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When the brain and nervous system are in operation, they give us a world of things. Only when we ignore our own operative point of view can it seem—to whom? one wonders—that the brain and nervous system are opaque obstacles to the world of things. In identifying ourselves with our brains, we make Hume’s mistake; we privatize appearances and migrate them indoors, into the folds of our gray matter. In doing so, we implicitly isolate ourselves from each other and from a joint world of truth. By contrast, phenomenologists recover the publicness of appearances; in doing so, they likewise demonstrate that experience takes place not in our skulls but instead out there with others among things. The experiential body opens a field of presence and absence in which language can arise and give voice to truth.

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Where are you in experience? You are not still another domino in the series: light, object, configured energy, rods and cones, nerve stimuli, brain, you. You are rather the enfleshed observer who sees the object [you are the result of the combination of all these factors; the knot that's made up of many threads] The physiology functions as a background condition for your experience, but not in such a way that you are derivable from or identical to that background. We crave a picture injecting ourselves into the process; we want to see ourselves layered on top of the biology, as yet another cog in the machine. But in fact the problem with the picture is that it leaves out precisely what we want pictured, the presence of a point of view. The simple truth is that the only way to conceive of a point of view is to occupy one.

How should we think of the brain and nervous system in light of the fact that ambient energy conveys appearances to us? Sokolowski suggests that the brain and nervous system can be thought of as similar to an ordinary glass lens that you can either look through or look at: it can be the transparent means for us to allow the world to be present to us; it can also be something that we make into an object in its own right, noting its physical properties. You need your brain to receive the energy of an object's appearance, but the appearance is not the brain and neither are you. And you are able to see the object thanks to the light, thanks to your brain, but not in such a way that the light or your brain stands in between you and the object. The object appears thanks to this transparently functioning means of transmitting the appearance, in the way you might see the object through a pair of glasses.

The phenomenologist Robert Sokolowski argues that sense perception is not a matter of brute impacts on our sensory receptors. Rather, the energy that our senses tap into is ambient energy: the light scattered by a perceptible thing is not some random chaotic energy. Rather, it is configured by the very shape and texture of the thing that reflected it. Configured energy bears the appearance of a thing, the way it looks.

In reality, appearances bond us to what appears rather than stand between us and what appears; they belong to the very being of the thing that appears. This explains why, most of the time, we all share the same perceptions: we all see the same objects and perceive them in almost the same way. It never happens that you see a truck, and the guy next to you says it's a chair (unless one of you is high).

Husserl calls the various appearances of the same object "adumbrations," or so many shadows the object casts as it is explored by us. The object [the thing-in-itself] does not hide behind its appearances. The appearances rather are the thing's disclosure. Appearances are the way to know the real object in all its sides and from different points of view. Appearances are indeed fleeting, as Hume suggests, but they constantly present the reality of the perceived thing. Hence appearances are not simply private, for they put us into contact with the public features of things.

Edmund Husserl's phenomenology upsets this line of reasoning in an intriguing way. Husserl actually agrees with Hume over the first two propositions, but he reaches an entirely different conclusion: 1. Our perception of the object—any object—constantly changes. 2. The real object does not. 3. The changing perception presents the same real object in all its reality [from different points of view].

Hume (and Kant following him) had this idea: 1. Our perception of the object—any object—constantly changes. 2. The real object does not. 3. Therefore, we perceive something else—mental images—not the real object. What they were basically implying is that we're always living in the world of appearances (phenomena) and are never in touch with reality, with the object-in-itself (Kant called it noumena, or Ding-an-Sich). You can see this line of reasoning continuing up until modern times, where it takes the form of "you hallucinate your reality." Or "your brain makes up your reality" and instead of proving it logically, some smart guy tries to prove it through superficially-understood brain sciences.

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*Listen to your patient; he is telling you the diagnosis.* Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has.. The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease. (William Osler)

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