"Right! Or upside-down. Really shake it up," he said.
"No." Pause. "No. I don't mean disrupt it. I really mean inside-out."
"Okayy. So what's that mean? Does the world have an inside?"
Pause. "See. On the one hand, there are colors, and sounds, and smells, and touches, and so on. That's one version of the world. Right? And on the other hand, in place of that, there's radiation, and compression waves, and molecules, and nerve responses, and so on. That's another version, of the same world."
"Ah, sure. Okay." Pause. "Where're you going with this?"
"So we think of the first version as 'inside' in a sense, don't we? Inside our heads? That's what we feel. And the second version is what we think is really 'out there', outside our heads."
"Yeah."
"But what if we reversed it, or inverted it? Or everted it?"
"Um. Ha, ha." Pause. "Not getting it."
"That would put colors and sounds, and smells, and even touches out there instead. That would be the real world. And things like radiation, compression waves, molecules, nerve responses would all be in our heads, in the sense that these would be our ideas about the real world, the world in here about the world out there."
"Well. But perceptions are in our heads aren't they? They're just our feelings."
"But suppose they just are, period. Perceptions are outside our will, after all, not counting attention. I mean, until we start thinking about them -- until we bring them 'inside' in that sense -- perception is all we have, all there is. If you don't like the spatial thing, you could say it's primary, and our thoughts about it are secondary, built on top of it. But the spatial thing, that metaphor or whatever, is ... traditional."
Long pause. "Okay." Pause. "So what?"
"Mm." Pause. "Well, truth. Would be affected. If we turned things inside out, then experience, moment by moment, would be the primary, most basic truth. There wouldn't be anything behind it, beneath it, beyond it. There'd only be what we build on top of it."
"Which may be true or false."
"How, though? How could any ideas about experience be true, or false? By what criteria?"
Snort. "Some things work, some don't. Come on. You're being silly." Pause. "Right? You can't fly or walk through a tree just because you think you can. That would be false."
"Yes. Yes. True in fact -- see? So then the criteria comes down to one, one criterion: what works, or what doesn't work. Some ideas don't work at all, and they're false, as you say. But some work some times or in some places, some work better than others, and so on. Meaning some ideas are true sometimes, or more true, or less true. It's not as simple, or at least not as binary, as the world seemed before it was turned inside out."
"Ahh...."
"Before, that world seemed to lie outside experience, like an absolute, or worse, an alien, inherently unreachable 'thing-in-itself'. But after the eversion it becomes just a fiction. Maybe conventionally useful itself, but still a fiction, an invention. It's not just that we have no access to it -- now, with this operation, there really is no 'external world'. We can't measure our truths against such a thing. It can't backstop, or underpin, or stabilize our knowledge. And it can't be something we can 'represent', except in that fictional sense. The only thing coming to us from anything like an outside is just what we see, hear, touch, etc. And that's the bedrock, that's the ultimate."
Exasperated sound. "So your private, personal experience is all you're saying you have to determine truth, hm? But others have different experience too, so they each have different truths? All there is is private, personal truth, each one unique?"
"Not all there is. But yes, experience, unmodified, is all there is to determine truth. It doesn't become, or can't be understood as 'private' or 'personal' until there is the idea of an other, with other experience -- and that itself is an idea, internally built out of experience. Clearly, though, it's a useful idea. And once we've constructed that idea, we can go on to the idea and useful practice of communicating and sharing these internal ideas, with their varying levels of utility. So, no, there are still culturally shared truths or knowledge, and that can still be judged or measured in terms of its workability. Just not in terms of its fidelity to, or representation of, an imaginary 'external world'. And then, beside that, yes, there would also be the private, personal, unique truths inherent in each unique experience."
"But wouldn't the workability of even that shared truth vary with different individuals? Doesn't this just leave you stuck in a hopeless relativism?"
"No. I mean, I'd agree there are relativist implications, but I'd say they're more hopeful than hopeless. In the first place, the operations of language, or more broadly of culture, are communicative processes that themselves are experience, and that work constantly to converge ideas on the basis of their workability. But in the second place, individual relativism, or varied workability, is exactly what's needed to ensure that the sharing is dynamic, a process, with new and unique ideas always being brought into the mix, the less workable dropping away, the more workable being repeated and spread. So cultural workability or shared knowledge is always being refined just by individual variance. It's Darwinian."
Silence. Then "Hm."
Silence. "Of course, it's just a thought-experiment. Philosophy-fiction, say. Phi-fi."
"Okay. Speculative philosophy." Pause. "So what about The Matrix then?"
"What?"
"The Matrix? You know, that movie --"
"Yeah I know the movie. What about it?"
"Talking about speculative. In the movie, the whole world is just a simulation. Everything we see or hear or touch, etc., is fed to us by a computer."
"Right. But what's that got to do with --"
"Well, in that case, wouldn't the inside-out thing be, like, impossible? Or at least really silly? The simulator would be inside our heads somehow, feeding us perceptions that we think are outside? Or something."
"Oh, I see what you're getting at. But I think it's just hard to get away from that 'external world' bias. Because all The Matrix does is suggest another version of the external world, right? Or maybe it just puts it another layer away from us. But even with an added layer, if we turn the world inside out, then perception is still the outer limit, or the rock bottom of reality. Then the simulation is just another idea that we come up with to cope with that reality, and it's judgeable, like any other idea, in terms of its workability or utility. Before the eversion, we want to judge such ideas in terms of how well they represent the 'real', external world -- but after, that just literally doesn't make sense. Ideas about the world don't, can't, represent anything at all, they just work, to greater or lesser extents, and that's all that truth or falsity can mean. We can come up with all kinds of these ideas, after all -- maybe we're living in a simulation, maybe we're brains in a vat, maybe we're figments in the dream of a butterfly. But, with the eversion, they're all just ideas, with varying levels, or even varying kinds, of usefulness attached to them. As, for that matter, would be the idea of a simulator inside our heads. Which actually isn't bad."
"Okay, okay. Interesting thought-experiment. One last question: why does everyone, including normal philosophers, think that there is an external world, assuming this 'eversion' makes sense or is doable? And if it is doable, why isn't it done? Why does everyone commonly assume that there's a reality behind appearance?"
"Right. Good question, or questions. But I would say there are two parts to an answer. First, the eversion doesn't eliminate an external world, it just makes that external reality identical with appearance. It eliminates the distinction between appearance and reality in other words. And then, second, there's the answer to the question of why everyone (except, maybe, those with a condition of some sort) operates under the simple assumption that there's a real world beyond appearance, if, after all, there's this inside-out alternative. And that, in the terms of the eversion, can only be that such an assumption is useful. In other words, the idea that the external world that we construct is beyond or behind experience actually works for us, particularly in routine, everyday situations. With the world turned inside-out, that idea is still inside, not 'out there', but it often, even usually, simplifies things if we assume that it is -- one less layer, so to speak, to consider."
"Ah, well. So then in your own terms, or in inside-out terms, the idea of an external world beyond appearance is true, no? Because it's useful. But if it's true then the inside-out idea is false! You've contradicted yourself!"
"Yeah, this is a bit tricky. Logical consistency, I'd agree, is a criterion both views must adhere to, but in inside-out terms the judgment of truth or falsity isn't, as a rule, binary, so doesn't lend itself to simple contradiction in the way the idea of a perception-independent external world does. In the latter view, there's an absolute criterion against which to judge truth of assertions, which must either match it or not. But in the alternate view, there's only workability, which can vary in degree, context, level, and other ways. So the conventional view can be assumed to be true for its everyday usefulness, but not -- that is, not judged as useful -- in meta-theoretical, or philosophical contexts."
Sigh. "So maybe one more last question then: so what? I mean, what does this matter?"
Shrug. "It would be interesting at least if it really didn't matter, wouldn't it? Turn the world inside out, make perception the deepest reality rather than merely its surface, make truth and knowledge a matter of what works or is useful rather than what's real -- and it all doesn't matter? But, I think it does. Matter.
Maybe think of it from another angle. The conventional view is that knowledge, from everyday to scientific, is an internal model of an external reality, and it's to be judged in terms of how close it represents that reality. The problem with that is that we have no access to that 'external reality' apart from our knowledge of it, and so we have no way to assess how close our internal model actually does represent it. It looks, instead, like the representation is simply posited rather than judged. In practice, of course, our knowledge is judged in terms of how well it actually works for us, or how useful it is -- and then we use that utility as a proxy for how well it represents this otherwise inaccessible external reality. But then why do we need that last, proxied part? If we have the internal part, and if we judge the adequacy of that practically, by its workability, then why isn't that external part superfluous? And if that's so, then the internal knowledge structure isn't really a model of anything -- it just stands by itself. To the extent that we think it's a model, the referent, what we imagine it's a model of, must be internal too. And so we're building an internal model of an internal 'reality', where that last is just an isolated and simple idea at best, having no effect or function. An empty label.
Well, there may be a psychological aspect to this 'reality' idea, some reassurance in the notion of a more or less stable realm, independent of us and our utility, to which truth and knowledge can be attached. Perhaps we think the utility requires some general, independent explanation, and representation is that. But notice how similar that is to the way the idea of God once provided reassurance to believers of another kind, who also felt that their knowledge of order required some general, independent explanation. We've learned, many of us at least, to wean ourselves from that sort of guarantor. Couldn't we do the same with the illusory comfort of an independent world beyond our senses? Men used to fight wars over the nature of their imaginary God. Do we now do so over the nature of our imaginary Reality? Do we need to?"
"Peace on earth? Really? You're saying that's what this 'eversion' offers?"
"Okay, too far.
But you asked why it matters, think of its two directions. On the one hand, it gives us a real world, immediate and sensuous, the bedrock of existence, the essence of life itself. And on the other hand, it makes all our thoughts about this world structures built on top of it, and out of it, rather than anything buried beneath it. It gives us, in other words, finally, a foundation on which to build, and it makes it clear that we are building, not searching, uncovering, revealing, etc. Building knowledge is still a potentially endless process, but it's no longer an undermining one. It's inherently a diverse process, on individual, group, whole cultural levels, as well as historically, contextually, but it's subject to the harmonizing processes of cultural communication, and it's disciplined by the judgment of workability or usefulness, ultimately enforced by the Darwinian, extra-cultural processes of nature itself. I'm saying this is an improvement on the notion of a single external 'reality' underlying appearance, which we can only ever approach at best, but which perpetually leaches the substance from not only our sensuous life but also all the partial, contextual truths we develop. And I'm saying that's why it matters."
"Okay. Interesting. So science doesn't investigate reality, it just makes up things that are useful. You're saying. And when we look at things, the parts we don't see aren't really there, they're just made up because it's useful. That it?"
"Yeahhh. Well, that's why the conventional view is useful. Most of the time. But that's why illusions work, too. When they do."
"Illusions?"
"You know, based on the parts of things we don't see, but make up."
"Hm. But aren't they examples of how perception deceives us about the world?"
"In the conventional view, yes. In the everted view, on the other hand, they're examples of how our ideas about the world can be deceptive."
"Alright, alright. So the conventional view is useful, even in this thought experiment. But before that you said it 'leaches the substance' from our perceptions!? And from our 'partial truths'? How is that useful?"
"Yeah, there are different contexts, situations. The conventional view is just a handy way of thinking about things ordinarily, like thinking the sun rises in the morning. That works most of the time, but not all the time. Funny example might be hallucinogenics."
"Wha?"
"Okay, full disclosure: I did acid once. You can wave away the whole thought experiment as the after-effects if you want. But it was an interesting context. For a time, the world, so-called, seemed to peel away from its substrate, and hang in a void like a big, glistening, wrap-around bubble. After a while, though, the anxiety lessened, and after a little while more, the idea of the substrate went away. It didn't help and wasn't needed. The bubble around me was all."
"Wow. Life on acid. Wouldn't that be interesting."
"But impractical."
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