The Psychological Projection of Internality and Externality

Here I wish to lay out the logical problem regarding perception that EOP resolves. 

1. EOP addresses many problems. The mind-body problem is one of them. I call it the two-world problem and as I go on you will see why.
2. The mind-body problem becomes clear when you follow the chain of events involved in sense perception, i.e. the perceiving we do with our five senses.
3. When discussing sense perception, since the beginning of philosophy, it has always been traditional to start with eyesight as it is the most familiar to us. But the principles at work in eyesight are roughly the same for each of the five senses. To keep things simple we also begin with eyesight.
4. When PERSON X looks at a thing, that thing does not go through his eye into his head. Rather light that reflects off the thing goes through the lens of the eye, strikes a nerve where the particular frequency of light is translated into a frequency of electricity that represents it. This electricity carrying this representation then passes down the optic nerve to the brain. There this data is somehow converted into a color experience that PERSON X has. Science does not know how this occurs, but the testimony of PERSON X suggests it.
5. Therefore, it is thought that all visual experience occurs in the brain, meaning this conversion to conscious experience takes place somehow in the brain.
6. This repeats with the other four senses, but we won’t go over them here to get to our real point — the two-world problem.
7. Therefore, we only actually experience these internal states. We don’t experience the external world, only a representation of it.
8. Since our sense experience constitutes our whole world as far as we are concerned, we can call this our world. But according to science it’s not the real world. The real world is outside of us. It is literally called “the external world” or “physical world” or “real world.”
9. Thus we effectively have two worlds, a real world inside our brain we perceive directly and an external world we only infer from our internal experience. We assume it must exist causing our internal experience.
10. So now we see what I mean by saying we are left with two worlds, and why this causes problems. First, we have no proof there is an external world. Remember, we only perceive our internal one. Even if there is an external world out there, because we can’t perceive it we have no way to compare it to our internal one. So, how do we know our internal experience is a fair representation of it? There’s also the contradiction that this entire narrative about sense organs, nerves, and brains is a description of things we observe with our senses. Yet, by these same principles what we perceive with our senses is supposedly not real.

This is the logical problem.

The problem is the result of applying the notion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ where it doesn’t belong. It is not obvious that conscious experience occurs in our brain. Though there are reasons we have assumed it does.  

For instance, if you cover your eyes, ears, and nose, you block out the incoming data of sight, sound, and smell. This does indeed suggest to us that something is entering our head. Snip the nerves going to your brain from these sense organs or cut out a portion of your brain that appears active on an EEG when you are perceiving, and you likewise interrupt these same pathways and prevent sensations from occurring. These do seem like evidence experience happens in your brain. It certainly shows us that the sense organs, the nerves that lead away from them to the brain, and chemical and electrical brain activity all play essential roles in sense perception. But what it does not prove is that conscious experience occurs in our brain. 

Now, look again at the image above depicting the mind-body problem. Notice that it has a cartoon image of a tree representing the ‘experience’ of a tree assumed to be occurring inside a brain or mind somehow.

The cartoon of a tree is meant to depict our ‘internal world experience,’ which in turn is imagined to be a representation of a second ‘real external  world’ that we don’t experience. 

Hence, the two-worlds or mind and body.

But, stop to consider what we mean when we speak of something being inside another thing. We are referring to a commonly experienced  spatial relation between two objects. We learn this relation from everyday observations of it, where one thing is inside another. 

Hence, we are effectively projecting this relation found in our unreal internal experience outward onto a theoretical real external world we assume is causing it. We are projecting an effect onto its cause.

Some people like the 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley denied the existence of an external world, opting instead to develop a system around the notion of the internal world of each person only. His view has come to be known as subjective idealism. Others, like the 20th century Canadian philosopher Daniel Dennett, denied the internal subjective world, dismissing consciousness itself as a linguistic confusion and something that doesn’t actually occur — likening people to metaphysically confused ATM machines. His view is known as machine functionalism.

I, on the other hand, deny both internal and external. The idea of an internal world is predicated on the notion of an external one, and visa versa. I consider both to be absurd. 

I wish now to explain why they don’t conform to any kind of common sense. And I want to follow this up by explaining why I continue to think the first steps of the scientific narrative regarding sense perception are true, even if I deny the last step. 

Sense organs like tongues are phenomena that we can experience. We don’t just have a theory that we have tongues. They are easily observed.

The same is true of nerves and brains. Neural synapses can be mapped with electron microscopes, which we include as a form of observation that confirms they are physical things. 

However, subjective experience is not that kind of thing. The subjective human experience of seeing the color magenta or hearing a soprano singing an E6 is not something located in space like a tongue or a synapse. Conscious experience is an act we perform, not a thing you can put in a glass jar like a piece of candy.

This is why the physical sciences, which are limited to what they can observe, are stumped by conscious experience. Neurons are in the brain. Experience is not. The entire approach of thinking in terms of inside and outside when applied to the metaphysics of perception is wrong.

Before I explain the alternative, I wish to point out that the notion of a real outer world in contrast to a representative and illusory internal one is as ancient as philosophy. Aristotle called our internal experience a phantasm. Plato called it a shadow of an external reality we could not directly perceive. The notion of throwing out the duality between an external reality and an internal illusion that represents it is new.

Two new ways of thinking were not around in the time of Plato or Aristotle. Nor were they around for Descartes or the Wachowski brothers when they wrote The Matrix. And machine functionalists like Dennett were too preoccupied with denying consciousness to notice them. They are process theories and evolution. 

Evolution, which comes from a Latin root meaning unfolding, was only first seriously applied to biology in the 19th century by Charles Darwin, though today the concept of an evolution is applied in nearly every field of science. Likewise, process theories are best exemplified by plate tectonics, a field developed in the 1970s.

When the thinking of an unfolding in stages over time, EOP is the result. The evolution of a series of perceptual schemas produces the world of our experience that we call the Universe. If you read about the process as it is described in either of my books The Evolution of Perception (2004) or Evolution of Perception Re-Explained (2021), you will see why the sense organs, nerves, and brain are necessary and how and why their arising out of the process was necessary.

One of the implications of EOP is that the world you see, smell, taste, and feel is the actual physical world. There is no other. The twin notions of an internal world and an external causal one you can’t see is abandoned as frivolous. 

Another important implication of it that conforms with common sense is that your head and brain and sense organs are only in the real world you perceive. And the world you experience isn’t in your physical head; your physical head is in the world you experience — right where you find it.

The main difference between the old and the new is that in the new we begin with perception in a simple state, which evolved and gives us the phenomenal world we see. We and it emerge from this psychic process. That is why we are actually in the phenomenal world, and there isn’t another.

In short, EOP explains how the world we experience evolved rather than positing another one we can’t see that mysteriously caused it.