 A great deal of philosophy can be resolved simply by understanding what the mind is doing. So many people get confused by the operations of their own minds and they misunderstand the relationship between their minds and the world. Take this example, which is actually pretty sticky. What is the difference between an object in the world and an object in your perception of the world? So I have this funky little red clip here. What is the difference between my perceiving of the red clip and the red clip in itself? You might be tempted to say something like well, if I close my eyes, the perception of the clip goes away, but the clip is still there. That actually halfway works. It certainly works in ordinary language, but when we break things apart philosophically, that starts to get a little shifty. So imagine somebody would come around and say, Steve, what do you mean by the red clip? Now, attempting response is to point to it. I mean that. That is what I mean by the words, the red clip. But check this funkiness out. I can say the red clip. I can point to it, but I can point to multiple different positions and still be pointing at the same thing. Here's what I mean. I could point to it like this. That is what I mean by a red clip. I can also point to it like this and this and this and this. So follow along. I can point to the exact same thing when I'm pointing like this, this, this or this. How's that possible? It's because I'm actually pointing to an object in my visual field, an object within the contents of my perception. Right now, there is a red blob that's in my visual field. It's right here. It's all along right here kind of in this, this general area. This blocks out the red field. It's right behind my hand. This, this red field. But if it's true that I'm actually pointing to an object in my visual field, then when I close my eyes, sure enough, that object goes away. There is no object. My visual field is just blackness. Boom. And now that object returns. Now there are some philosophers who have taken this rather literally and they say essentially when you close your eyes, ordinary objects disappear. There's no such things as objects outside your perception. I don't agree with those particular philosophers. I think we can rescue some notion about ordinary objects. We just have to be really careful. And when we go down this rabbit hole, I think it actually reveals some profound truths about the relationship between the mind and the world. So there's a few ways to try to rescue ourselves from this extreme skepticism of thinking maybe the world goes away when we're not looking at it. One more common sensical way to try to rescue this idea is to say, okay, yes, there is such a thing as the perception of redness. And yes, it does go away when you close your eyes. But the cause of your perception of redness is because there's a red object in the world that you're perceiving. There you go problem solved. I actually don't find this particularly compelling. I don't think color is in the world separate of our minds. I think color is a way to describe a phenomena that we're experiencing. I do think it's the case that the entirety of the redness that I'm referencing disappears when I'm not looking at it. Now you may be looking at it, you may be having a conscious experience of redness that doesn't go away when I close my eyes. Okay, but that's a different phenomena. That's mental phenomena in your mind. It's not mental phenomena in my mind. What I'm talking about sure enough disappears when I'm not looking at it. Now I here's how I rescue the idea of the external world. I would say it is the case. I'm theorizing. I don't claim I know this, but I'm theorizing that there is a spatial world which is occupied by bits of matter that are arranged in particular ways that when your sense organs interact with the way that the world is arranged, it causes the perception of redness in your mind. So you could say this in a more physics terms. You could say if we were to break apart the actual perceiving of red, it's not like red is something that's out there in the object and somehow it gets transmitted through space into your mind. It's that there are wavelengths of light which they don't have colors themselves, but the wavelengths of light impress upon your senses. Your senses represent that impression in your mind as redness. So yes, I think there is an external world. I think it's arranged in a particular way that impresses upon our senses. And yes, even if there were no minds, I still have the belief that there would still be this kind of three dimensional physical space, but without minds, I don't think there would be such a thing as redness because there would be nobody to describe the phenomena that they experience. It's very similar to the age old question. If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? My answer is no, it doesn't because sound is a way to describe a phenomena that a mind experiences. Sound is a representation of the world. You might still have sound waves. If a tree falls, it might still create sound waves, but without any minds to perceive the sound waves, there is no such thing as the phenomena of sound. I think this way of thinking solves a bunch of different philosophical problems that get really sticky when you try to preserve the existence of properties in the world or lots of properties in the world. And I think this is a rather natural way of thinking when you start practicing becoming aware of the contents of your experience. So usually the way that people's minds work, at least in the West, is to say, this is an object out there in the world. They don't take the time to sit back and say, huh, what's going on? What am I actually aware of? Well, I'm aware of colors in my visual field. If you do that enough, if you practice that enough, I think you'll discover the properties we thought were existing in the world are actually properties in our mind. And if we're careful, I don't think this leads to any kind of radical skepticism or solipsism that says the only things that exist are the contents of our perception. I don't buy that either. So what do you guys think? Do you think that when you perceive red, you're seeing redness in the world? Or do you think that you're simply seeing redness in your representation of the world? I submit it's the latter.