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→The phenomenological cage
Those inputs that come from our senses, whether outer senses like smell, vision, hearing, touch, warmth, etc. or from our inner senses like thirst, hunger, love, hate, etc are all will be called the phenomena. Phenomena, with correspondence to Kant's philosophy, is our senses experiences.
Through the usage of knowledge, we try to understand our surroundings and inner feelings, but we have an unobservable barrier to the surrounding or even our inner selves. We have no access to the surrounding itself. All our knowledge about the "surrounding" comes from our senses. We have phenomena, but no access to the thing that creates the experiences. For more than 2500 years of epistemology, [[The Historical Historircal overview of the phenomenological cage|nobody had found a reliable way to establish a relationship between perception and the “surrounding”]]. To demonstrate the problem of the relations between knowledge and the surrounding, we may use the thought experiment of the “[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat brain in a vat]”. In this thought experiment, you are asked to find a reliable way to know if you really exist as you perceive it, or you are actually a brain in a vat, which gets its sensory inputs from a computer, that simulate the perceived world.
Till today nobody was able to find a reliable answer to this question. Philosophers sometimes suggest that Hillary Putnaham had found a way, but his conclusions say otherwise. He concluded that we cannot distinguish between reality and virtual experience<ref>Putnam, H. (1981): "Brains in a vat" in Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge University Press; reprinted in DeRose and Warfield, editors (1999): Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader, Oxford UP</ref>.