The so-called "proof" of philosopher G.E. Moore that an external world exists amounts to holding up both of his hands. "Here is one hand," the linguistic communication of his ideas goes, and "Here is another." This fallacious argument for the existence of an external, material world is, contrary to what its alleged "common sense" proponent might have posited, not an obvious confirmation. Ironically, what is obvious in light of reason is how erroneous it is. Just because something seems obvious does not mean it is. Only logically necessary truths can be obvious, yet they are abstract and can take enormous effort for a non-rationalist to discover after living and believing on the basis of passive and unexamined experiences, subjective persuasion, total epistemological assumptions, and emotionalistic preference.
To be justified in believing this nonexistent proof, the act of merely holding up one's hands would have to prove that your hands really are there, that they have the appearance it seems to have, and so forth. This is not so under human epistemological restrictions. None of these things follow from holding up a part of the body to be gazed upon, though they do prove (though it is logic that truly proves anything) that the perception is real. Perception cannot exist without a consciousness, but many things that are perceived by consciousness could appear to be external and yet be constructs of hallucination or some other sort of illusion--the illusion being that they would seem to be external and would not be.
If it does not follow by logical necessity--and reason is not a linguistic construct or function of subjective perception, but a set of necessary truths--that perceiving the hands really means they are externally existent as physical extensions of the body, then it is impossible to know the latter from the former. Indeed, perception of external objects is not, with one category of exceptions [1], the same as their independent/external metaphysical existence or epistemological proof that they really are there as perceived. It is only this aforementioned exception that helps prove that there is an external world at all. Holding up one's hands on its own only proves to oneself that one is perceiving one's hands; absolutely nothing about the existence of corporeal parts outside of one's immaterial, perceiving consciousness is established by this.
There is no such thing as common sense [2], only reason and rationality, which is a being's grasp of the objective necessary truths of reason. There is no such thing as an epistemologically valid intuition and no intrinsic metaphysical connection between feelings like conscience or general sensory experience and the outside things they seemingly correspond to. One can know that intuitions exist when one experiences them, for mental states cannot be illusory as far as conscious existence and experience goes, but one cannot know from intuition that something like God, the external world, morality, other human minds, and so on actually exist. Ironically, the existence of God is nonetheless entirely verifiable since it is logically necessary [3]. While it is very difficult to demonstrate due to the factual precision involved, there is an external world (again, see [1]). It can simply be proven only one way.
Moore's philosophy is asinine because it is irrationalistic. It epistemologically rests on the unverifiable leap from visual perception to the presence external objects, metaphysically conflating very distinct things (the mental experience of sight and appendages of a physical body that would be outside the mind) that could exist totally independent of one another. It is not a fool who rejects "common sense" and basic perceptions, not even when there is no way to prove that they are not accurate. The fool is the person who believes in something that is not true in itself like logical axioms or that follows from another truth. Whatever is logically possible could be true. Whatever cannot be proven is still unknowable and thus could never have a basis to actually be believed. Where there is no logical self-evidence or absolute deductive certainty free of assumptions, rationalistic skepticism is the only legitimate stance.
Logic, people. It is very fucking helpful.
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