We have discovered how columns of brain cells in the visual system identify objects, in spite of differences or fluctuations in degree of illumination, visual angle, or distance. (Motion too?) Objects have characteristics such as size, shape, colour, texture (though this is partly tactile) .They also have “meanings” in relation to our survival, pleasure/pain, comfort, and everyday experience and activity – i.e. Functions of tables, flowers, cats…

But I have an epistemological problem. The explanations above assume an independently existing external world of objects. The experiments on which the explanations are based depend on the manipulation of both the assumed external objects and the brain cell assemblies (seen as external objects by the experimenter). But the observations and interpretations are processed by the experimenter’s brain cells, “seeing” the objects manipulated in the experiment in the very same way which is being studied. The experimenter is not outside the system, he or she is part of the loop. The whole knowledge acquisition process seems circular in its logic. We are using in our observation the very process whose nature we are trying to elucidate.

Presumably, (another questionable inference), brain mechanisms evolved by selection for survival, not for understanding the external world. The brain recognizes and distinguishes objects not for the sake of understanding them in any abstract sense, but in order to be able to react or respond appropriately, especially if the objects represent dangers to be avoided or resources to be utilized. For this purpose, it would be sufficient merely to have some parallelism between the external world and its brain representations, some kind of a symbolic correspondence, a one-to-one mapping.

Philosophers from way before Kant knew that we do not perceive “things in themselves”. That includes the brain cells that we observe in these experiments. We do not “see” them as they “really” are, only some symbols of them. But we perceive them by our own brain cells whose nature is the same as those we observe…The object and the subject partake of the same nature, and its nature is radically unknowable.

Yet, if external objects as perceived (the brain representations of them) did not have a close correspondence to independently existing external objects, why would there be any survival value in reacting and adjusting to them? If they don’t push us around or we cannot push them around, except in our imagination, why would they have the potential to harm us or nourish us? Why fear an imaginary falling rock or charging tiger? Why be attracted to imaginary succulent