I wrote this over four years ago. Reading it now it is as if someone else wrote these words. What remains the same, however, is that I find the reasoning compelling. Do you find any flaw in the reasoning?
Help out an old man on the precipice. How is it that there is to us an external world? I am not doubting that there is an external world. We would agree, I think, that we are only speaking metaphorically when we speak of experiencing ourselves from the inside. Why is it not equally metaphorical to speak of experiencing an outside. Space after all is not a sense perception. Isn't it a construction of the brain? A part of that construction is that we experience the world as something apart from the very brain that constructed it. O ghost of Parmenides!! There must be some simple answer for this question. You are all sensible, smart, sane folk. Help out a simple-minded old man! I have not yet leaped to the conclusion that there is no external world at all. I know you have papers to write or grade and a multitude of mundane matters to attend to and your share of sisyphean labor as well. And surely more worthwhile things to think about. As do I, except I can't shake this sense of the unreality of reality. Perhaps over the weekend. Or direct me to a wise man who can explain this to me, other than a psychotherapist.
Day Two: No help has arrived. So I'll try again.
I am arguing that all input from the external world is translated into the binary system of the neuronal process. The brain then recreates the external world as a hypothesis that it is continuously testing. The recreation is, however, never the world as it is. Even the externality of the world is a creation of the brain, not just colors or any other qualities. There is, so to speak, no transparency between our experience and the objects of that experience. Our experience is always hypothetical; we walk through our world through our own internal projection of it. It is unnerving to me.
Day Three: Help has come from my old dialogue partner, Jordan Fleischer.
Jordan Fleisher: I definitely agree with your ideas about our internal world. One thing I think we must consider though is that there is a definite connection between the external and internal world. Although our experience is only a hypothesis of the external world, our experience only exists because of the external world. After all, our brains create our experience, and our brains are part of that external world. Does this make sense? So while our experience is just an internal projection, I think that necessary connection is what enables us to feel as if the external world must also exist.
Hugh Himwich: I agree that the external world must exist, but radically and perhaps necessarily other than we can ever possibly know. (Reminds me here of some statements about God.) We are caught up in existence and are part of what we speak of as external-- but what really exists is neither external nor internal.
Jordan Fleischer: If what really exists is neither external nor internal, what really exists?
Hugh Himwich: There is no way of knowing. The external exists only from our perspective. The most we could say is: Not This. We are always and everywhere a negation of being. This does not mean that science cannot discover aspects of reality that are useful, but we often mistake our ability to make nature work for us for knowledge of existence itself. It may be existence is so radically different from our understanding -- no matter how efficacious that understanding may be -- that to talk about advancement in knowledge is like talking about progress in our understanding of what it is like to be another person. We may be able to seize upon patterns and even make predictions, we may even discover the neurological correlate for consciousness, but what it is like to be that other person necessarily eludes us. So too existence.
Jordan Fleischer: I think I understand your argument. If I'm not mistaken, we can never trust our perception of the external world to be an accurate reflection of the external world as it really is. However, would you agree that by the simple fact that we do perceive an external world, an external world of some sort necessarily exists? I agree that all we know is the external world from our perspective, but I feel that because our perception exists, some sort of external world must be causing our perception.
Hugh Himwich: I agree that the external world exists as a kind of mode of being, the other mode being the internal. Shades of Spinoza here. I think I am proposing something more radical, however, than that our perceptions of the external world are merely hypothetical. I am arguing that externality itself is a construction as well as the internal and that two really are one. This "one" is inaccessible from the internal side (1st person) or the external (3rd person). The mind/body problem results from this dual inaccessibility with the result that this problem is not resolvable from either the 1st person or 3rd person perspective. Consequently, I argue that the external world is an illusion (as is the internal), not in the sense that the external world is nothing but that it does not exist as we suppose it to be, that is external. Reality is not out there or in my mind. It transcends both objectivity and subjectivity. We know this because of the failure of either to account for what we are. We ourselves are the proof that the two are one. We just can't get to it other than by being. I am proposing a different kind of existential philosophy.