Has anyone seen my neutral pointer?

[Bunburryist]

The concept, or perhaps it really is better to call it a conceptual tool, is what I call the “neutral pointer.”  A neutral pointer is a way of referring to something while saying as absolutely little of what you believe about it as possible. 

Would I be right in thinking your concept of a neutral pointer is similar to the concept of an axiom (self evident truth)?

We have neutral pointers everywhere in everyday life – “that bird” for an unidentified bird.  “That box shaped thing” for a filing cabinet.  But we don’t have a neutral pointer for “the material world.” 
Then there’s the problem of our “bodies.”  It is implicit in most peoples’ thinking that “my body” is made of matter.  But what if we want to see if we really are that kind of being.  We need a neutral pointer for what we learn to believe is a material body. 
If a person is not willing to . .  then they simply will not understand.   If you’re trying to determine if an a bird is  finch or some other kind of bird, you can’t even discuss it wit
 
Let’s take a geometric axiom – that a circle is that set of points that are equidistant from a given point.  That’s an axiom, and we have a definition.  Where does the idea of a neutral pointer idea come in?  Suppose we have a piece of paper with some apparently circle-like shapes.  Now, we don’t know that they are circles because haven’t determined if they are consistent with our definition.  So we don’t want to call them circles, because we don’t know they are circles.  But if we want to talk about them; talk about how we might determine if they are circles or not, we need to call them SOMETHING.  We need a neutral pointer – we could use “those shapes,” for example.   Now we can ask, “Are those shapes circles.”  If we determine one way or another whether they really are circles, then we can throw our neutral pointer away and call them either circles or non-circles.
Neutral pointers in everyday life – like “that animal,” or “that box-looking thing”  -  are common and not particularly interesting.  But ask yourself – what neutral pointer would we use for what we learn to call “the material world”?  “The world”?  “The physical world”?  “The universe”?   “The physical universe”?  “The material universe”?  “The cosmos”?  They all imply a big something that you, as a living thing, exist “in,” and to most people are implicitly synonymous.   But if we want to really “stand back,” so to speak, and take away ALL of our assumptions about what this experience we learn to call “the world” is, and what we as beings are, we need a way to refer to it, just as we needed a way to refer to those circle-looking shapes.  In order to talk about it we need to call it SOMETHING.  My neutral pointer for what we learn to call “the material world” is “this experience.” 
Perhaps the most useful aspect of referring to this experience we learn to call “the material world” as “this experience” is that ALL aspects of “the material world” come into doubt – whether the “things”  I experience seeing are “made of atoms,” whether my experiences happen in a brain existing in “this head,” (neutral pointer) whether there is something called light propagating through “this space” (neutral pointer) or not,  and whether my nature, as a being, is that of a thing in a “world” at all.
Keep in mind that neutral pointer doesn’t imply anything one way or another.  Using the neutral pointer “this brain” doesn’t imply either that my experiences happen in a material, and it doesn’t imply they don’t.  It is merely a way to refer to whatever exists/goes on/happens (whatever) at this place in my experience.
 
Another way to appreciate the necessity of a neutral pointer comes when we analyze and understand what I call the “sense story” – how we learn to believe we see, feel, etc.  If it is true as it is taught in science class (I’m not saying it is, and I’m not going to get into it here) then this experience IS NOT a material world, but is, somehow, an experience happening in a brain in a material world.  So if (according to the sense story) this experience is not a material world but something happening in a material brain – what will I call it?  Some philosophers like the phrase “sense date,” but it’s usage implies “something happening in a material brain,” and far from being a neutral pointer is rather something specific to materialist theories of experience.  I have found the best neutral pointer for what we learn to call “the material world” is “this experience.”