Contemporary academic psychologists and neurobiologists, as well as contemporary academic philosophers, if they want to sound trendy and give the impression and appearance of being sophisticated, like to talk about how the human brain creates experience, and the various biases that manifest in this creation.
But we, as Objectivists, must ask the real questions: The human brain creates experience... from what? From magic? From fairy dust? From thin air? If the human brain creates experience from a source in the external objective world, but what we ourselves experience is merely created by our brains, then how could we, as thinkers, ever gain knowledge of the external world, since we would have no direct access to it? But, if experience is not created from a source in the external world, then from what source is it created? Where does your brain exist, if not in the external world, and, if you have knowledge of your brain itself being in the external world, then from where did this knowledge come, if not from the external world?
Their belief collapses into a contradiction, and in a hurry, too, if anybody actually bothers to examine it in a logical way. If experience is real, then something is real, so where could any real experience come from, if not from reality? It's like the reverse of Descartes' classic motto "I think, therefore I am": I experience the external physical world; therefore, the external physical world must be the thing that I am experiencing.
For example, if I brush my teeth, then I feel my teeth, and I hold the toothbrush, and I feel the toothbrush brushing my teeth; each of these things exists physically outside of my physical brain, therefore it adds nothing beneficial to our philosophical analysis to say that my brain created my experience of my teeth and the toothbrush and brushing my teeth. Yes, I can only taste the tastes of the toothpaste that my tongue has the taste buds with which to sense and that my brain has the neurons with which to understand, but that only means that my point of view limits the scope of what I can experience, it does not mean that the things which I actually can experience are subjective.
Another example of this: the human eye cannot see ultraviolet light, but that does not prove that the colors we can see, red, green, blue, etc., are subjective. The ocean is blue, and apples are red (or green, and their insides are yellow or white), and if the blue ocean exists, then the fact that it is blue is an objective fact, and this is what we see when we look at the ocean and see a blue ocean. The blueness of the ocean, and the experience of that color blueness, is the ocean itself, is the ocean as a thing in itself, and that perceived thing is what we experience when we see the blue ocean.
The objectivity of existence does not say that you perceive everything, instead it only says that what you perceive exists objectively, so it is perfectly plausible, and compatible with this account, that what you have the actual ability to perceive is limited to your point of view. For example, if you are facing forward, then you can only see what is in front of you, however, if you see a rose garden in front of you, then that rose garden objectively exists, despite the fact that your point of view limits you to see only this rose garden, and not, for example, the brick wall behind you.
Either reality is objective, or else it is subjective. There is no middle ground. As I have written elsewhere, some things, like our artistic preferences, or our sexual orientations and romantic desires, are entirely subjective. But they are subjective only in the sense of moral objectivism or moral subjectivism, not in the sense of epistemic subjectivism or epistemic objectivism: that one person cannot pass valid judgment upon another person's desires or tastes, and desires and tastes can be neither right nor wrong. To the extent that a preference or a desire does in fact exist in reality, it, too, exists objectively. However, experience itself, and the objects of our sensory experience, are objective. Existence exists objectively.
Inevitably, because these idiots say that the human brain creates experience, which would require the contradiction that we have no direct access to the external world and yet we know that the human brain is creating our experiences from content in the external world, their answer is that we have direct access to knowledge of the external world, not from our experience, but by means of our intuition, or instinct, or faith, of phenomenological revelation. So, their neuropsychological false premises always cause them to collapse into philosophy, which then causes their philosophy to collapse into religion and mysticism, of the worst variety. With my theory of epistemology, no need for this sort of stupidity exists. The experience of driving a car, for example, is itself merely the act of that person driving a car, in objective reality, which one experiences, the experience of a thing is what the objective real thing looks like to that person, and so consciousness is merely the name for objective reality as experienced from the point of view of the person who is aware of it.
Likewise, the perception of something, for example the taste of an apple, is the perceived thing itself, is really the thing in itself as experienced by a person, for example the taste of an apple is the apple itself as perceived by the tongue, and the experience of an apple is the apple, and the consciousness that experiences it is the person who tastes it. The perception of an apple is not a perception, it is an apple. And, in a sort of similar way, words in a language are merely symbols or signs or representations that show a thing to the mind’s eye, such that dog is not a word, dog is a four-legged canine animal, which can be shown to a listener or reader by speaking or writing the word “dog.”
Essential logic says that a thing is a set of properties, and, if you can define the property or properties that are the essence of a thing as that type of thing, and then prove what other properties a thing will have because it has those essential properties, then those things, as the consequence of the essence, must necessarily and universally be true for all things of that type, so I prove truths that are necessarily and universal, but at the same time I hold that physical reality consists only of specific concrete real objects, because essences are properties of real physical things as analyzed by essential logic, and the surface properties of a thing as a set of properties can be known directly by means of sensory perception, so the essences are not themselves real abstract beings in some other spiritual or intellectual realm known by means of faith or revelation or intuition. Instead, knowledge of essences and consequences as necessary and universal truth in the physical world comes from logic and reason and perception and awareness.
You can call my analysis above by the name of "the contradiction of subjectivism," or Russell Hasan's Paradox, that, if our experience of reality is subjective, then we cannot directly know objective reality by means of perception and sensory experience, but then we could not know what our supposedly subjective experiences are actually of, such that if we experience an external physical world, if we see the ocean, taste an apple, or know what brushing our teeth is like, this proves that the world that we experience exists objectively, because we have knowledge of it from our experience.
If you hold true to the belief that your brain creates your experience, then you either collapse into a contradiction, that your brain is creating the experience of things outside of your brain, or abandon your subjectivism and embrace objectivism, or else you must concede that you actually know absolutely nothing, and you have no idea what the fuck you are really experiencing when you have an experience, or else you must fall back on the position that intuition or instinct or revelation is your source of knowledge for what you experience and what those things really are.
Some philosophers seek to solve my paradox by means of what they call "inter-subjectivity," that your brain creates your experience, but, because everyone else's brains are also creating their experience, and we all experience the same world that we share which we are all in, our shared subjectivity is what creates objectivity. But this is like saying that a shared dream or a shared hallucination is real, just because multiple people experience the same dream or the same hallucination. And my paradox refutes this, too, in this way: how do you know that the other people in your shared world are real? You either know that other people exist, on the basis of your sensory perceptions of them, your experiences of them, and a set of valid logical inferences that you draw from that experience: you see someone, hear them talk, see them smile, engage them in a conversation, observe their behavior, so you infer that this other person is someone like you, is a real person. If not, then the other people in the subjective experience that you brain creates, would be just as subjective, and unreal, as everything else in your experience, so either you would have no direct knowledge that other people exist, and so you cannot derive your objectivity from their shared subjectivity, or your knowledge that other people are real would come from intuition or instinct or revelation--and what is both good and bad about intuition, is that no one knows how it works, and that is the whole point, so you would require blind trust and faith in intuition, and abandon reason and rationality, or you would still know nothing, and be limited to solipsism, that the world you experience is just in your own mind. Inter-subjectivity as a solution to my paradox merely collapses, again, into my paradox.
The one and only solution to my paradox is strict philosophical epistemological Objectivism. If your brain creates your experience, then how could you ever have any direct access to the external world, ever, at all, so how could you ever know that an external world exists, other than by a process of transcending your subjective experience to a spiritually known objectivity by means of intuition, which is pure mysticism and faith and nonsense and religious bullshit, and requires completely abandoning reason and rationality and logic? And even that is not rational knowledge of objective reality, it is merely faith in intuition of objective reality.
Three other attempts to solve or refute my paradox: First - The human brain creates experience, but you can tell the difference between the parts of your experience that are subjective and the parts which are objective. You can tell the difference: how? Why? On what basis? How could you even have a concept of objectivity to begin with, as a starting point for this analysis, if all of your experiences were created by your brain, and none of your experiences were the direct experience of objective existence?
Second - the human senses are subjective, but, for example, camera video footage is objective, and scientific test instruments' measurements are objective, so you can use such things as a measure or basis of knowing objective reality. Yes, that's great, except that, from a person's own subjective point of view, if they watch video, that video is within their experience, therefore they would think their brain had created the experience of the video footage, or, if you read the results of scientific tests using scientific instruments, you read those results with your eyes, the test results are things you see, so the experience of reading the test results would be subjective, so the test results themselves, too, would be entirely subjective.
Third – there is the argument that how the human brain processes information is very important to our experiences, and this has been proven by science, in research study after research study. Yes, but that does not solve my paradox, because “how the human brain processes information” is the means by which an experience is obtained, it is not the content of the experience itself. How the brain works says how we get experiences; it does not say what an experience is. There is no reason to assume that the means of experience somehow constitute the contents of the experience itself, if the experience is of something in the external world that exists objectively, unless that position was reasoned and logically deduced from some basis in reality, and I do not accept that there is a proof of such a position anywhere in objective existence.
Your brain, and how your brain processes information, as your cognitive point of view, might limit what you have the ability to experience, much as your eye’s point of view limits what you have the ability to see, but this does not prove that the actual experiences or perceived things themselves are subjective. The scope of what you can experience, which is defined by your means of experience, is not identical to an actual real experience, which is defined by the external world in objective reality. An actual real experience is identical to the actual real thing that it is the experience of, in other words, an experience is identical to the thing which is experienced. If you see something in the external world, then something in the external world is what you see. And the proof of this is that what you see is physically located outside your own skull and brain, in space and time, if you see a table over there, in the corner of a room, then you see a table in the external world. The external world is the world outside your mind, outside your brain, which exists objectively, and the meaning of “objectively” is that it exists independently of, and separately from, the means of perception, means of awareness, means of consciousness and means of experience, and of the acts of perception and awareness.
If the means of experience does not bias the contents of experience (and there is no proof that it does), then we can directly experience the external world, and this is true even if we experience reality by means of our brains. I could go further and assert that reality, in other words existence, merely refers to space and time which exists objectively. If you analyze these arguments using strict, coherent, rational logic, they collapse into contradictions. Your knowledge of objectivity would itself have been within, and have come from, a purely subjective experience or a set of purely subjective experiences, unless you began by directly perceiving things that objectively exist in reality, as your experience. And the philosophy which says that this is true, is called Objectivism.
For citations as to who inspired this analysis, I must cite, in general, to Ayn Rand, and also to Mortimer Adler, who himself cited to Thomas of Aquinas, who himself cited to Aristotle.
