Philosophy For Dummies

Imagine that you are locked in a small one-room building. You have contact with the outside world through only one window. You can see what’s going on outside by looking out the window. It is open and also allows you both to hear passing street noises and to smell flowers right outside the building. You can also feel the cool breezes of the early morning air outdoors. Now imagine that someone comes along and closes the window, nailing it shut. Your ability to hear the sounds and smell the aromas in the outside world has suddenly been eliminated. You can no longer feel the cool breezes blowing outside. But you can still see out.
Now imagine that someone outside slathers black paint all over the window and nails boards tightly over its casing. Your ability to see outside has been eliminated. Each bit of change to the window has eliminated one or more ranges of your experience of the outside world. As long as you remain in that building, you will be unable to see, hear, smell, or feel what is going on outside. But if the door is suddenly unlocked, and you can leave the building, you will no longer depend on that window for your access to the outside world. You will be able to perceive directly what is going on around you, without need of that now damaged and useless window.
This is an analogy for life and death. While we are “locked” in the body, we depend on the brain, and its connected sensory organs, as our window on the world. When this window is altered and damaged in various ways, our experience of the world is diminished and depleted in corresponding ways. But at death, the door is unlocked, and we leave the building. Then, we no longer depend on the state of the building, or its window, for our access to outside reality. The building at that point can be totally destroyed, and we are free of its constraints. How do we know that this is not an insightful analogy for the impact of death on human experience? It at least blocks the force of The Brain Damage Argument and depletes it of its otherwise straightfoward persuasiveness.

Do not believe hastily.
— Ovid

The standard philosophical analysis of knowledge presents it as nothing more, or less, than properly justified true belief