

I must admit though, I really don't know what you mean by "metavalue". — Metaphysician Undercover

Here is an account. There is a lot behind this, but in essence (btw, it likely will be encountered as novel thinking. Apologies. Should best be read fully before judgment):

It is the easiest concept to grasp, and yet, the most difficult. Easy because it is clear, intuitive, and not a logical product of argument. Hard because we don't think like this. Heidegger said the same of Being: There, in the intimations of our existence, most close to us, pervasive in every thought and engagement, yet so distant from the understanding. For Heidegger, being was complex, for there is nothing intuitive and direct that reveals some absolute nature of what a thing is at some unimaginable foundational level, like God or material substance. All that can be affirmed is bound to the interpretative conditions of affirmation: language and culture and history.

But take a look at, say, Dennett's argument on qualia, the conclusion of which is that it is an impossible term, just like Heidegger. Impossible, to put it Derrida's way, because it is a term that, like all terms, defers to other terms for terminological meaning. Wittgenstein called these states of affairs, facts, like the Earth being of greater mass than the moon, or that my shoe is untied: a fact, dull and equal to all other facts as a fact, and this is what the understanding can grasp in the logicality of meaningful utterances. the rest that is NOT fact, is transcendental, unspeakable. Open your mouth to speak it, and there you are in the middle of the delimitations of logic and language and memory. History: language is a constructed thing. Took centuries, and, it took a the personal assimilation process a much shorter time. Every utterance brings this into play, this interpretative medium.

Anyway, I bring all this up to make a point: A given perceptual event, qua perceptual, is thick with meaning. Not perceptual, but apperceptual. One cannot even conceive of what a direct intimation of a thing could even be at all. Pure nonsense.

But there is something direct about it, in the mix, that is, of language's meanings and the actuality before one. This is why Kierkegaard is considered a father of existentialism: he said there is this qualitative divide between what is there and what can be said about it. IT cannot be spoken.

But here is where ethics comes in and why Wittgenstein said ethics is transcendental. My example of the finger on fire: In the perception as one's finger is literally aflame, there are the facts, the logical, propositional possible utterances, like, well, pain is conducive to evolutionary survival, or, there is an event, I do not enjoy it, there is the physiology of nerves reporting pain, the quick withdrawal of the finger, and so on: facts, facts, states of affairs.

Here is the rub: Once the facts have been suspended, and all that remains is the most "local" fact, the pain itself, right there at the, if you will, Cartesian center of experience, we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia, the unutterable presence of the pain. Once analysis has taken the matter this far, the meta value becomes clear: this is not a dull fact like my shoes being untied. There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad". This clumsy sounding usage is unavoidable.

The argument I find definitive regarding moral realism is the above; in fact, I find that once value is so understood, there is no choice but to reify goodness and badness in the moral, transcendental conception, and the reification of these argues for a reification of the ego as well, for the center of our existence is the productive origin of value in the world. We are no longer in the empirical scientist's world, but in the phenomenologist's, and meaning---value-meaning, importance, interest, caring. loving, despising, and the rest, all issue from the self. These transcendental events issue from us.

This is why Kierkegaard is considered a father of existentialism: he said there is this qualitative divide between what is there and what can be said about it. — Constance

Are you then supporting what Kierkegaard said? the core of his statement is the word "qualitative divide". Kierkegaard "qualitative divide" is full of dualism, full of God.
Are you saying you agree on Kierkegaard's divine moral?

Wittgenstein said ethics is transcendental. — Constance

Now I'm more confused. Before you mention Kierkegaard, now you mention Wittgenstein, are you saying the meaning of transcendence for Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are the same? I would disagree to this, it appears you're mixing up things here.
For example Wittgenstein said as well that : "..."And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead matter is neither good not evil; therefore, the world of living beings can in itself be neither good nor evil." and then from here he concludes the "nonsense" of the world and sense being contingent

Once the facts have been suspended, — Constance

Facts suspended? Looks like you're building a play of a movie you imagine within your speculations but studying emotions and feelings like pain (Damasio) and seeing how they work I would say that "suspending" an emotion makes no sense. Do you mean to suspend the conscious phenomena of the pain? Well we know this is a construct of our unconscious, we know our brain unconsciously decides about what to do with this "pain" around 200ms before we become conscious of it (Libet). It can become conscious or maybe not.
This is to say again that the "local" fact of a pain is not something you can suspend. it doesn't work that way.

we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia — Constance

We, who? Well I guess Chalmers and metaphysical thinkers. As you can guess me and many other contemporary philosophers do not agree this "qualia", the way you explain it This dualist qualia is not needed to explain pain in a satisfactory way. Emotions and feelings are "incarnated", we have to work with the concept of an extended brain to understand them. Well I guess you know Damasio. Emotions do not need of consciousness to exists, etc. etc. This is the contemporary concept of emotions, again no need qualia... emotions and feeling can artificially be triggered as we know very well how they work. It can be done using electric signals in certains parts of our limbic system or inducing special conscious states with certain chemistry (drugs, psychotropic substances, etc.)

There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad". This clumsy sounding usage is unavoidable. — Constance

Well, I think you need to show us why it is unavoidable?
Let me elaborate a bit, if I'm able to manipulate your emotions and feelings with certain technology wouldn't you conclude that the mystery of how your emotions and feelings isv within the science of the technologies I used to manipulate you? If a tumor can change your personality and make you become a pedophile (google it and you will find several cases) wouldn't you think that your emotions and feelings rely on the chemistry and physiology of your brain and not on any metaphysical reality?

There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad" — Constance

Can you demonstrate it? In the meantime I would claim this residuum is not needed to explain the word "bad". You just need to put it in a context. If in this case you put it in the context of my finger burning is bad. Well, in this case, this forum is not the right place to explain it as it is not that short but here you can find a good source to understand how pain works and why it is associated to the word "bad". As anyone could expect, such a complex things requires a complex and very technical language but if you really want to understand it I'm sure you can find it accessible:
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/65/65ps1.full

I can understand that many people find it easier to speculate and build metaphysical worlds, but for them to become credible nowadays I think they first need to understand what science has to say about it.

Let's be humble to what the true dialogue with nature tells us about what we're and avoid falling into the temptation of solipsisms.

Here is the rub: Once the facts have been suspended, and all that remains is the most "local" fact, the pain itself, right there at the, if you will, Cartesian center of experience, we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia, the unutterable presence of the pain. — Constance

Sorry Constance, I don't buy it. I don't see getting to "the pain itself" as the final reduction. It's just a turning point, of going from the external world of what you call "facts", to the internal world of feelings. So there is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings. And I don't buy the notion that this is a world we cannot speak about, because we commonly talk about our feelings. It just requires a completely different way of talking from the way that we talk about the external world of "facts".

Are you then supporting what Kierkegaard said? the core of his statement is the word "qualitative divide". Kierkegaard "qualitative divide" is full of dualism, full of God.
Are you saying you agree on Kierkegaard's divine moral? — Raul

I think this is right, yes, though, not to get too hung up on overwrought terms like 'soul' and 'God'. A close reading of K's Concept of Anxiety will reveal that he thought such terms as part of the very nature of 'sin' (another dubious term which he rejects emphatically: the old fashioned, Lutheran sense of Adam's atrocious transgression).

As for K's religious thinking, his phenomenology serves to dethrone the sensibleness of common thinking, hence the affirmations of the Bible where thought really had no place at all. Thought cannot encompass the world, one reason why Wittgenstein was such a fan. To see where thought can go, we find his philosophy: a temporal dialectical phenomenology that overtly rejects the the primacy of reason. the divide I mentioned occurs where reason seeks to subsume the actualities of the world. Nonsense. the world's actualities are not categorial.

For the long version of this, see his Concept of Anxiety. In it, you see over and over, the foundations of later existential thought.

Now I'm more confused. Before you mention Kierkegaard, now you mention Wittgenstein, are you saying the meaning of transcendence for Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are the same? I would disagree to this, it appears you're mixing up things here.
For example Wittgenstein said as well that : "..."And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead matter is neither good not evil; therefore, the world of living beings can in itself be neither good nor evil." and then from here he concludes the "nonsense" of the world and sense being contingent — Raul

One has to be careful with Wittgenstein on this. Not the same, exactly. That would be impossible. Not mixing them up, but drawing on parallels in thinking. First, the following passage to your quote is "Good and evil enter only through the subject. And the subject does not belong to the world. Rather it is a boundary of the world."
When I speak of the world, I am not in W's world. I am thinking of the world of Heidegger's dasein and "Being in the World" and so references to the "world" get confused. W confuses me, frankly, but everybody is confused by him because he presents ideas that are open concepts. Anyway, he writes: "so good and evil which are predicates of the subject, are not properties of the world....Here the nature of the subject is completely veiled." Further, "What is good is divine, too. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the supernatural."

Facts suspended? Looks like you're building a play of a movie you imagine within your speculations but studying emotions and feelings like pain (Damasio) and seeing how they work I would say that "suspending" an emotion makes no sense. Do you mean to suspend the conscious phenomena of the pain? Well we know this is a construct of our unconscious, we know our brain unconsciously decides about what to do with this "pain" around 200ms before we become conscious of it (Libet). It can become conscious or maybe not.
This is to say again that the "local" fact of a pain is not something you can suspend. it doesn't work that way. — Raul

Such a suspension is meant to serve the purpose of analysis. But think of it like this: We suspend facts all the time, as I am doing as I write. I am not thinking about many things as I concentrate on one. In this way thought itself is a matter of abstracting from the general body of related ideas to particular ones that rise to an occasion. Here, you are being invited consider an ethical case, an extreme one to make for poignancy. There are many details to the case. If I were to inquire about the logical form of the propositions that describe the case, then I would abstract from all that is not propositional as such, focusing, as Kant did, on the logical forms, the conditionals, the negations and assertions and tautologies and so on, that make propositions possible.

Here. I am after something specific as well: I want to know about the anatomy of an ethical case, what makes ethics what it is, its essential features. I am not interested in how to determine what to do. I want to know what ethical goodness and badness is, what all the fuss is about. This is a phenomenological question, a question of the Being of the phenomenon of pain and pleasure, suffering and joy; it is a descriptive account I want.: just to observe and acknowledge.

Talk about the brain and anything else that is not there, in the bare descriptive of the event is suspended, just as Kant suspended everything but logical form to discuss pure reason, not that I am so keen on Kant, but his method is just simple analysis that looks to rational form in judgment and extrapolating from this to what must be the case given what is clearly there.

We, who? Well I guess Chalmers and metaphysical thinkers. As you can guess me and many other contemporary philosophers do not agree this "qualia", the way you explain it This dualist qualia is not needed to explain pain in a satisfactory way. Emotions and feelings are "incarnated", we have to work with the concept of an extended brain to understand them. Well I guess you know Damasio. Emotions do not need of consciousness to exists, etc. etc. This is the contemporary concept of emotions, again no need qualia... emotions and feeling can artificially be triggered as we know very well how they work. It can be done using electric signals in certains parts of our limbic system or inducing special conscious states with certain chemistry (drugs, psychotropic substances, etc.) — Raul

But you wander from qualia with all this talk. To speak at all about qualia, and surely you see this, is to use language. Language cannot speak what is there. One cannot say the color yellow, but the presence of yellow is fit into and contextualized by a theory of color, and the many ways color turns up in casual or technical talk. There is not stand alone talk about yellow and referring to the limbic system has nothing whatever to do with the problem of qualia.

To play a game in philosophy, one must at the very least attend to the way the problem is presented. This is a simple, descriptive affair of something that lies before you. If I were to ask for an exclusively descriptive account of a cloud's phenomenal presence, such a request would be unproblematic. Same here.

Can you demonstrate it? In the meantime I would claim this residuum is not needed to explain the word "bad". You just need to put it in a context. If in this case you put it in the context of my finger burning is bad. Well, in this case, this forum is not the right place to explain it as it is not that short but here you can find a good source to understand how pain works and why it is associated to the word "bad". As anyone could expect, such a complex things requires a complex and very technical language but if you really want to understand it I'm sure you can find it accessible:
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/65/65ps1.full — Raul

It is spelled out more explicitly in the OP entitled Metaethics and Moral Realism.

But Raul, the ideas presented here did not rise up ex nihilo. See G E Moore's Ethica Principia. Moore wanted to know the nature of the Good. He concluded that it was a non natural property. Then Wittgenstein, Read his Tractatus, his Lecture on Ethics. Then read John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing right and Wrong.

The context is not complex. You are being invited to think phenomenologically and if this is not familiar to you, if you have never read any Continental philosophy, well, hmmm, you perhaps should consider this.

Sorry Constance, I don't buy it. I don't see getting to "the pain itself" as the final reduction. It's just a turning point, of going from the external world of what you call "facts", to the internal world of feelings. So there is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings. And I don't buy the notion that this is a world we cannot speak about, because we commonly talk about our feelings. It just requires a completely different way of talking from the way that we talk about the external world of "facts". — Metaphysician Undercover

Consider then: facts of the world. Is my migraine, just because it is an interior event, any less a fact? Is it not somewhere in the grid of worldly affairs as much so as glaciers and planets and clouds and everything else? The problematic here is not location, in my head or on top of a mountain. The mountain is there, in the world. As is my headache. Factual affairs. Only in this factual affair, over here, in my left side, there is a spear in my kidney and the phenomenon we call pain. I see no reason to separate sensate feelings from other facts at all. Everything is just there, an aggregate of atoms.

So once you complete that turn in the turning point, and you observe the sensation, it is just another event no different than any other event as an event.

So then, the matter goes to describing what is there. Very simple. Only, unlike the cloud or the untied shoe, this event is painful. So, what is pain? Observe, there is the feeling. Is it not qualitatively distinct from other facts? I would say so, since the pain hurts like hell! And then, what is this?

Then of course, the matter of the ethical "badness" of the pain shows itself. this is an absolute. See the argument in the OP Metaethics and Moral Realism.

I read, studied and forgot and then studied again, etc. continental philosophy and phenomenology but I came to the conclusion that analytical was more powerful and then, when I got in touch with Quine and then with naturalist cognitivism I couldn't go back :-)
As I understand we have different positions on how we "are on the world" (never ending story within history of philosophy :-) ) let's try to build from statements where I think we agree. Little by little so that we can understand where the fundamental divergence is.

The divide I mentioned occurs where reason seeks to subsume the actualities of the world. Nonsense. the world's actualities are not categorial. — Constance

Right!
Then, if we stick to this idea for a moment, if the world's actualities are not categorical, don't you think that the tool (language) and the method (rely on reason) of continental philosophy is not appropriate by itself?
Symbols and categories are the food of reason but they represent a way of being in the world, not the world itself. If I'm in a world where the Earth is assumed flat, I would wonder what is there beyond the oceans? where does the Earth ends? because the category Earth for me is represented by certain properties, being flat. This simple assumption would generate a world of ideas (illusive monsters at the end of the oceans).
If I stay within my house and just spend my time on survival activities I will never get to know that I'm fundamentally wrong. Only by observing the sun and the shadows and by creating technologies that allow me to observe the stars and measure certain movements I could at the end, as Copernicus (and others before him) did, get to know that my flat-Earth world makes no sense. This man that got out of his "house" and experienced the world in a richer way was able to create new categories and new technologies that allowed him to better understand the world.

If you agree with this principle, wouldn't you agree that it is more likely that neuroscience gives you the right tools and categories to better understand what Husserl called phenomenology?
You can say that technology is the way of being modern human's (Heidegger) but isn't language itself a contingent technology that emerged from a very successful nervous system? Instead of relying on the categories "meaning" and "sense" as used and understood by Heidegger and Dreyfus, shouldn't we open the black-box?, the brain, and analyze it using the new senses we have created (EEG,  MEG, fMRI, photon migration tomography, transcranial magnetic simulation, etc.). Don't they have something new to show us related to the categories we create?Shouldn't we give a chance to the transcendence of heterophenomenology? Traditional phenomenology accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence.I guess you see this more a risk to fall into reductionism?

here is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings — Metaphysician Undercover

:up:

So once you complete that turn in the turning point, and you observe the sensation, it is just another event no different than any other event as an event. — Constance

It's not "an event" though, that's a misrepresentation, and you ought to be able to see this. There is a huge multitude of things going on all required for me to feel pain. You cannot reduce pain to "an event".

It's not "an event" though, that's a misrepresentation, and you ought to be able to see this. There is a huge multitude of things going on all required for me to feel pain. You cannot reduce pain to "an event". — Metaphysician Undercover

It is about the multitude of things no more than logic is about the multitude of axonally connected neurons. Pain is NOT reducible. Such complexities are only analytical correspondences. When experience the horror of being, say, tortured you are not IN the event having a "gee my neurons are very excited" experience. Such an idea is patently absurd.

But you also encounter this is such a reductive attempt: When you make the move to higher ground analytically, looking to physical brain activities, in the act of data extraction in the observation of the brain, you are not working from outside perspective looking at the brain. You are LOOKING. Literally a product of brain activity and precisely the kind of thing you are supposed to be analyzing. This is the most obvious form of question begging imaginable.

The pain is what is evidently there, unproblematic in what it is. The reduction is on your part: you take what is clear as a bell, the screaming pain and claim this is not what it really is. It's explanatory grounding is elsewhere. Well, of you are doing a scientific analysis on thephysical anatomy of pain, then fine. But that is not this here at all.

You are a moral realist?? As am I, and I argue for this frequently. There are few takers on this as it requires a break with the familiar world. Unfortunately, what I consider the most penetrating reading is the least accessible.

Why are you a moral realist? — Constance

At this point, I am moral-realism-adjacent. I think most people are moral realists, but are aware that it is taboo to actually declare oneself as such, so they devise other moral theories in order to mask their moral realism.

For all practical intents and purposes, moral realism (in the form of moral egoism) seems to be the only viable way to be.

If you agree with this principle, wouldn't you agree that it is more likely that neuroscience gives you the right tools and categories to better understand what Husserl called phenomenology?
You can say that technology is the way of being modern human's (Heidegger) but isn't language itself a contingent technology that emerged from a very successful nervous system? Instead of relying on the categories "meaning" and "sense" as used and understood by Heidegger and Dreyfus, shouldn't we open the black-box?, the brain, and analyze it using the new senses we have created (EEG,  MEG, fMRI, photon migration tomography, transcranial magnetic simulation, etc.). Don't they have something new to show us related to the categories we create?Shouldn't we give a chance to the transcendence of heterophenomenology? Traditional phenomenology accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence.I guess you see this more a risk to fall into reductionism? — Raul

Neuroscience is not the ticket into this. And a lengthy justification for what I think is true goes absolutely nowhere. As I see it, the only way to move forward, or at all, would be dialectically. Otherwise it would simply be a lot of wasted writing.

I would begin with a question, which is clean and to the point. Assume the material physicalism implied by your references to EEG's and MRI's and the rest, or even, if you're like Wittgenstein or Rorty, you are not ontologically committed to this, but you see this as the only way to talk at all about the world, foundationally or otherwise, making you a conditional physicalist. Whatever. But assume the above: In this this physical model of all things, how is it that anything out there (the mind independent world) gets in here (the mind)?

Just to note, to is intended to be taken for no more than it asks. Lengthy justifications for affirming the "outthereness" of things are beyond the parameters of the question. Just tell me how this "out there to in here" works.

At this point, I am moral-realism-adjacent. I think most people are moral realists, but are aware that it is taboo to actually declare oneself as such, so they devise other moral theories in order to mask their moral realism.

For all practical intents and purposes, moral realism (in the form of moral egoism) seems to be the only viable way to be. — baker

I think most people who think are not moral realists because they also think science defines the world and science cannot discuss morality; therefore, it is assumed morality has no meaning.

But then, most thinking people do not read Continental philosophy. Only here does one find the vehicle for affirming the ontology of ethics. It can do this because it takes as first philosophy meaning, not a model of the physical universe, which is infamously absent of discussions about meaning, or, the meaning of meaning: meta-meaning.

Alas, these arguments require a lot of hard reading and a reorientation of one's attitudes. I don't see why you are averse to Kierkegaard. He "speaks" (thought he does it with style, with far too much style--the extended metaphors are maddening) what meditation IS. Again, it is in a circuitous way that he does this and he is so embedded in the Greeks, post Kantians, Hegel, religious exegeses, and so on, that his references are often entangled things. But once one reads through all this, it is clear: Kierkegaard was right! Putting aside the colorful BS and the pseudonymous narratives, he was right, essentially, in analysis of the self vis a vis meditation. this is why he is called a father of existentialism.

nly way to move forward, or at all, would be dialectically. — Constance

Right, but not a solipsist dialectic but a dialectic coming from the dialogue with nature, our nature, the world through scientific method. This is the dialectic that has made progress human history.
We're not better philosophers or better people than past civilizations but we do have best technology and science than in the past. This is the actual, factual breakthrough.

In this this physical model of all things, how is it that anything out there (the mind independent world) gets in here (the mind)? — Constance

This one is an easy one. Do you have children? just observe them, see how the grow and learn,. Specially during the first 3-4 years. They interact with the external world in many ways, they copy the behaviour and sounds of the adults, they try and learn via a trial-error approach.
Their inner nervous system that initially is just worried about keeping homeostasis in a very simple way (crying when hungry) little by little gets more sophisticated.
Their brain absorb so many things during those 3-4 years, it creates so many mental objects.... should I follow? This is how the external and physical world gets in your brain.
Then the self rises as the baby interact in society and builds self-consciousness.... should I continue?

This one is an easy one. Do you have children? just observe them, see how the grow and learn,. Specially during the first 3-4 years. They interact with the external world in many ways, they copy the behaviour and sounds of the adults, they try and learn via a trial-error approach.
Their inner nervous system that initially is just worried about keeping homeostasis in a very simple way (crying when hungry) little by little gets more sophisticated.
Their brain absorb so many things during those 3-4 years, it creates so many mental objects.... should I follow? This is how the external and physical world gets in your brain.
Then the self rises as the baby interact in society and builds self-consciousness.... should I continue — Raul

Well, that is an easy answer. But I am putting the question to the simple affirmation itself. There is my cat under the table. Here am I. How is it that an epistemic connection is made such that cat over there gets into this brain thing such that I can say, I know the cat is under the table in a way that is sustainable independently of any experience making faculties. One might begin with, well, we perceive the cat, to which I ask, is perception like a mirror rendering a faithful representation, and you might reply; well, how would you reply?

I should add that solipsism is a term that complicates a simple question. If it is clear, to you, then just be clear. References to other theoretical terms already violate the terms of the question.

How is it that an epistemic connection is made such that cat over there gets into this brain thing such that I can say, I know the cat is under the table in a way that is sustainable independently of any experience making faculties. — Constance

My previous answer responds all these questions. Your interaction with cats and tables in your childhood created those mental objects in your mind as well as the rules on how they interact within the "model-of-the-world" you create as you grow.
Let's put it this way, a blind-born person would never be able the cat is black, the same way you would never be able to say the cut is under the table if do not experience the cat and the table and its relationship with the world.

One risk is though that once you get self-consciousness you start getting into what I think is the epistemic trap of the "meta-"... meta-physics, meta-ethics, meta-meta-meta-meaning"... there is nothing like that out there. It is an epistemological trap, we could say an intellectual epiphenomenon with no epistemic value outside yourself.
Humans, reflexive people, with a very developed self-consciousness can understand you concepts. Most europeans have studied continental philosophy and metaphysics so belief me I know what I'm talking about, but, again,it has no epistemic value outside us.

References to other theoretical terms already violate the terms of the question. — Constance

Well, "solipsism" doesn't complicate it for me, nevertheless is it you that is talking above about "epistemic connection"

Well, "solipsism" doesn't complicate it for me, nevertheless is it you that is talking above about "epistemic connection" — Raul

But I want to emphasize: all you said is evasive. Leave out the meta concerns. There is the cat, here am I, a perceiving agent. Two things. How does it work?

ll you said is evasive. — Constance

Why evasive? I have responded but looks like you need more. Here you have all you need to understand on the state-of-the-art on how the brain works:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=deahene+on+perception

By the way, the perceiving agent is your brain, not "you". You, yourself, is a construct within it.
You already know my manifesto on th eontology of the self:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/490508

Not to be difficult, but you should be suspicious yourself at your reluctance to be direct. What the self is is not asked. Nor have I asked how the brain works. Two objects. When a knowledge claim is made, on the physicalist's view of things, there are two objects, localized physical things. How does the relationship work such that one thing can know another? The actual content of the brain is not at issue. It could be a rock. The question is , causally antecedent to the brain, how does the cat thing even begin to make a first move to get into the brain thing such that I can say, I see (have visual knowledge of) the cat.

If I were to ask this of two plain objects, an offended car fender and a guard rail, say, one might simply say, the fender impacted the guard rail, it's body yielded to the extent is structure could not absorb the event, or something like this. Of course a brain is complicated, but so what? If the account begins with the object, the complexity of the brain doesn't enter into it; just keep things on the outside, as with the car fender.

I think most people who think are not moral realists because they also think science defines the world and science cannot discuss morality; therefore, it is assumed morality has no meaning. — Constance

I think that most people who think science defines the world are proponets of scietism, and therefore, very much assume that science is the one that has all the answers to moral questions.

most people who think

And you think there are people who don't think?

I don't see why you are averse to Kierkegaard. He "speaks" (thought he does it with style, with far too much style--the extended metaphors are maddening) what meditation IS.

I've been around Buddhism for some 20 years. In this time I have encountered so many ideas about what meditation "truly is" (and the supposedly peace-loving Buddhists and proponents of mindfulness viciously fighting over it) that by now, all of these ideas seem equally valid/invalid. It really depends on whom you ask.

I had turned to Kierkegaard to help me solve my problem with theism. It didn't help. All in all, he struck me as yet another theist basking in his faith. A faith I had no hope of obtaining. The idea of a leap to faith is to me like a spit in the face -- like someone telling me, "See, I can do it, but you can't!! Shame on you!"

I had turned to Kierkegaard to help me solve my problem with theism. It didn't help. All in all, he struck me as yet another theist basking in his faith. A faith I had no hope of obtaining. The idea of a leap to faith is to me like a spit in the face -- like someone telling me, "See, I can do it, but you can't!! Shame on you!" — baker

What the !@#$# did you read to get that impression?

Pain is NOT reducible. Such complexities are only analytical correspondences. — Constance

Analysis is reduction. What are you saying, pain ought not be analyzed? That's a value judgement which needs to be justified. How do you justify it, by insisting that pain is the absolute, metavalue? And you justify this by claiming that pain ought not be analyzed. That looks like a vicious circle to me.

But you also encounter this is such a reductive attempt: When you make the move to higher ground analytically, looking to physical brain activities, in the act of data extraction in the observation of the brain, you are not working from outside perspective looking at the brain. You are LOOKING. Literally a product of brain activity and precisely the kind of thing you are supposed to be analyzing. This is the most obvious form of question begging imaginable. — Constance

No, not quite, I'm not observing the brain, I'm observing the finger, the pain is in the finger. And it is the fact that the pain being in the finger makes the brain want to analyze it, which makes it appear to consist of parts.

The pain is what is evidently there, unproblematic in what it is. The reduction is on your part: you take what is clear as a bell, the screaming pain and claim this is not what it really is. It's explanatory grounding is elsewhere. Well, of you are doing a scientific analysis on thephysical anatomy of pain, then fine. But that is not this here at all. — Constance

I'm not denying the pain, I'm saying that there's more to it than just the pain. I feel the pain, I look at the place where it hurts, and I see the wound. Oh, there's a reason why I'm feeling this pain. PAIN is not the end of the inquiry, it's the beginning.

It's my standard grudge against theists, it has nothing to do with Kierkegaard specifically.

Ok Constance, let's go with how the cat gets into the brain.
At the beginning it works the same way a cat would get into the microchips of the computer that has a webcam. Light hits the cat that hits our eye that hits our visual cortex.
Our visual cortex contains already certain neurons that are sensitive to the cat as part of our learnings when we were children (I assume this brain has seen and interacted with cats before).
So those neurons related to cat-ness get activated (here it is exactly same way a CNN works), the image triggers the associated word cat, uit gramatics and it triggers as well lot of neural-networks that get activated that situate the cat within our model-of-the-world so that we get the cat and its properties, expectations activated, the cat-ness gets active.
Our brain is ready to interact with the cat.
Makes sense?

Pain is NOT reducible — Constance

It is not reducible I agree, naturalism (forget about word materialism) is not reductive because it actually expands our understanding on the power of biology in our brain instead.
I would say that dualists are the ones that have a "reduced" concept of the power of nature (matter, energy, however you want to call it) and lose time with what I think are naif and solipsistic intuitions of the meta-thinking that has not made any progress since Aristotle. Metaphysicians are always trying to reinvent the wheel (Kant, Heidegger, etc...), this is well accepted among philosophers.
The pain you feel in your finger can be induced in your brain from external people activating the specific group of neural network that trigger it using electromagnetic fields. Doing this you won't need the finger to feel the pain, we induce it. But you, subjectively will swear it is your finger burning !
If I disable those specific finger-pain related neural networks you will not feel that pain anymore even if I cut your finger.
Makes sense?
Let's go even beyond, we could trick you neural networks in a way that when I burn your finger you feel the pain in you ear. All this is possible and it is possible because all your pain is within the biology and architecture of your brain.

It is painful I know, but pain is in your brain.

Analysis is reduction. What are you saying, pain ought not be analyzed? That's a value judgement which needs to be justified. How do you justify it, by insisting that pain is the absolute, metavalue? And you justify this by claiming that pain ought not be analyzed. That looks like a vicious circle to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. I am saying that when one puts the analytic game in play, which is the taking apart of things, ethics does turn out to be a thing of parts. But in this analytic reduction, we discover a "part" that entirely resists analysis. The same is true for all things, really. I see the color yellow and analysis gives me talk about the electromagnetic spectrum, the comparative qualities vis a vis other colors, emotional values associated, and on and on. But the color itself? Just as a yellow "presence," there is nothing to say, for the saying contextualizes, which brings in what is NOT the presence. This is what being irreducible means. All language is contingent, analyzable, but that presence before me is not language.

The "circularity" you see in this is of course, not simply right, but rather profound: Did I not just "speak" to you about yellow telling you it was unspeakable? This is a fascinating philosophical passageway into post modern thinking. It gets "worse" not better, regarding the paradox of the understanding's being locked into language for interpreting the world, on the one hand, and on the other, being "impossibly" clear that yellow, a "given" sound, feeling, emotion, etc., are all in their "presence" not language at all!

No, not quite, I'm not observing the brain, I'm observing the finger, the pain is in the finger. And it is the fact that the pain being in the finger makes the brain want to analyze it, which makes it appear to consist of parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, but this is all "outside" the given phenomenon. Even the fact that the pain is in the finger is beyond, if you will, the "qualia" of pain. the analysis that brings the entire ethical issue at hand to its parts, then the recognition that there is a part, THE essential part that is not reducible, suspends all talk about brains and fingers and locality.

The hardest part of this is, to bring a little jargon into it, is to actually DO the phenomenological reduction, the release of the phenomenon that is before you to its bare essentials, its "pure" presence. See my comments just now on the problem this poses regarding language and objects.

I'm not denying the pain, I'm saying that there's more to it than just the pain. I feel the pain, I look at the place where it hurts, and I see the wound. Oh, there's a reason why I'm feeling this pain. PAIN is not the end of the inquiry, it's the beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Depends on what you are inquiring about. If you are dicussing human anatomy, pain gets very complex. But here, it is a phenomenological examination of pain. If you were an empirical scientist, you would have as your foundation a body of paradigms that go to work, always already there the moment an issue rises. Here is it the same, only we are in another field, that of phenomenology, which begins with the "thing itself" and moves into examinations of the structures of experience respecting the full value of the given as its foundational assumptions.

All language is contingent, analyzable, but that presence before me is not language. — Constance

Of course it is not language. It is about biology of your brain.
Capgras syndrome, phantom-limb-syndrome... we can induce you the feeling of someone following you just increasing certain neurotransmitters and certain hormones in your blood and brain... and you would swear someone is following you, doesn't this change the way you understand "presence" and the "feeling of presence"? And you still think you can rely on your metaphysical ideas of the "pure presence"?

We can even make someone more or less religious, believe more or less in deities, or make him believe he is god by stimulating activity in certain areas of the brain (see Ramachandran research). Doesn't this change the idea we have about religion?

A tumor can change your personality (see the case of pedophile the medicine discover he was pedophile because of a tumor in his brain, famous one you can google). Doesn't this change the idea we have about pedophile? It challenge our justice system and our values (google it, is really worth it).

Ok Constance, let's go with how the cat gets into the brain.
At the beginning it works the same way a cat would get into the microchips of the computer that has a webcam. Light hits the cat that hits our eye that hits our visual cortex.
Our visual cortex contains already certain neurons that are sensitive to the cat as part of our learnings when we were children (I assume this brain has seen and interacted with cats before).
So those neurons related to cat-ness get activated (here it is exactly same way a CNN works), the image triggers the associated word cat, uit gramatics and it triggers as well lot of neural-networks that get activated that situate the cat within our model-of-the-world so that we get the cat and its properties, expectations activated, the cat-ness gets active.
Our brain is ready to interact with the cat.
Makes sense? — Raul

Of course.

It is the questions begged that this hinges on. You say light hits the cat, and I ask, light? Cat? I should first be clear that I am working with a model of physical materialism, not phenomenology of ontological dualism weak or otherwise. Just a world of material things bound to the necessity of casual sufficiency, which I take as provisionally unassailable (the provision being that we not talk about grounds for its assailability).
The next question I ask is, these causal events where the light hits the cat, then reflects, hits the eye, on to the retina and so on: in order for this to constitute a knowledge yielding event, there must be something epistemological that carries the object, the cat, to my interior world. Causality doesn't do this. I mean, the dented fender of my car does not "know" the guardrail that caused the dent. You can say the matter with knowledge is much more complex than this, which is obviously true, but prior to the 3 to 4 pound mass of neurons, where the light reflects off the cat, this is far more simple. How is it that the reflective event "over there" off the cat, can carry, if you will, the "ofness" that eventually becomes my knowledge OF the cat?
Ordinarily, one would not ask such a question the case of photos, videos, digital or otherwise, because we already have a model of the original object in mind, confirmed in familiarity. All one has to do is observe the original, compare it to the photo, and you have confirmation of verisimilitude. But here it is very different: it is the original that is in question, and there is no model beyond this that can be brought in for comparison. All models beg the same question!

It is not reducible I agree, naturalism (forget about word materialism) is not reductive because it actually expands our understanding on the power of biology in our brain instead.
I would say that dualists are the ones that have a "reduced" concept of the power of nature (matter, energy, however you want to call it) and lose time with what I think are naif and solipsistic intuitions of the meta-thinking that has not made any progress since Aristotle. Metaphysicians are always trying to reinvent the wheel (Kant, Heidegger, etc...), this is well accepted among philosophers.
The pain you feel in your finger can be induced in your brain from external people activating the specific group of neural network that trigger it using electromagnetic fields. Doing this you won't need the finger to feel the pain, we induce it. But you, subjectively will swear it is your finger burning !
If I disable those specific finger-pain related neural networks you will not feel that pain anymore even if I cut your finger.
Makes sense?
Let's go even beyond, we could trick you neural networks in a way that when I burn your finger you feel the pain in you ear. All this is possible and it is possible because all your pain is within the biology and architecture of your brain.

It is painful I know, but pain is in your brain. — Raul

On this last part: undoubtedly pain is in your brain, but then the question is begged: where is the brain? Jump to the chase: If you cannot affirm that causal networks are analytically epistemological, then you cannot justify that your knowledge of the cat is about that "whatever over there" based on a physicalist's, materialist's, or naturalist's model of the world, for all models like this would have to show the same thing: magical knowledge at a distance. Why magical? An idea is only as good as its justification.
So, there you are, a competent surgeon with an awake patient probing around the brain looking for responses so as not to remove anything vital and it is clear: brain and experience correspond. To argue against this is folly. But the issue was never about our functioning, pragmatic grasp of the world, but about whether your grasp of the world could be about something OTHER than pragmatics. Pragmatists like Dewey, Rorty and even Heidegger (his ready to hand instrumentality) say your knowledge is inherently pragmatic. There is no magical "reaching out" beyond one's apperceptual faculties, rather, the object that we see, hear, and so on, is a pragmatic/conceptual of-a-piece presence. If you take electromagnetic fields to be in their exhaustive analysis about what is "out there," independent of experience, then you would be committing the metaphysical fallacy of positing things unseen.

Existentialists are anything but metaphysicians. They are phenomenologists, committed to a limitation of ideas to what actually is presented.

What does this have to do with ethics? Physiclist, materialist, naturalist (it matters not here) models yield to models of meaning and value. We can now proceed to construct a new model of the world, one in which values are not subordinated the "metaphysics" of science, and the subjective/objective division at the ontological level simply vanishes.

Of course it is not language. It is about biology of your brain.
Capgras syndrome, phantom-limb-syndrome... we can induce you the feeling of someone following you just increasing certain neurotransmitters and certain hormones in your blood and brain... and you would swear someone is following you, doesn't this change the way you understand "presence" and the "feeling of presence"? And you still think you can rely on your metaphysical ideas of the "pure presence"?

We can even make someone more or less religious, believe more or less in deities, or make him believe he is god by stimulating activity in certain areas of the brain (see Ramachandran research). Doesn't this change the idea we have about religion?

A tumor can change your personality (see the case of pedophile the medicine discover he was pedophile because of a tumor in his brain, famous one you can google). Doesn't this change the idea we have about pedophile? It challenge our justice system and our values (google it, is really worth it). — Raul

Of course, all of this is true. Too true, meaning too commonplace for philosophy. You are thinking a a world of unquestioned assumptions about knowledge relationships with the world. This matter here is about the questions that are rightly ignored by functioning scientists. Science needs to know its place, however.