We want to resist the idea that experiences are a kind of object. They aren't something we possess or which lurks in a space between us and the world. If we want to avoid putting new kinks in our cables, we need to remember that an experience is a verb, not a noun.

We also want to resist the idea that mind can be disembodied. People exist in the (physical) world not in addition to it.

However, if we start to think of ourselves as machines operating on and in the world, and not as empty boxes which receive experiences, then the kinks and twists re-entwine themselves in a different configuration. We escape, or at least hope to escape, the difficulties of scepticism and the simpler varieties of idealism. But in exchange, we find it harder to hold on to the idea that the world has a real structure which we can discover.

It becomes difficult to say if the patterns we observe are inherent in nature or results of the way our experience operates. Does our mental machinery impose structure or discover it? We want to say that at least some structure is imposed, the machinery must have some kind of mechanism before it can begin to operate on anything. But then our experience of the world can never go beyond those structures. If the world happened not to yield patterns intelligible to those structures, we would be condemned to a world of random violence and noise.

Do we have a reason for thinking that the substance of the world has a structure at all, or is it just imposed by us upon it?

We want to exist in the world, we want our machinery to be made up of the same stuff as everything else. Yet at the same time we are tempted to say that there is no regularity beyond that which we impose and hence no principles by which the machinery of our mind can operate in practice.

The existence of ourselves presumably shows that there is a structured physical world in which a mental machine can be constructed. Hence, the universe operates according to principles which it really has.

If our minds seek to impose a structure and the world really has a structure, then the question arises of what guarantees that the two will be in synch. If they are not, then the truth of the world will be forever beyond our understanding. If there is no guarantee, then we will remain in some kind of perpetual uncertainty, a continual terror that we might reach a point where the universe ceased to be coerced into our patterns of thought and became incomprehensible.

Need a mind constructed in accordance with the ways of the world understand the world according to those same ways? Or might its way of experiencing be at odds with the principles underpinning its construction?

I'm not sure if I see this problem more clearly than I did a year ago, or if the tangle has reformed whilst I've been looking in another direction.