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Many philosophers, including Kant and Hume, have expressed doubts about what we can know about the world through our experience. Kant and Hume both think that we cannot know the objects in the world as they are. What we can claim about the objects as such are either mediated by our cognition or illusions. The idea of the biparte brain provides the biological explanation of why we cannot know the world “directly”. Our most immediate contact with the world is processed through the brain stem, or the “frog brain”. The experiential data generated is sent to the cerebral cortex. It is in this upper region of the brain that we experience the world. Case studies of brain injuries give us the observation that theoretically we can see something without experience it. The brain stem can see some object, but without the help of the cortex we cannot experience what we see.

There is the general assumption that the cognitive work of our cerebral cortex is superior than other parts of the brain. When philosophers prize seeing the world directly, surely they can’t mean that it is more valuable to see the world with the “frog brain”. Given the physical impossibility to sense the world directly through our cerebral cortex “direct contact” of the world, if it were to be a distinctively human activity, somehow it has to be the task of the cerebral cortex. Then how can the cerebral cortex be in “direct contact” with the world? Some philosophers say that it cannot be done. Some philosophers like Hegel redefines our intellectual quest and say: we can’t know the world as it is, however a wealth of the world is available to us as mediated, through our consciousness. Perhaps this is where we can start most fruitfully.