The Boundaries of Human Knowledge A Phenomenological Epistemology or Waking Up in a Strange Place

ion and reification, that shed light on the fundamental principles behind Quantifying Knowledge and Experience 7 perceptual knowledge. These issues are discussed in chapter 8. Models of conscious experience often go astray by defining experience in such vague or abstracted terms that the explanation is no clearer than the aspect of consciousness that it supposedly explains. I intend to ground my discussion of consciousness by beginning at the lowest, most concrete level, the part of experience that is probably very similar across individuals, and even across related species. I further ground my speculations by expressing them in terms that could actually be implemented, at least in principle, in some physical machine, although the kinds of machines I propose are very different than those generally favored for computation today. In effect what I describe is the functional architecture, or how the perceptual system operates functionally, based on its observed properties in experience. I do not have a complete answer to how perception completes volumetric forms, but I do establish that this is what perception is doing, as a computation. In Chapter 7 and 8 I explore the basic laws of perceptual processing based on an introspective analysis of perceptual completion as I experience it in everyday vision, and in Chapter 9 I propose a neurophysiological theory of how the brain computes these spatial symmetries, by way of harmonic resonance, or patterns of standing waves in the neural substrate to express the spatial structures of our experience. But first we begin with an analysis of the dimensions of visual experience, its capacities and limitations. In Chapter 3 I discuss the distinction between the experience of self and of non-self, where the boundaries of our self really are. In chapters 4 and 5 I discuss the historical debate between realism and idealism, and show that much of the confusion has been due to lack of clarity on the central epistemological issue, of what in our experience is “inside” our self, and what is “outside”. The realist is right, that we can observe the external world (as if) directly. The idealist is also right, that all we can ever experience is the inside of our own head. These two apparently contradictory views, each of which can be shown to be true, and to be false, can both be true simultaneously within the larger framework of representationalism; our experience of the world is indeed indirect, so we cannot ever experience external reality directly, which is consistent with the idealist claim. At the same time however, certain aspects of our internal experience do correlate reliably with certain essential aspects of our environment, such that we can get reliable information about the configuration of the world around us, as the realist claims, although that information is acquired indirectly, through the medium of the sense data, which are themselves properties of experience. But the qualia of conscious experience, the raw colors and feelings with which it is painted, the interface between our brain and its experience, are themselves intrinsic properties of the brain, at the same time as being part of our experience. The internal mechanism of the physical brain, or certain very special parts of it, are the only physical entity which we can experience directly. We know what it is like to “be” the patterns of electrochemical activity in our own physical brain. But by the very fact that our mind is conscious of its own spatial structure, and given that our mind is a physical process taking place in the physical mechanism of our brain, that is already direct and incontrovertible evidence that a physical process can, under certain circumstances, become conscious of its own spatial structure. This insight has profound implications for the place of science and physical knowledge with respect to conscious experience. In fact, this insight