The lesson of subjectivity

If you are a brain in a vat, does that matter?

Neo had a chance to destroy the Matrix and did not.

He just made human life within it more fun for lovers of comic book heroes with superhuman powers.

Of course, experience could be more deceptive even than that.

Berkeley.

Solipsism.

Hume.

The Skeptics, said Voltaire, are not a sect of philosophers but a sect of liars.

Voltaire, like Moore, was unable to accept that the world of our experience is certainly a lie, certainly a merely virtual world.

Or that our belief that it connects to, perhaps represents, an objective, somehow material, real world including other minds - minds of others, at least humans, with whom we are of a kind and communicate - is mere animal faith.

An animal faith for which, at its most uncorrupted, the ray of vision reaches out from our eyes and sees the objects that comprise the world where they are and, generally, as they are.

And among them are other people whose perception of the physical, objective world we all inhabit is as direct and veridical as our own.

But Hume himself provided the answer before the comics.

We can know our faith for what it is.

It is possible to disbelieve its every article and yet jump into life with all the practical, "as if" faith of the faithless Neo, who knows it's all illusion.

Though the suggestion would certainly freak out those most dogmatic of  physicalists and pig-headed of philistines, the enlightened, atheist liberals of America, for undermining morals and weakening resistance to Christianity.