So now you’re just going to double down on your metaphysical realism? And it’s not just ‘most scientists’ but also now ‘most ordinary people’ who think like you? You’re sure you’re not just projecting your own metaphysical dogma here DK? A dogma reinforced by the echo chamber of ‘most’ of your scientific and ordinary friends? These latter ‘ordinary friends’ of yours I take it have already been informed by you of their philosophical ‘insanity’ and now reject the ordinary person’s very widely held assumption of naive (direct) realism, that we see the physical objects themselves?
Perhaps we could even run a poll if this forum supports it to see what ‘most Buddhists’ think:
“Do you believe that all sankhara / phenomenal experiences are just the mere appearances caused by an external world of physical objects: Yes or No?”
I’d also like to see your vox populi survey of ‘ordinary people’, here’s a script for you:
[DKervick walks down Everyman Street to meet Jane and John Doe, DK speaks]
“Hi, I’m Dan Kervick and I’d like to talk to you about my hand.”
[Waves hand]
“This is in fact not my real hand!”
[Points to waving hand]
“My real hand exists in a world external to this phenomenal world we only appear to be standing in. It’s just that … what appears to be my hand…”
[Waves hand]
“Is like a picture of my real hand… except not literally of course, it’s just a simile you understand… it’s more sort of an indirect indication of the real physically external hand … which it itself isn’t … and here’s the proof!”
[Waves hand]
“Now you see it”
[Puts bag over hand]
“and now you don’t!”
[Takes bag off hand with a magician’s flourish]
“Now you see it again! You see, my hand exists independently of our seeing it here!”
[Waves hand yet again]
“Thus you MUST BELIEVE in the existence of the external world!”
[Stares intently like a scientologist going in for the sales pitch]
“Either that or you’re obviously both ‘insane’ followers of some sort of naively solipsistic 17th century idealism. Well, what’s it gonna be… YES OR NO!”
[Jane and John look at Dan’s hand, then look at Dan, then look at one another. Jane speaks]
“Thanks Dan but we’re members of the Church of Hilary Putnam and the Latter Day Pragmatists, perhaps you’ve not heard of Him and His Teachings? Now while we respect your right to proselytise your dogmatically realist delusions both John and I think that this sort of metaphysical jibber jabber does a public disservice to philosophy and science. However, if we can agree to disagree about the supposed existence of your supersensuous external world [John smirks discreetly] we’re off to the Cartesian Omni-theatre in town if you’d like to join us? There’s a new multi sensory film by Dennett about these homunculi who visit a Cartesian Omni-theatre to view the projected representations of their experiences in the external world viewing themselves viewing themselves in an infinite regression. It’s quite hilarious!!”
[DKervick waves hand but this time with just his phenomenal middle finger raised. With this mere appearance of their invitation’s rejection, Jane and John move on with their ordinary people’s business in the ordinary people’s phenomenal world, fully captivated by the flux of phenomenal experiences that constitute it without having to bother with metaphysical dogmas]
“Clearly” … is also not an argument, rather it seems to be more an appeal for my agreement with your non-argument for how your phenomenal hand experiences ‘correspond’ to their external physical hand objects. And the clarity of this realist argument is precisely an ongoing, perhaps never-ending, debate between realist and anti-realist philosophers. This is my point here regarding your realist bravado, your realism remains philosophically contentious rather than, as you would have it, a proven fact that forms the basis of all scientific thinking. Your certainty here is not only misplaced and unexplicated but also rather naive. But I do agree that this realist naivete may represent a dominant belief system amongst ‘most’ scientists who are generally not also philosophers, being busy as they are ‘doing science’. So shall we agree to disagree here that the external world either does or doesn’t exist, or is or is not just a way of interpreting our relation to phenomenal things?
Shall we now discuss perception itself?
Now putting aside the question of whether your metaphysical realism is true or not (which I believe is also scientifically unprovable), what is it that you would say perception consists in, given your realist interpretation of it? You’ve sort of denied perception being like pictures (representations) of external objects, and sort of denied that this would mean perceptions are ‘internal mental processes’ that map onto external objects, but then you say perceptions are sort of indirect indications of external objects… I think your difficulty here is very much at the heart of the metaphysical tangle all realist notions of perception get into. But that’s to be expected as we simply don’t have ANY particularly coherent model for how phenomenal experience and its perceptions might relate to the physical/phenomenal body and world, realist or otherwise.
So from a purely scientific perspective on sense perception, and putting aside phenomenal experiences for the moment, we have ‘external objects’ or as I’d prefer, physical phenomena external to the body’s sensory organs, such as radiative light, heat, acoustic waves and kinetic energies impacting the skin, chemicals in air and food and so on. These physical phenomena make contact with the sensory organs that then produce electrochemical stimulations in the peripheral and central nervous systems through to the whole brain … the NaK pump mechanism of the neural network.
Put simply, these ‘external objects’ impact our sense organs producing physical stimulations that in a functional sense produce neural patterns related to those objects. I take it you would identify these physically internal neural patterns, which are visible now via fMRI, as being the ‘external’ physical analogue of your ‘indirect’ phenomenal experiences, such as when you see your phenomenal hand there at the end of your phenomenal arm in this phenomenal world? Is this correct?
In this sense your phenomenal hand, being your visual and tactile experiences of that hand, is indirectly related to the ‘external’ physical hand by virtue of these physically internal neural processes? The phenomenal experience thus corresponds indirectly with the physical hand via the brain pattern correlated with that experience?
Is this more or less what you would intend to mean by your notion of an ‘external world’ beyond the phenomenal world?