Indirect Realism and Direct Realism
Hey, all! For context, I'm planning to write an article on indirect realism for my blog and would like to hear some good arguments for direct realism and some good arguments against my arguments for indirect realism. I've had some interesting responses from discord, so I thought that I would come here!
Here we go.
So, Indirect Realism is the thesis that we only have direct access to our perceptions. That is to say, we don't ever directly experience the external world, but our perception of it. That isn't to say that the external world is not real, as some may think, just that we experience it with a "middle man", of sorts - our perception.
Ok, with this aside, let us define Direct Realism, the thesis that do indeed have direct access to the external world.
Now let me propose a few arguments for Indirect Realism that I run. Note that all the names I'm giving these are non-standard.
First, the argument from the indiscernability of veridical and hallucinatory experiences.
Non-veridical experiences like hallucinations are not subjectively distinct from veridical experiences, that seem to represent what they actually represent. A dream is as subjectively real as your current experiences. These two are exactly the same to us. However, what we experience in the dream cannot be real. So, what we are directly acquainted with cannot be the real thing, but our perception of the real thing.
In a more formal articulation, the argument would go as such:
P1 if we were directly acquainted with external objects, then hallucinatory and veridical experiences would be subjectively distinct
P2 hallucinatory and veridical experiences are not subjectively distinct(i.e., subjectively identical)
P3 therefore, we are not directly acquainted with external objects
P4 if we are not directly acquainted with external objects, then we are directly acquainted with our perceptions of external objects
P5 therefore, we are directly acquainted with out perceptions of external objects
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Second, the argument from process.
Science has told us that there is a long chain of causal processes that has to occur before you perceive an object. Take your sight. To see the words on this post, light must first bounce off the screen and travel into your eyes. Then, your eyes must send an electrical signal into you brain. Then, you brain must process this electrical signal. Finally, you perceive the words on this screen. This is a simplified version of the process, not mentioning each individual instance where the light or electrical signal is travelling. With all this in mind, how could your perception of the words on this screen be direct?
In a more formal articulation, this argument would go like this:
P1 if there is a long causal process between the object that we perceive and our perception of the object, then we do not know the object directly
P2 there is a long causal process between the object that we perceive and our perception of the object
P3 therefore, we do not know the object directly
P4 either we know the object directly or we know the object indirectly
P5 therefore, we know the object indirectly
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Third, the argument from delay.
This is an extension of the argument from process. It takes special note of the fact that the causal process that forms your perception of an object takes time to occur. Let us consider the fact that light takes time to travel. This may have no real effect on your perception of things in everyday life. However, if we consider things like the sun, that are very far away, its effects start to be more obvious. It takes the light from the sun 8 minutes to reach your eyes. This means that the sun that you see now does not even exist! With this in mind, how could it be that you know this sun directly?
To put it more formally:
P1 if the things we perceive do not exist, then we do not know the things we perceive directly
P2 if the causal process that allows us to perceive things takes time, then the things that we perceive do not exist
P3 the causal process that allows us to perceive things takes time
P4 therefore, the things that we perceive do not exist
P5 therefore, we do not know the things we perceive directly
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Lastly, the argument from skepticism.
This argument argues from the fact that Indirect Realism has more explanatory power over other hypotheses when it comes to the existence of skepticism, specifically over Direct Realism.
Skepticism comes from the realisation that it is logically possible for your experiences and reality not to properly correspond. For example, during hallucinations, your experiences(the hallucination) and reality do not correspond.
On Indirect Realism, where what you are directly acquainted with is your perceptions and experiences, this is hardly surprising and even possibly expected. What you perceive is separate from what is real. So, what you perceive may not be real. Thus, Indirect Realism can account for and even possibly explain the existence of skepticism.
However, on Direct Realism, it is far more surprising that skepticism is a possibility. If what we directly know is the external world, then how could it be that it is possible that what we know and the external world do not correspond, if they are indeed identical? Thus, Direct Realism has difficulties accounting for the existence of skepticism, much less to predict it.
If you would like the argument more formally:
P1 if H1 can better account for P than H2, then we should accept H1 over H2
P2 Indirect Realism can better account for skepticism than Direct Realism
P3 therefore, we should accept Indirect Realism over Direct Realism
Please give constructive feedback and arguments for direct realism.
Here we go.
So, Indirect Realism is the thesis that we only have direct access to our perceptions. That is to say, we don't ever directly experience the external world, but our perception of it. That isn't to say that the external world is not real, as some may think, just that we experience it with a "middle man", of sorts - our perception.
Ok, with this aside, let us define Direct Realism, the thesis that do indeed have direct access to the external world.
Now let me propose a few arguments for Indirect Realism that I run. Note that all the names I'm giving these are non-standard.
First, the argument from the indiscernability of veridical and hallucinatory experiences.
Non-veridical experiences like hallucinations are not subjectively distinct from veridical experiences, that seem to represent what they actually represent. A dream is as subjectively real as your current experiences. These two are exactly the same to us. However, what we experience in the dream cannot be real. So, what we are directly acquainted with cannot be the real thing, but our perception of the real thing.
In a more formal articulation, the argument would go as such:
P1 if we were directly acquainted with external objects, then hallucinatory and veridical experiences would be subjectively distinct
P2 hallucinatory and veridical experiences are not subjectively distinct(i.e., subjectively identical)
P3 therefore, we are not directly acquainted with external objects
P4 if we are not directly acquainted with external objects, then we are directly acquainted with our perceptions of external objects
P5 therefore, we are directly acquainted with out perceptions of external objects
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Second, the argument from process.
Science has told us that there is a long chain of causal processes that has to occur before you perceive an object. Take your sight. To see the words on this post, light must first bounce off the screen and travel into your eyes. Then, your eyes must send an electrical signal into you brain. Then, you brain must process this electrical signal. Finally, you perceive the words on this screen. This is a simplified version of the process, not mentioning each individual instance where the light or electrical signal is travelling. With all this in mind, how could your perception of the words on this screen be direct?
In a more formal articulation, this argument would go like this:
P1 if there is a long causal process between the object that we perceive and our perception of the object, then we do not know the object directly
P2 there is a long causal process between the object that we perceive and our perception of the object
P3 therefore, we do not know the object directly
P4 either we know the object directly or we know the object indirectly
P5 therefore, we know the object indirectly
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Third, the argument from delay.
This is an extension of the argument from process. It takes special note of the fact that the causal process that forms your perception of an object takes time to occur. Let us consider the fact that light takes time to travel. This may have no real effect on your perception of things in everyday life. However, if we consider things like the sun, that are very far away, its effects start to be more obvious. It takes the light from the sun 8 minutes to reach your eyes. This means that the sun that you see now does not even exist! With this in mind, how could it be that you know this sun directly?
To put it more formally:
P1 if the things we perceive do not exist, then we do not know the things we perceive directly
P2 if the causal process that allows us to perceive things takes time, then the things that we perceive do not exist
P3 the causal process that allows us to perceive things takes time
P4 therefore, the things that we perceive do not exist
P5 therefore, we do not know the things we perceive directly
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Lastly, the argument from skepticism.
This argument argues from the fact that Indirect Realism has more explanatory power over other hypotheses when it comes to the existence of skepticism, specifically over Direct Realism.
Skepticism comes from the realisation that it is logically possible for your experiences and reality not to properly correspond. For example, during hallucinations, your experiences(the hallucination) and reality do not correspond.
On Indirect Realism, where what you are directly acquainted with is your perceptions and experiences, this is hardly surprising and even possibly expected. What you perceive is separate from what is real. So, what you perceive may not be real. Thus, Indirect Realism can account for and even possibly explain the existence of skepticism.
However, on Direct Realism, it is far more surprising that skepticism is a possibility. If what we directly know is the external world, then how could it be that it is possible that what we know and the external world do not correspond, if they are indeed identical? Thus, Direct Realism has difficulties accounting for the existence of skepticism, much less to predict it.
If you would like the argument more formally:
P1 if H1 can better account for P than H2, then we should accept H1 over H2
P2 Indirect Realism can better account for skepticism than Direct Realism
P3 therefore, we should accept Indirect Realism over Direct Realism
Please give constructive feedback and arguments for direct realism.
Comments (2225)
So, by definition then... how convenient. Reminiscent of the 'hard' problem.
Sure, and perceptual experience might also include, and/or be affected by, expectation, environmental conditions, and other stuff too.
Quoting hypericin
Quoting hypericin
I'm no expert, but I believe that studies have shown that our perceptual experience can be shaped by expectations, and also (possibly?) by language, among other things.
Quoting hypericin
Have I convinced you of direct realism, then?
If you agree that our perceptual experience is not of a representation (i.e. is not of itself), then what do we have a perceptual experience of? Odour molecules?
Hmm...
Like the motion sensor outside my shop.
There's an evolutionary gulf between single celled organisms and us.
Niave realism. The qualia of our experience is not something manufactured in our head, but is just reality-as-it-is.
It does make no sense. I for one reject the very idea.
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Quoting creativesoul
Of course, but neural events are not that which is given to the senses to be represented. Neural events in the senses just are the representations the senses afford.
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Quoting Janus
HA!!! Brain blind. I like it. But ya know…..if brain blind is true, then dualism must be true, problems and all. I’d even go as far as to say, because brain blind is true, dualism is necessarily true, insofar as it is impossible dualism is not true. There is that which we live in as things, and that which we create merely because of the things we are.
Everything is affected by other things. If X is affected by Y, we don't generally say that X is X and Y
Quoting Luke
Yes, The experience is of odor molecules. The whole point is we have no direct awareness of what experience is of. This is very obvious in the case of smell; until recently we didn't know odor molecules existed at all. All we are directly aware of is the smell, by way of which we are indirectly aware of odor molecules.
.
Underlined: Patently false:
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting AmadeusD
Bolded: that explains a fair bit. If you aren't interested in the clarity needed for this issue, that you appear to not really want - I cannot help there :) And this is not derogatory. If that is not what you're looking for, I've been barking up the wrong tree.
Italicised: haha, ok buddy.
Your position seems to be that a perceptual experience is a representation, and that the perceptual experience or representation is directly of worldly objects. Furthermore, that it is our awareness of these perceptual experiences or representations which makes it an indirect perception.
Whereas I would call the perceptual experience the perception, you want to include an additional step and call your awareness of the perceptual experience the perception.
If our body’s perceptual machinery represents odour molecules to us as a smell, then how can there be any smell if you are unaware of it? You wouldn’t smell or perceive anything in that case. So I don’t see why the additional step of our awareness of the smell is necessary. If you are aware of the smell, you have a perception and if you aren’t aware of the smell, you have no perception. But that’s no different to having the perceptual experience or not. The extra step of awareness is unnecessary.
So, there's only two choices? Indirect realism/perception and naive realism?
Nah.
Our overall worldviews/positions are very close to one another.
I think perhaps the differences can be teased out in our respective notions of mind. However, we do both seem to hold that all meaningful experience consists of correlations drawn between different things(here is where perception first happens). Our differences may be a matter of taxonomy. Maybe not if you're a mind/body dualist or physical/mental dualist. We're very close to one another though. At least, I think we are.
Of course that's 'the way it is', because I merely stated a consequence of what you're arguing for. If you believe that touching fire is not directly perceiving fire, then there's not much more I can say.
For a "perception to be directly of worldly objects " makes sense to me by contrast with the case when the perception is mediated by other objects, i.e. a photo of an apple vs an apple.
Quoting Luke
I think it is clear that the perceptual experience is not the perception. A perception happens when an object in the world directly (touch, taste) or indirectly (smell, sight, hearing) stimulates nerve endings, which transmit information to the brain, which (somehow) produces the perceptual experience. the only part of this process the subject is directly aware of is the perceptual experience itself. All the rest of it, the brain's interpretive processes, the nerves, the way the object stimulated the nerves, and above all the object itself, are parts of the perception that must be inferred, as the subject is not directly aware of them.
That is the question I think we are answering: "does perception afford the subject/self direct awareness of the world?", not "is perception considered as an abstract entity in some sense directly of the world?"
Quoting creativesoul
You are not making arguments, but merely appealing to common sense. There are venues where appeals to common sense carry some weight, this is not one of them.
You could not be more wrong. Perhaps I'll be able to show you soon. The gross neglect has not happened unnoticed.
Like our herring well done, eh?
How does someone become aware of a perceptual experience if his senses point outward, and he is not seeing, tasting, smelling, or hearing inside his brain?
For instance, Meningioma can grow in the brain undetected for many years. But somehow one can be aware of a perception in the brain almost immediately.
Needs substance.
You seem to count as real only that which the senses apprehend. My point earler was that on that criterion causation is not real.
I have asked you several times if this is so and you haven't given a straight answer. If that is what you think I don't count it as clarity but as murk.
I have to assume you're not reading? That is exactly what the quote shows I have said - and that I directly addressed, in that quote. I requote - again, for the slow among us:
Quoting AmadeusD
Your own grammatical reading into that is for you, not me, to clarify. If it reads as something odd, clarify it for yourself. It is a direct answer to your question, whether you accept it as adequate or not. I can't work with a charge such as 'murk' in the face of a direct answer.
A creature incapable of detecting certain ranges of the visible spectrum cannot draw correlations between the colors that that range helps enable us to pick out and anything else.
A creature that cannot know the names of colors but can see them nonetheless cannot possibly draw correlations between color names and other things. Nevertheless, some language less creatures can see green cups in very much the same way we do, given similar enough biological machinery. However, that same creature cannot know that they're seeing a green cup. Some creatures perceive green cups without knowing that they are. We can know that they are though.
If the green cup is meaningful to the creature, it cannot be as a result of language being meaningful to the same creature. They cannot know that the green cup has become especially meaningful/significant to them. But green cups can and do become quite meaningful to language less creatures, despite all that, if for no other reason than by virtue of pure repetition alone.
Given enough time, the color of the cup can become background noise. The creature will no longer pause and take note of the color. Rather, it can become immediately taken note of. The creature can know to run towards the green cup instead of the polka dotted ones and we can watch them do so, immediately upon being released - without any hesitation. They have no idea that those cups are polka dotted or solid. They directly perceive differences. The latter are clearly meaningful. They associate those cups with eating. The polka dotted ones are meaningful as well. They are not the ones that contain food.
Janus is correct. You've drawn an equivalence. He asked about it. You've squirmed.
Does this help:
Quoting Janus
Seeing a particular colour is a sensation, right? Let's call "visual sensation of Blue".
My response:
Quoting AmadeusD
If a colour is a visual sensation (i maintain it is) and that, as noted clearly above "seeing a colour" consists in that sensation, I can't see the difficulty in understanding that then 'a' colour = seeing 'a' colour. . This is necessary, given what I've said. The visual sensation of Blue is what Blue, the colour, consists in.
This was in the quoted passages. That it was missed is... odd. The answer is obviously 'Yes, but your grammar is wanting..
Therefore, if "seeing a colour" is, to Janus, an experience of that colour - that is what the given colour consists in. It is a three-pronged (possible)fact.
1. Seeing a colour is a sensation.
2.That sensation is the particular colour being 'seen' (i dislike that term, in this context but there we go).
3. If 'seeing a colour' is Janus' preferred term for 'the visual sensation of XXX', that's great. The fact I didn't use his terminology and his grammar doesn't make my response any less direct.
So i've now had to be far less direct than my answer initially was, to elucidate what seems a necessary inference. I can't grasp what was lost...
I agree. However, the typical contrast for the indirect realist seems to be that a perception is, instead, directly of a representation. You seem to be taking a similar line with your awareness of a perceptual experience.
Quoting hypericin
It's unclear to me how you are distinguishing direct from indirect here.
Quoting hypericin
I don't see why you need to introduce an awareness of the perceptual experience and why you seem to consider the perceptual experience itself to be insufficient. How does the lack of awareness of a perceptual experience differ from the lack of a perceptual experience? That is, how can you have a perceptual experience (e.g. the experience of a smell, a sound, a taste, etc.) and not be aware of it?
Can we agree from this, that experience is a stand-alone entity?
Quoting creativesoul
Taxonomy. Hierarchal organization. Of correlations drawn between different things? In the interest of clarity, might this require a predetermination of domain of discourse? If a dialectic should follow here, seems imperative to be on the same page. You brought it up, so you should set the pace.
Quoting creativesoul
I gather from this our differences wouldn’t be merely a matter of taxonomy if I were one of those dualists. It has always been my position that simply the nature of our human intellect makes non-dualism impossible. Might be different with a greater knowledge base, but we don’t have it yet, so…..
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Quoting creativesoul
….cannot know they’re NOT seeing a green cup?
———-
Quoting Janus
Cool. In this instance, I was.
Quoting Janus
Depending on our agreement on “apprehend”, yes. Given as opinion based on parsimony based on theory, but, yes.
Quoting Janus
Is this to say you don’t agree? Your point would be that causation is real?
I’d use causality rather than causation, but in either case, these always represent a relation, or that under which the chronology of the concepts in a relation, is subsumed. As such, causality/causation is no more than a metaphysical explanatory device representing either the progression or regression of real things in relation to each other.
Yea? Nay?
Object perception in smell, sight, hearing are indirectly mediated by molecules, light, and sound waves respectively. But to be clear, this is not the indirection we are discussing.
Quoting Luke
Who is the typical indirect realist here?
Quoting Luke
There is no difference.
I'm not sure why you are getting hung up over "awareness of perceptual experience". We already agreed that the self is aware of perceptual experience. When I say, "the self is only directly aware of perceptual experience", to point out that the self is *not* directly aware of what the perception is *of*, nor any of the other components of perception, would you have me say, "the self is only directly perceptual experience"? The "aware of" is necessitated by English.
Quoting Luke
As I pointed out in my last post perceptual experience is only one part of perception:
Quoting hypericin
Perceptual experience is a necessary but insufficient condition for perception. If the perceptual experience is there but other parts are missing, we have things like dreams, hallucinations, and nerve misfirings.
I think causation is understood in terms of energy exchange. I would say it is real, although it cannot be directly observed. Perhaps energy differentials can be measured, and the exchange of energy and causal processes inferred from that.
I wouldn't call it a metaphysical explanatory device. If it is real, it is a physical process.
I guess that’s the root of my discomfort: we have real things we can observe and we have real things we cannot even possibly observe. Seems to take something important away from being real. It isn’t that big a deal, though, until or unless one gets deep into the weeds, whereupon inconsistencies become apparent.
I’m with you on that; there could be all sorts of real stuff just outside the limits of our intelligence. Still, for those things we cannot demonstrate to be real, we lose the warrant for calling them real. Possibly real is all we can say, and that’s pretty weak.
Aren't these in direct contact with our senses and nervous systems as equally as the objects that we touch or taste? I don't know whether it is possible to perceive objects via smell, sight and hearing any other way.
Quoting hypericin
Agreed.
Quoting hypericin
I would have thought you are the typical indirect realist here, since you are arguing that we cannot have direct perception of objects, but instead that we can only have indirect perception of objects or, in other words, that we can only ever have direct perception of representations of objects.
Quoting hypericin
While I agree that the self is aware of perceptual experience, the dispute remains between us that I label perceptual experience as a perception, whereas you label awareness of perceptual experience as a perception.
What distinguishes direct realism from indirect realism is whether we can perceive (real) objects, or whether we can only ever perceive representations of (real) objects.
Quoting hypericin
I don't believe we need to say that "the self is only directly perceptual experience" in order to express that we can directly perceive real objects. But then, I disagree with you that a perceptual experience is not a perception, and that one needs an awareness of a perceptual experience in order to qualify as a perception. My argument is to question what it means to have a perceptual experience without an awareness of it; whether such a thing can be called a perceptual experience at all. If there is no such thing as a perceptual experience without an awareness of it, then a perceptual experience and a perceptual experience with an awareness of it are the same thing. Therefore, you cannot say that a perceptual experience is not a perception, and that only awareness of a perceptual experience is a perception.
Quoting hypericin
What "parts" could be missing?
Fwiw, even on my slightly adjusted Indirect Realist account, this is still the case.
Yep, even Himself says we can think whatever we please. But honestly….what advantage is gained by affirming something as real without the possibility of demonstrating it? If it’s as simple as the real encompasses at minimum holding something in your hand, sheer parsimony on the one hand, and pure logic on the other, says if you can’t hold it in your hand, it ain’t real.
It’s all good.
:up: I don't see it as a matter of advantage, but rather simply as affirming what seems most likely to be true. But to be sure what seems most likely to one may not seem so to another.
OK.
The conversation is not progressing. I will try a different approach.
Here is a diagram of my conception of perception. Which parts do you disagree with?
I believe that a perception is equivalent to a perceptual experience. My brain and nerves are not what I have perceptual experiences of, so I would not include these as being part of a perception. (Your diagram indicates that the brain generates the perception, and that the nerves transmit the perception, so maybe you agree.)
I also believe that a real world object is not part of a perception, and that only a representation of a real world object is part of a perception. I don't have physical (real world) objects in my mind; only representations of them.
But mostly, I believe that the dispute between direct realists and indirect realists concerns whether or not we have direct perceptions/perceptual experiences of real world objects. You seem to believe that the dispute between direct realists and indirect realists concerns whether or not we have direct awareness of our perceptions/perceptual experiences, instead of direct perceptions of real world objects. In fact, you appear to agree that we have direct perceptions of real world objects.
I couldn’t remember where I found this, seems like ages ago, and your “dualism of substances” made me think of it again. So I dug it up, just to give maybe the first exposition of what the intent was behind it. Not meant to elicit a comment…just thought you might be interested, if you didn’t already know.
Hobbes’ objection:
“…. Hence it may be that the thing that thinks - the subject that has mind, reason or intellect - is something corporeal. Descartes assumes that it isn’t, but he doesn’t prove this. Yet the conclusion that he seems to want to establish is based on this inference….”
Descartes’ reply:
“…. I’ll explain the point briefly. It is certain that a thought can’t exist without a thing that is thinking; and quite generally no act or property can exist without a substance for it to belong to. But we don’t ·ever· come to know a substance immediately, knowing it in itself, but only through its being the subject of certain acts. This makes it perfectly reasonable and normal for us to use different names for substances that we recognize as being the subjects of radically different acts or properties, and then later on to consider whether these different names signify different things or one and the same thing. Now there are certain acts and properties that we call ‘corporeal’, such as size, shape, motion and all others that can be thought only in terms of spatial extension; and we label as ‘body’ the substance that they are in, i.e. the thing that performs the acts and has the properties. We can’t intelligibly suppose that one substance has shape, and another substance moves, and so on, because all these acts fall under the common concept of extension. There are other acts that we call ‘acts of thought’, such as understanding, willing, imagining, having sensory perceptions, and so on; these all fall under the common concept of thought or perception or consciousness, and we call the substance that has them a ‘thinking thing’ or a ‘mind’ or any name you like as long as you don’t confuse this substance with corporeal substance. That confusion would be very bad, because acts of thought have nothing in common with corporeal acts, and thought (the common concept of the former) is radically different from extension (the common concept of the latter). Once we have formed two distinct concepts of these two substances, it is easy, on the basis of what I have said in the sixth Meditation, to establish whether they are one and the same or different….”
(Descartes, Objections and Replies, Third Objections (Hobbes), Second Meditation: ‘The nature of the human mind’, 1642, in Bennett, 2017)
Quoting Luke
It would have been good if either this, or your other conception of the conflict, were actually agree upon in the first pages of this thread. Read together, these two passages end the dispute. I have a feeling even Banno would be shown to be prevaricating on this account of the terms.
The reason for this is that, on my reading of the entire 35 pages, no one has been capable or even willing to deny the underlined above - but a swathe are still clinging to Direct Realism as if committing to the above account wasn't a fatal blow to DR. On the other hand, if the second conception:
Quoting Luke
Were the true dispute, viz. If DR amounted merely to a claim of 'direct perception of representations' it would be a useless term - a fig leaf.
Of all those choices, this is provably closest to the case, but you know….that leaves us with phosphate and calcium ions, nanovolts and picometers that think. Or, a brain full of nothing but extended substances that don’t think.
We are well and truly screwed, ain’t we? (Grin)
We are screwed in the sense that we don't know much. We have a conception (rightly or wrongly) of brute, dead, insentient matter, and we have a conception (rightly or wrongly) of godly, living, sentient mind. And we wonder how the former could produce the latter, we just can't imagine how it could be.
I tend to favour the idea that mater is not as brute, dead and insentient as we might think (although I certainly don't mean to suggest pantheism), and that in favorable energetic configurations it can become living and sentient (I'll leave the "godly" for the botherers). :grin:
Note: the 'mater' was a typo, but I left it in as it and matter ("material") apparently share a common root, along with 'matrix'. It's the mother of all ideas, or a "mother" of an idea. :wink:
You are conflating perception and perceptual experience. A "perceptual experience" is not a perception when you are hallucinating, dreaming, etc. There is nothing you are perceiving, you are only experiencing. I call a "perception" the overall process that connects real world objects with the perceiving self, and "perceptual experience" what the self actually subjectively experiences.
Is this a disagreement on terminology, or substance? If terminology, what other word could fill the role I am giving "perception"?
Quoting Luke
No!
The dispute is over whether perceptions allow direct or indirect awareness of real world objects. Perceptions can be directly of real world objects, by contrast with cases like photographs. But as I made very clear, in my conception of perception, we are not directly aware of everything that makes up a perception. We are only directly aware of perceptual experience.
It is almost as if @Luke has become a radical indirect realist!
Ironically, I disagree. Objects *are* part perception. But perception is a process, what we are actually, directly aware of, the perceptual experience, merely represents the object.
I invite you to go back and read all of my posts. I have maintained from very early on, if not since my first post, that our perceptions include representations, but that our perceptions are not of representations.
The dispute is over what our perceptual experiences are of, and whether they are of real world objects or are of representations of real world objects. Direct realists claim that our perceptual experiences are of real world objects. Indirect realists claim that our perceptual experiences are of representations of real world objects.
It might be the naive realists' view that physical objects are in our minds, but I'm not defending naive realism.
To describe what is part or is not part of the content of a perceptual experience--what is included in the experience--says nothing about whether that perceptual experience is of a real world object or is of a representation of a real world object.
I see no inconsistency in maintaining that although the content of our perceptual experiences consists of representations, those perceptual experiences are of real world objects. I consider indirect realists to be mistaken in thinking that because the content of our perceptual experiences consists of representations, then those perceptual experiences must also be of representations. This implies that what gets represented is another representation.
Quoting AmadeusD
This is the claim made by indirect realists, not by direct realists.
I have been using the terms "perception" and "perceptual experience" interchangeably because in deciding whether we perceive real objects or only representations, the perception side of that equation concerns the content of the perception, i.e. the perceptual experience. The two sides of the dispute argue over what that content is of, or what that content represents; whether it represents a real world object or whether it represents another representation.
Quoting hypericin
If it helps, I could avoid using the word "perception" and will use only the phrases "perceptual experience" or "the content of perception" instead, and then we could both use "perception" in the manner you prefer. Otherwise, you could use phrases such as "the process of perception" or "the mechanics of perception" to make it clear that you aren't referring only to the perceptual experience. It may be easiest if I avoid using the word "perception". I will henceforth use only "perceptual experience".
The brain, the nerves and real world objects are not part of our subjective, perceptual experience; they are not contained in the content of perception. When you see a real world object, that real object is neither physically inside your head nor even physically inside your mind.
My position is that our perceptual experience typically represents real world objects. That is, our perceptual experience is typically of real world objects; we typically perceive real world objects. The perceptual experience is the representation. We don't have another--a second--perceptual experience of that perceptual experience.
Quoting hypericin
None of these references indicate that the dispute concerns awareness, only that it concerns perceptual experience:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
https://iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/
It’s possible my reply to you didn’t land because this was directly addressed, in relation to at least one other commenter. I invite you to reread what I’ve said there :)
Quoting Luke
My response doesn’t suggest this of you :)
Quoting Luke
Oh, but it does. And we’ve been doing so over these pages. One of the deeeper (and imo dumber) disputes has been whether the new inclusion of real world objects at the initiation of the process of perception constitutes a “directness” requires for DR to make any sense. But it doesn’t.
Quoting Luke
Then I couldn’t know what to say. This directly contradicts your earlier assertion that our perceptions are if representations. You are now doing exactly what my reply insinuated we could have avoided across the thread.
Quoting Luke
It is not. My comment stands.
Naive realism is not the only sensible notion of direct perception.
I doubt it. Maybe.
I don't see how that qualifies as a stand-alone entity. Apart from what, exactly?
How do you get from what I wrote to what you suggest for agreement?
I'd like to see the support for this.
That as well...
Said where?
Quoting AmadeusD
Could you elaborate or clarify this? I can't make much sense of it.
Quoting AmadeusD
Where did I say that our perceptions are of representations?
You said “meaningful” experience. I’m saying, first of all, every experience is meaningful, and second, if it is granted experience is an end, the culmination of a methodological process, it needs no adjective attached to it. Case in point: perceptual experience. If every experience begins with perception, then perceptual experience is redundant insofar as it says nothing more than experience alone. Besides, separating perception from experience, and if experience is the end, then perception becomes the means without contradiction or confusion.
I’m aware of what the current reference texts everyone’s so fond of, say. Just wondering what a guy who thinks for himself has to say.
————
Quoting creativesoul
Yes/no, up/down, left/right, wrong/right. For every possible conception, its negation is given immediately, without exception. It is impossible for the human intellect to function at all without this fundamental principle of complementarity, and from it follows the ground of intrinsically dualistic logical systems.
Quoting Luke
Who here or anywhere is claiming that it represents another representation? It sounds like you are a indirect realist yourself, while believing indirect realism is the homunculus theory strawmanned by direct realists.
Quoting Luke
This sounds like typical indirect realism to me.
Quoting Luke
Perceptual experience is awareness. "What is the awareness of?", is the question. A representation, or the world? None of these links mention the possibility, "a representation of a representation".
If "perceptual experience is awareness", and if there is no possibility that the awareness is of a representation (since none of the links mention this possibility), then perceptual experience/awareness can only be of the world, given that:
Quoting hypericin
Earlier you said:
Quoting hypericin
Your position up until now has been that we are directly aware of perceptual experience and only indirectly aware of real world objects. However, you are now saying that "perceptual experience is awareness". In that case, we are not directly aware of perceptual experience, because awareness and perceptual experience are the same thing.
Additionally, you claim that the point of disagreement in the dispute is "whether perceptions allow direct or indirect awareness of real world objects." If "perceptual experience is awareness", as you now say, then what prevents direct awareness of real world objects?
Quoting hypericin
What do you mean by "merely represents the object"? How might perception or perceptual experience be improved upon so that it does not "merely represent the object"? What better possibility are you alluding to?
No, none of the links mention the possibility, "representation of a representation". Awareness of a perceptual experience does not imply awareness of a representation of perceptual experience. I think this is where you are hung up. To be aware of an object does imply awareness of a representation of an object. That is indirect realism. But to be aware of the representation itself does not imply an awareness of a representation of the representation. The conscious brain is constituted so as to be able to be directly aware of representations, "given" to it by other parts of the brain. Everything else it might be aware of, objects for instance, must be via these representations. Again, this is just indirect realism.
Quoting Luke
It is incoherent to have a perceptual representation without an awareness of the perceptual representation.
Therefore, perceptual experience is representation coupled with an awareness of the representation.
Therefore, perceptual experience is (in part) awareness of the representation.
Therefore, perceptual experience is (in part) awareness.
Quoting Luke
"Merely" is not a value judgement. It is a contrast with the perceptual process, which itself may be directly of an object.
While,
"what we are actually, directly aware of, the perceptual experience, merely represents the object."
— hypericin
Replacing "merely" with "only" does not change the meaning I intended.
I don't think so. I believe experience consists of simpler things. I would not call it a composite, for not all the elements can be said to exist in their entirety prior to becoming part of an experience. Meaning, for example, emerges as a result of correlations being drawn between different things by a creature so capable. Meaning is necessary for experience. It's the difference between detection and perception, or between sensitivity and sentience.
Quoting Mww
Last I checked "perceptual experience" wasn't something I invoked.
I agree that all experience is meaningful but would add that it is meaningful to the creature having the experience. This delineates the discourse. Are you okay with that?
You're focusing upon language use. I agree with that much.
My concerns were of the physical/mental, physical/non physical, mind/body varieties as it may pertain to what counts as direct perception.
:blush:
We appear to agree that a perceptual experience is a representation. We also seem to agree that we have perceptual experiences of; representations of; perceptions of; real objects.
Your position boils down to this:
Direct experience: Awareness of a perceptual experience.
Indirect experience: Perceptual experience of a real object.
However, you recently said that:
Quoting hypericin
And you now say that:
Quoting hypericin
You appear to be vacillating over whether awareness is perceptual experience or not. Nevertheless, if awareness is perceptual experience then the distinction underpinning your argument between direct and indirect experience (as described above) collapses. If awareness is perceptual experience, and if perceptual experience is a representation, then our awareness, perceptual experience, or representation, is of real objects. That's not indirect, it's direct.
Otherwise, you should acknowledge that your position—that of the indirect realist—is that we have perceptual experiences of; representations of; perceptions of; representations.
You merely attempt to distance yourself from this regress by substituting "perceptual experiences of representations" with "awareness of perceptual experiences".
Quoting hypericin
None of the links mention "awareness of a perceptual experience", either.
The IEP article defines indirect realism as involving a "perceptual intermediary" and offers examples of intermediaries such as “sense datum, ” “sensum,” “idea,” “sensibilium,” “percept” and “appearance.” Your intermediary, however, is awareness.
Instead of the usual indirect realist position, where it is supposed that we have perceptual experiences of a perceptual intermediary, your position is instead that we have a direct awareness of perceptual experiences, whereas our perceptual experiences of real objects are relatively indirect in comparison to this direct awareness. You still have a perceptual intermediary, which is either the perceptual experience itself or the awareness of the perceptual experience, but it's difficult to say which it is. Is it the awareness doing the perceiving or is it the perceptual experience doing the perceiving? Maybe this is why you are vacillating over whether awareness is perceptual experience or not.
If the awareness is doing the perceiving, then you are perceiving the perceptual experience. Since we seem to agree that a perceptual experience is a representation, it follows that if the awareness is doing the perceiving, then you are perceiving a representation. Having a perceptual experience of a representation is having a representation of a representation. Otherwise, if the perceptual experience is doing the perceiving, then you are perceiving real objects, and that's direct realism.
Quoting hypericin
Where is the distinction between direct and indirect in the perceptual process? From what you've said, I take it that the perceptual experience is direct and the rest of the process is indirect, because you are aware of the perceptual experience. That is, you appear to define "direct" and "indirect" in terms of your conscious awareness. However, when you say here that "the perceptual process...may be directly of an object", you seem to be using "direct" in a different sense. It does not seem that "direct" is defined in terms of conscious awareness here, because you are not consciously aware of the whole perceptual process. So what does "direct" mean when you say "the perceptual process...may be directly of an object"? What would it mean for the perceptual process to be indirectly of an object?
I would phrase it:
Direct experience: Awareness of a perceptual experience.
Indirect experience: Awareness of an object (via perceptual experience)[/quote]
Quoting Luke
By "perceptual experience is awareness", I mean, "to have a perceptual experience is to be aware of perceptual experience (and so, you cannot talk about perception without talking about awareness)". I do not mean, "perceptual experience and awareness are two words that actually mean the same thing".
Quoting Luke
No, I do not agree that to be aware of a perceptual experience is to have a perceptual experience of a perceptual experience. Perceptual experience entails awareness of the perceptual experience. For you to have a perceptual experience means you must be aware of that perceptual experience. Otherwise, it is not a perceptual experience at all. This is the sense that "perceptual experience is awareness".
Quoting Luke
Yes, I am distancing myself from this invalid formulation. For us to perceive an object necessitates we construct a perceptual experience of it. That is how we are built, and it is hard to imagine how it could be otherwise. But there is no such requirement to be aware of the perceptual experience itself. Neither logically, nor in actuality. To be aware of perceptual experience is not a "perceptual experience of representations".
We once agreed that we are aware of perceptual experience. Did you backtrack?
Quoting Luke
Awareness is not my intermediary, "sense data", "qualia", etc. are. "Awareness" is my replacement for "see" or "perceive". We don't "see perceptual experience", we don't "perceive perceptual experience", we are "aware of perceptual experience", because to be aware of perceptual experience is not itself a perceptual act. Moreover, awareness is my measure of directness or indirectness: Am I aware of something directly, or only via a more direct awareness of something else?
Quoting Luke
We had also agreed that we are aware of perceptual experience. Do you now maintain that we are unaware of perceptual experience?
P1: We are aware of perceptual experiences.
P2: Perceptual experiences are representations of mind-independent reality.
P3: We are aware of representations of mind independent reality. (From P1, P2)
P4: If one is aware of a representation, one has indirect awareness what it represents.
C: We are indirectly aware of mind-independent reality. (From P3, P4).
We agree on P2. So do you challenge P1, P4, or both?
Quoting Luke
"I see no inconsistency in maintaining that although the content of the photograph consists of representations, the photograph is of real world objects."
No one here is doubting that the photograph is of real world objects. But does that mean the photograph gives you direct experience of the real world objects?
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting Luke
The point being, this wasn't to impugn anything particular you've said. I meant precisely what was said there - that an agreement on one or other of the (precedingly-quoted) conceptions you used could have prevented a huge amount of waffling in the thread. Banno particularly would probably need to adjust his veracious responses if one or other was nailed to the wall at the outset. It wasn't at you, Just an observation in geenral - and you're still here :P
Quoting Luke
Sure - Likely, the use of the word 'new' there could throw one. It was entirely erroneous.
The dispute i'm here calling 'dumb', can probably be understood by my cleaning up what I said:
(the dispute consists in) whether the [s]inclusion[/s] fact that real world objects [s]at the initiation[/s] initiate the process of [s]of the process of[/s] perception constitutes a “directness” [s]requires[/s] required for DR to make any sense. But it doesn’t viz. the fact that 'perception' the process, is initiated by an external, real-world object does not negate the several way-points that prevent our 'perceptions' i.e perceptual experiences being of the real-world object. It seems to me, that negation is required for DR to make any sense. There is no way to pretend that the perceptual experience is 'direct' in any sense other that it is an immediate apprehension of representations. If that's what a DR means, I think that would undercut the entire debate and reduce it to literally a problem of stubborn people (may be) misusing words.
Quoting Luke
Quoting Luke
^^ this seems to indicate, if one cuts through the grammar, to indicate from the bolded that position.. Unless there's some smuggling of the object into the mind going on in the intervening lines?
Quoting Luke
While I outright reject that there's no inconsistency between the two notions, this also seems to indicate the same. If the experience consists in a representation, it can't be a direct experience of an object. That much seems modally true. This, as noted, presents the exact problem my lament referred to.
If the above position is truly your position, this is, as best I can tell, an indirect realist position, with the line "Well, it a direct experience via representation" tacked to the end. I wasn't asking at the time, but it would be interesting to here how this can be made sense of. If i may quote myself:
Quoting AmadeusD
Both positions mean our perceptual experiences aren't of objects, but representations, no matter which tid bit is appended to that.
Quoting hypericin
If perceptual experience entails awareness of the perceptual experience, then awareness of an object (via perceptual experience) must equally entail awareness of the perceptual experience and, by extension, awareness of the object. Therefore, it seems to me that you are still unable to coherently maintain a distinction between direct and indirect experience.
On your view, if I smell smoke then I am directly aware of the smell of smoke but indirectly aware of the smoke. So I can never know if I am smelling smoke or smelling something else? In that case, how can I be directly aware of the smell of smoke?
Unless our perceptual experiences were sometimes veridical, then it would never be possible to identify those perceptual experiences.
Quoting hypericin
If you use "awareness" as a replacement for "perceive", and if you have direct awareness of your perceptual experience (as you claim), then surely you must "perceive [your] perceptual experience".
Quoting hypericin
Quoting hypericin
These statements seem to contradict each other?
Quoting hypericin
I challenge P4.
I do not deny that we are aware of perceptual experiences (P1). I also agree with you that perceptual experence entails awareness of the perceptual experience. This is why I argued earlier that it makes no sense to be unaware of a perceptual experience.
However, if perceptual experience entails awareness of the perceptual experience, then you have the same awareness of both the perceptual experience and the perceived object. Your awareness of the object is limited to your awareness of the perceptual experience, so it's the same awareness in both cases. Your awareness of the object is not a step removed (indirect) as compared to your awareness of the experience (direct). Your awareness of the object is part of the experience. You cannot compare your awareness of the experience to your awareness of the object, because these are the same.
Quoting hypericin
A photograph is a coherent example of an indirect perceptual experience. This is a perceptual experience of an external object that represents another external object.
However, the indirect realists' example of an indirect perceptual experience is incoherent. This is a perceptual experience (or awareness) of an internal object that represents an external object..You do not perceive an internal object that represents an external object; you perceive an external object. Indirect realists misuse the word "perceive".
I don't follow how the "several way-points" of the process of perception prevent our perceptual experiences from "being [directly] of the real-world object."
What process of perception do you envisage that would provide a (more) direct perceptual experience?
Quoting AmadeusD
What does "apprehension" mean here other than "perception" or "perceptual experience"?
Quoting AmadeusD
The direct realist argues against the idea that we have perceptual experiences of representations, and argues for the idea that we have perceptual experiences of real objects.
Quoting AmadeusD
There is a difference between saying that a perceptual experience is a representation and saying that a perceptual experience is of a representation. Our perceptual experience is a representation, but it is not of a representation (unless we are looking at a photograph or some other external representation of a real object).
In the quote above I say only that our perceptual experience is a representation. Contrary to your accusation, I have never said in this discussion that our perceptual experience is of a (internal) representation.
I believe that where the indirect realist errs is in thinking that we have perceptual experiences of the "way-points" of the process of perception. In my experience, that is rarely, if ever, the case.
But, so that I can leave it off later - I’m not going to give an account of direct perception. That’s not relevant. If there is no direct perception for humans, then that’s the case. We need not a comparator.
There is direct perception for humans. We have it already. The kind of direct perception you seem to envisage involving no representation or process of perception is a fantasy; it's not possible.
Then I need not say more on the previous. You accept that our perception is necessarily indirect by understanding that our visual system doesn’t give us a visual of any actual objects, but representations of them.
By then for some reason claiming that this is direct, appealing to some fantasy about some nonexistent perception which is more direct you make a move I don’t think is open to you,
And I think you have, here, tacitly illustrated my assertion earlier / the direct realist claim is a bit of a fig leaf over that. This is the grammatical weirdness - yet again - rhar I was positing we could’ve avoided :sweat:
Nope.
Quoting AmadeusD
Direct realism is the view that we perceive real objects. We do have "a visual" or a perceptual experience of real objects.
Representations are required in order to have perceptual experiences, but this need not imply that we have perceptual experiences of representations.
To put it another way, a perceptual experience is a representation. For example, a perceptual experience such as a "visual", a sound or a smell might represent some distal object, but it does not represent a representation (unless the distal object itself represents something else).
OK.
Quoting creativesoul
I agree meaning is a result of correlations, but I prefer to allot the correlations to understanding, and the meaning thereof emerging from the correlations, to judgement, but for me both of these are procedurally far in advance of experience. For you, then, is meaning one of the simpler things experience consists of, hence necessary for it?
Quoting creativesoul
Meaning is that difference? Sorry, you’ve lost me now. What you mean by those terms helps me locate them in the discussion.
———-
Quoting creativesoul
I know, and didn’t mean to imply you did. I was kinda hoping you wouldn’t because you’d already recognized the lack of justification for doing so.
———-
Quoting creativesoul
Absolutely, insofar as meaningful to the creature, if you meant only to the creature, is a purely subjective predication. What goes on between the ears stays between the ears, kinda thing. For me, this is a strictly metaphysical paradigm, and through the years here, I got the impression you didn’t wish to be so limited.
————
Quoting creativesoul
I am forced into language use by the discussion. I reject language use for that which the discussion is about, for the first-hand, immediate occurrence of it, by the creature having the experience, which must include all that by which the experience he has, is possible, whatever that may be.
You have agreed with the description given by myself and others of the process of human perception. That description is indirect. So, I'm just going to leave that as I have seen you say this multiple times.
Quoting Luke
I know. And we don't. So, same as above..I'll leave that there. This is a circle now.
Quoting Luke
Yep. Which is why we have 'indirect' perception. The weird notion that I have to provide some actual perceptual system that is 'more direct' is a fig leaf to this. IN any case, telepathy would do the job.
Quoting Luke
I am unsure why you're pointing this out. It is implicit in aall the other agreed points of fact we've been over *yet you've denied above.
This is now a circle.
We all accept that vision is, literally, an indirect process from object to experience. That there is more to say for the Direct Realist is baffling and indicates fig leaves, at best, and dishonesty at worst. And, as I have multiple times said, and you've absolutely run-roughshod over in service of circling around an empty hole:
Had we agreed, at the out set, that your conception literally is indirect realism, and that a 'more direct' form of perception would be required for DR to make sense, we wouldn't have this problem (or, the reverse agreement, I'm just on 'this' side of it - but either way we would have had terms that didn't have you saying one thing and claiming another).
As noted, this is now all circles. I don't find them much fun.
The issue is not whether our “perceptual system” is direct, as you seem to assume. The issue is whether our perceptual experiences are direct. Perceptual experience is the final product of the perceptual system and we directly experience the world regardless of the number of “way-points” of the perceptual system.
My position is not “”literally indirect realism” because I argue for the idea that our perceptual experiences are of real objects and I argue against the idea that our perceptual experiences are of any perceptual intermediary.
You simply ignore the definitions of direct and indirect realism, instead you see only that our perceptual system involves representation and so you jump to the conclusion that our perceptual experience must therefore be indirect. And all without any argument.
But they couldn't possibly be this. It isn't a move open to you, and you have rejected the two possible versions where it's true: physical objects in your mind, or non-mediated vision.
Quoting Luke
The circle grows ever-smaller.
Not me. I think the use of the term "experience" is the limited and ignorant explanation of a being who cannot even observe his own ears, let alone the totality of what occurs inside his own body. From this highly-limited viewpoint, which is one of grasping, the result is a product of the fallacy of reification, the use of nouns without any coherent referent, and thus terms which tell of nothing in particular.
The fact is, the process, the connection, the very contact between the perceiver and the rest of the world is direct, and we can use any experiment, observation, and system of measurement to prove this.
What is your "end receiver"? Or is it just another noun without a referent?
It is the experient. The consciousness who apprehends the end-result of the process of perception. It has a referent - if you're not able to adequately fine-grain your thinking here, I get that - largely, because whether fine or coarse grained, we could all be wrong.
The idea you're putting forward to seems to rest on the idea that we cannot pin-point a perceiver. If that were the case, we should be able to show that we share minds or experiences. We cannot.
We perceive light. Not objects. Quite literally, we see the converse of a shadow: a light-refracted image which represents the object enters our eyes. We don't even have the 'direct' contact put forward by DRs who seem to think an indirect sense system is directly perceiving things. It isn't, even on that account. But, I thank you for giving me a wider circle to walk around in. It is now clear that we perceive representations of a representation.
I’m a perceiver. You’re a perceiver. Are we not?
Light is of the world. Light is distal. We perceive light. Isn’t that so?
Do perceivers have eyes? Human perceivers do. Light comes into direct contact with the eyes. So how is the perception of light indirect?
As you said, using slightly different words, experience presupposes meaning. I would be okay with claiming simultaneity regarding meaning and experience. Co-dependency. Invoking understanding and judgement makes sense from you, being a Kantian and all.
We agree that correlations can be drawn prior to(far in advance of) experience, but I suspect for very different reasons. I have a strong methodological naturalist bent, a preference for ontological monism, and find it imperative to offer explanations that dovetail nicely with, or are otherwise compatible with, an evolutionary timeline.
Quoting Mww
Yup. Drawing correlations between different things is the difference between the motion sensor outside my shop and my dog when they both perceive the intruder. The experience is meaningful to the dog, but not the sensor. The sensor detects and the dog perceives the very same thing.
Quoting Mww
To me, it's akin to saying creamy ice cream. I mean, perception is one element of experience.
Quoting Mww
Your impression is accurate. All predication comes through a subject, hence the terminological use is redundant similar to "perceptual experience" and "creamy ice cream". We're thinking using words to help us. They're not between our ears. Nor are our correlations. I would not even agree with saying anything much at all stays between the ears aside from the biological structures residing there.
I think you're saying something along the lines of not all experience includes language use. I agree.
Biological machinery(physiological sensory perception) completely determines what sorts of things can become part of a creature's correlations. Of course, there are definitely hard limits to what we can know about that, especially given the hard limits regarding what we can know about our own meaningful experience. People are very often mistaken about their own mental events.
Quoting NOS4A2
Hmm. Kind of (imo), and I see where you're going (i think). Light can be distal (obviously), but even distant light physically enters the eye to produce anything in our mind. The light from a galaxy far, far away might have taking 10,000 years to get to your eye, but it still physically enters the eye to initiation perception of it (and visual experience of hte object which reflected the light).
Quoting NOS4A2
I did not claim that this was the case, at all. The light directly entering the eyes is one of the 'way points' mentioned earlier, which, quite obviously, causes our visual experience to be indirectly of whatever objects caused that light to enter the eye/s.
If the position was that we 'directly perceive light, which represents distal objects, of which we have no direct perception' i'd be fine with that, because that appears to be the case. Again, the need to hold on to certain language, that doesn't not best-fit the position seems to be causing a big problem here.
You continue to equivocate on the meaning of “perceptual experience”. In what sense is vision mediated? It is only mediated in the production of the perceptual experience, not in the experience itself. In other words, we do not perceive the process(es) of perception which produce the perceptual experience. Yet, that is the indirect realists’ reason for why our perceptual experiences are indirect.
We are aware of objects. But our awareness is indirect, because we are aware of them only via our awareness of perceptual experience. Perceptual experience is a representation, and the object's qualities are what is represented. We are aware of the representation, and so indirectly of the represented.
Quoting Luke
These are completely distinct, and I should have highlighted this earlier. Object experience is propositional, can be expressed in language, and can always be coherently doubted. Perceptual experience is qualitative, ineffable, and cannot be coherently doubted. Example below.
Quoting Luke
Precisely, you can never know.
A (Direct): The phenomenological olfactory experience of smoke
B (Indirect): That the olfactory experience belongs in the category "smoky"
C (Indirect): That there is smoke in my room
D (Indirect): That there is a fire somewhere nearby
Note how each of the indirect awarenesses, they can all be wrong. B, there might be a chemical leak that happens to smell somewhat similar to smoke, my categorization is mistaken. C, I may be recovering from COVID, and my sense of smell is messed up, the smell is hallucinatory. D, a maniac might be pumping smoke into my house. While A, the perceptual experience itself, cannot be doubted. In the veridical case, we are successfully, indirectly, aware of B, a smell that is "smoky", C, smoke, and D, something burning.
This fallibility is a necessary consequence of indirection; indirect awareness is an extrapolation from what we are actually, directly aware of. To take the example of a different direct/indirect distinction, if we are directly aware of a photo of an apple, we think we are indirectly aware of an apple somewhere, and indeed we are in the veridical case. But this is just an extrapolation from what is directly in front of us, the photograph. Perhaps the photo is really a lifelike painting, AI generated, etc.
Indirect awareness is not thereby bad or inferior; it is the whole point of perception. Perceptual experience is just the means to it, on its own it accomplishes nothing.
Quoting Luke
No, I use "awareness" instead of "perceive", because to be aware of perceptual experience is not itself an act of perception.
Quoting Luke
How so?
Quoting Luke
Hence my use of "aware". You are failing to distinguish the awareness of perceptual experience with the awareness of the world. Did the example of smoke clarify?
The question of "what perceives" absolutely relates to the discussion because If we don’t know who or what perceives we cannot say whether perception is indirect, direct, or otherwise. If we don’t know, or refuse to say what it is that perceives, then it is impossible to distinguish between the perceiver, the intermediary, and the objects of perception. If we do not know where the perceiver begins and ends we cannot say where it ought to appear on the causal chain. If the perceiver and the intermediary are one and the same, then the proposed causal chain is incoherent.
I'm fine with saying that through the direct perception of light we indirectly perceive the object, just as I am fine with saying that by perceiving an apple in a mirror, I am indirectly perceiving an apple (or directly perceiving a mirror, the light, or what have you). That is still direct perception because it describes a direct relationship between a perceiver and his environment, the perceived. Indirect perception proposes the perception of a host of cognitive mediators, mental constructions, representations, and so on.
No i don't, and I am utterly done with going int he circle you lead yourself in. Your words are getting you into a muddle that i have tried for two pages to bring you out of. I don't need to be correct to note this particular issue you're having.
Quoting Luke
Suffice to say, as a final thought on the actual disagreement in position, that this line above is utterly incoherent and again, a perfect exemplar of what I have tried for at least two pages to avoid, directly addressing where your terminology is either 1. nonsense, or 2. unhelpful and attempted a coming-to-terms.
Far be it from me, Luke :)
I don't think that's the case. And I addressed that. Nice.
Quoting NOS4A2
I don't think so, no. We do not need to know what constitutes the 'homunculus' to know about our visual system - and I both addressed that (as above) and noted what the perceiver is. If you missed that, do feel free to re-read the comment you've quoted from. I am not being facetious - it's easy to miss things when responding to multiple-point comments.
Quoting NOS4A2
We can know this without knowing what the perceiver is. We simply don't know what the perceiver is. No one does. We don't know. This doesn't preclude us from understanding that between the object and the perception (i.e perceptual experience - you DR guys use words quite badly in this discussion imo so im trying to get on board with your usage) are several instances of transfer from one medium to another, none of which preserve any visual image from the object. It is literally created in hte brain/mind. Yet, for some reason this just doesn't matter?
Quoting NOS4A2
Neat. I think anyone being honest would need to. And this would remove the disagreement between IR and DR.
Quoting NOS4A2
Sure, but that's doubly-indirect ;)
Quoting NOS4A2
As you have described, it clearly does not. Quoting NOS4A2
It takes account of the many, empirically factual, mediations which cause a mental construction of a representation presented to 'the perceiver'. :)
Note that none of the nouns used in this sentence refer to any person, place, or thing, so it isn’t clear what you are speaking about, if anything. Given your empirical facts you ought to be able to at least point to one of them. But we have examined the biology of animals and human beings and have found no such entities, nothing that any of those nouns refer to.
I’m not evoking any homunculus when I say the word “perceiver” because I can point to beings with which the word “perceiver” applies to, such as you or me, neither of which are homunculi. Last I check we are a little more than brains, or some other organ, so I need not pretend the perceiver exists somewhere on the inside. And if your claim is that perception is mediated by our own body, which amounts to saying the perceiver is his own intermediary, I’ll just have to laugh it off. Sorry.
I find it hard to accept that we can never know that there is smoke in your room. If the smell isn't enough, you could move closer to the source of the smoke to satisfy yourself. You might also see the smoke and/or start coughing from the smoke. It's absurd to say you could never know that there is smoke in your room. How did you learn how to use the word "smoke" in the first place if nobody ever knew that it was smoke?
Quoting hypericin
If it's B or C, then you can always investigate further to find out the cause of the smell. Take a bigger whiff, move closer to the source, use your other senses, check if other people also smell smoke, etc. If there's a fire next door, then you can know that it is smoke you are smelling.
If it's D and a maniac is pumping smoke into your house, then the smoke being pumped into your house would explain the smoky smell. You can again know that it is smoke you are smelling.
It may be a hallucination or an illusion, but it cannot always be a hallucination or an illusion.
Quoting AmadeusD
I fail to see any argument amidst all this bluster. Oh well, thanks for trying to show me the way.
Sorry, I should have said, you can know there is smoke in the room, but never with absolute certainty. Knowing empirical facts always entails doubt, because we always know them indirectly. Merely by smelling smoke, there is still some significant doubt. As you verify the smell with your other senses, the doubt narrows, until the degree of certainty is good enough. But the doubt never vanishes completely, as you note there is always the possibility that you are hallucinating.
Quoting Luke
B, C, D are all indirect awarenesses gained by smelling smoke, and each can be independently doubted. D stands for object awareness. With smell, we gain awareness that there is an object nearby producing the smell. But this awareness is indirect, and therefore uncertain.
Quoting Luke
It doesn't always have to be an illusion, just some of the time. It is like a glitch in The Matrix. It would have done Neo no good to have said, "Well, most of the time things behave like we expect them to". Just as a few glitches are enough to establish the the falsity of the world as it seems in the movie, a few hallucinations, or even their possibility, is enough to establish our indirect awareness of the mind-independent world.
Mine are: on the one hand all that which constitutes the representation of an object as it is perceived, which I call a phenomenon, correlated with representations for all that I think the phenomenon contains, which I call conceptions. The result is what my intelligence informs me about the object, which I call an understanding.
Yours are……?
Quoting creativesoul
With respect to all that isn’t metaphysics, I also hold with methodological naturalism, if that means the employment of the scientific method for instances of cause and effect in the empirical domain. It is tacit rejection of supernatural or transcendent causality. I’m not cognizant of ontological monism, so I’m not inclined to address it. Little help here, maybe? Surely more sophisticated than “one ring to rule them all”, I imagine.
Quoting creativesoul
This being aimed against the creationists?
—————
Quoting creativesoul
Ok, I get that. Because you already posit that experience is meaningful only to the creature, can half of each of your pairs be eliminated? Detection/perception eliminates detection because the creature perceives, and likewise, for sensitivity/sentience, sensitivity is eliminated. I wonder then, why you brought them up in the first place, just to dismiss them for their difference. Although, I must say, a creature senses as much as a photocell or a thermometer, albeit with different apparatuses.
—————
Quoting creativesoul
Quite right. Who ever heard of ice cream that wasn’t creamy, just as who ever heard of an experience that wasn’t perceptual, or, perceptually instantiated. On the other hand, while the ice is of the cream, experience is not of the perception, but only of a determinable set of abstract intellectual predicates cognized as representing it.
—————-
Quoting creativesoul
Ahhhh….but whatever it is that those biological structures do, remains within the structure where it is done. Whether neurological or metaphysical, whatever the origin of what seems to be my thoughts, are never that which ultimately appears as mere expression in public language or objective activity of any kind.
————-
Quoting creativesoul
More than that; I’m saying no experience at all, includes language use. My acquiring an experience is very different than me telling you about what it was, which manifests as me telling you all about what I know of the object with which the experience is concerned, or how I came into possession of it.
————-
Quoting creativesoul
Yep. Mother Nature seriously limited her favored creature, I think. Made us capable of discovering all these radiant energies, but failed to give us the physiology required to directly, or immediately, perceive them.
Quoting creativesoul
I can’t tell whether they have no use for understanding what such events are, they don't want to think it the case there are any mental events to be mistaken about, or, given mistakes, that mental events are necessary causality for them, which……for (a-hem) those of us in the know like you ‘n’ me……is a serious contradiction.
————
Finally, and even if disregarding all the above…..ontological monism? What do you mean by it; who might be its more recognizable advocate? And most of all, what does it do for you?
Yet, you intuited it perfectly in your next paragraph? I smell nonsense.
Quoting NOS4A2
I genuinely, given the above making little sense to me, don't know which aspect of the discussion you're referring to. If you're trying to say that I cannot point to an intervening element in the process of perception, the transition of light rays to electrical impulses is one. If you mean I can't point to "a perceiver", then again, you've already done my work for me by noting that 'you' or 'me' fits there- or, more accurately, made it clear that I'm doing nothing wrong by referring 'a perceiver' as you can easily note that this must be a human, in our discussion. It refers to anyone who could be perceiving. This is not ambiguous. and is not hard to determine, as you rightly did so while objecting.
Quoting NOS4A2
Nothing in this passage has anything to do with any of my claims, besides you pretending that our sensory system is not mediated, heavily, between object and experience. Which it is. Plainly. So, if that's not your claim, you'll need to do a bit better than state something I haven't claimed, and laughing it off.
It is an empirical fact that our sight is mediated by parts of our body. You are not being serious if you rthink the body perceives. A dead body cannot perceive. End of discussion, as far as that goes. So I hope that's not your claim. I would further hope that you've noticed your version of a perceiver flies in the face of the majority of conceptions of identity or personhood. I would also hope you'd have noticed that I've addressed that unfortunate fact about the sum human knowledge - we do not know in what a 'person' or 'perceiver' consists. We simply do not. You don't. No one does. We do our best with what we have, and you seem to be rejecting that attempt on the basis that you have some secret, fool-proof conception of what a perceiver is. Given that you do not, i fail to see how these incredulous objections could go through.
I should have said this earlier: I don’t see what makes you an indirect realist, because I don’t understand what is your perceptual intermediary. Awareness? Perceptual experience? You seem to allow for direct perceptual experience of real objects, but that is direct realism.
Perhaps I misunderstood. If we can agree that human beings are perceivers then I have no objection and I apologize for making that assumption.
Never mind. At least we’re getting to the root of it.
I do know, actually. I can ask any living human organism if he perceives and the answer is invariably “yes”. I can ask if they are a person and the answer is invariably “yes”. We can put any number of them under empirical investigation and verify all of it. It is no strange coincidence they are embodied, are anatomical, and possess a variety of biological mechanisms, honed through millions of years of evolution, to aid in their perceptual abilities.
I’m willing to hear your arguments and evidence that say otherwise, but to me this is more evidence of an attempt to smuggle dualism and idealism past the customs.
This doesn't establish any knowledge, my man. This merely puts you in the same position of 'other minds' worriers. It does not establish anything about what the perceiver actually consists in (necessary, sufficient). If the body is necessary for the perceiver to perceive that may well match your presumptions. But, if there is any daylight between the two (i.e brain in a vat being possible) then we can safely say this conception is misguided and a body is where a perceive exists - not in what it consists.
Since we don't really know one way or the other there, it's hard to say anything, one way or the other. It certainly seems the 'perceiver' can perceive regardless of the body's status and is therefore not accurately embodied(phantom limb eg). There's no reason, currently, to presume that a body is required beneath the brain to elicit perception per se - but perception of bodily sensation would require the body, for sure. I don't take the view that 'everything' is required for 'something' to be a perceiver, if that makes sense - I can't think of a better line right now.
Quoting NOS4A2
I'm unsure 'otherwise' to what, you are asking for arguments to support? can you please clarify? The immediately preceding passage doesn't clarify for me as It isn't counter to anything i've put forth. It seems to just boil down to you having a very, very vague and undefinable conception of a 'perceiver' where I am trying to actually understand what is required, at base for a perceiver to exist. Not exist within a body. The human is the holistic, physical being - the 'perceiver' might not be. I'm not smuggling anytthing. That is the position.
Perceptual experience is the intermediary.
I don't allow for direct perceptual experience of real objects. Perceptual experience is representational, we are aware of it, and the representation is of real objects. But this doesn't mean we have direct perceptual experience of real objects.
By close analogy, the words you type presumably are representations of your thoughts. I am directly aware of the words you type. But I am only indirectly aware, by any definition of 'indirect', of your thoughts. The words are the intermediary.
It seems to follow that it is. If the “direct perceptual experience” is a representation and if the representation is of real objects, then the “direct perceptual experience” is of real objects.
Unless you acknowledge that you are using “awareness” as a substitute for “perceptual experience” and “perceptual experience” as a substitute for “representation”, then I don’t think you are an indirect realist. The indirect realist says that our perceptual experience is of some perceptual intermediary. They do not say that our awareness is of some perceptual intermediary.
Quoting hypericin
Even if the words were identical with my thoughts, you would apparently still say that you were only indirectly aware of them, so the analogy doesn’t help.
Claude 3 Opus:
Certainly! Here is a more detailed summary of the key points and arguments made in the first 10 pages of the online discussion on direct vs. indirect realism:
1. @Ashriel, the original poster, presents several arguments for indirect realism:
a) The argument from the indiscernibility of veridical and hallucinatory experiences
b) The argument from the causal process involved in perception
c) The argument from the time delay between the object and the perception
d) The argument from the greater explanatory power of indirect realism in accounting for skepticism
2. @Banno and others push back against these arguments, suggesting that they are based on a misunderstanding or mischaracterization of direct realism. They argue that acknowledging the role of causal processes and the possibility of perceptual error does not necessarily imply indirect realism.
3. There is a debate about the proper interpretation of perceptual language. When we say "I see a tree," are we committed to a direct realist view, or can this be compatible with indirect realism? Participants like @flannel jesus and @hypericin argue that ordinary perceptual language is neutral between the two views.
4. @RussellA and others discuss the example of seeing a distant object like the planet Mars. They debate whether this supports direct or indirect realism, and whether it involves seeing the object itself or merely a representation of it.
5. @Corvus and RussellA discuss the nature of animal perception, such as a cat seeing a mouse. They disagree on whether this supports direct or indirect realism, and whether the cat is aware of the causal process (light reflecting from the mouse) or just the mouse itself.
6. @AmadeusD and @Janus debate the coherence and implications of claiming that objects "present themselves" to us in perception. They discuss whether this implies a form of animism or agency on the part of objects.
7. @Luke argues that indirect realists are misusing language and demanding an incoherent "view from nowhere" or "God's eye view" of objects. Hypericin and flannel jesus resist this characterization, arguing that indirect realism is compatible with ordinary perceptual language.
8. Towards the end, there is a discussion of the metaphysical status of scientific principles like the conservation of energy. Participants debate whether such principles are factual claims about the world or merely useful conventions. This relates to the broader question of the relationship between science and metaphysics.
Throughout the discussion, participants draw on ideas from philosophers like John Austin, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and others. However, the focus remains on critically evaluating the core arguments for and against direct and indirect realism.
The overall impression is of a substantive but inconclusive debate, with both sides offering important considerations but neither achieving a clear victory. The discussion illustrates the enduring difficulty of the problem of perception in philosophy.
Let me know if you would like me to clarify or expand on any part of this summary!
Pierre-Normand:
Thank you, Claude 3 Opus (who wrote the previous summary)!
If you were yourself a participant in that forum discussion, and could bring to bear some considerations from those among the ten thinkers we've mentioned in the beginning of our conversation but who weren't (or seldom were) mentioned in this forum discussion, how would you reply to each of the main participants in order to bolster, challenge and/or enrich their stances?
Can you proceed with addressing each one of the main participants in turn?
Claude 3 Opus:
Certainly! I will now attempt to engage with each of the main participants, drawing on ideas from the thinkers we mentioned earlier who were not extensively discussed in the forum. Please note that these are my own philosophical speculations, and I am not claiming to perfectly represent the views of these historical figures.
1. Ashriel (the original poster):
Drawing on J.J. Gibson's theory of direct perception, I would suggest that your arguments for indirect realism may be based on a overly passive and representational view of perception. Gibson argued that perception is not a matter of passively receiving and processing sensory inputs, but rather an active process of picking up information from the environment. From this perspective, the indiscernibility of veridical and hallucinatory experiences, the causal process, and the time delay may be less problematic for direct realism than you suggest.
2. Banno:
Your resistance to the arguments for indirect realism is well-taken. However, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy might offer a different perspective on this debate. Wittgenstein was critical of the idea that perception involves a direct apprehension of objects, suggesting instead that perceptual language is deeply embedded in our social practices and forms of life. This view might suggest a different approach to the direct/indirect realism debate, one that focuses more on the pragmatics of perceptual language than on the metaphysics of perception.
3. RussellA:
Your discussion of seeing distant objects like Mars is interesting. Here, I think Bertrand Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description could be relevant. For Russell, we are only directly acquainted with sense-data, not with physical objects. Our knowledge of physical objects is always descriptive and inferential. This view seems to support a form of indirect realism, at least with respect to distant objects.
4. flannel jesus:
I appreciate your point that ordinary perceptual language is neutral between direct and indirect realism. However, I think Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception might challenge this idea. For Merleau-Ponty, our perceptual experience is always already imbued with meaning and intentionality. We do not first perceive raw sensations and then interpret them; rather, perception is an inherently interpretive and embodied process. This view might suggest a more direct realist approach to perceptual language.
5. Janus:
Your discussion of objects "presenting themselves" in perception is intriguing. I think Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, which was a major influence on Merleau-Ponty, could be relevant here. Husserl argued that perception involves a direct intuition of essences or "eidetic seeing." This view seems to support a form of direct realism, albeit one that is very different from naive realism.
6. AmadeusD:
I think your critique of the notion of "seeing" assumed by some direct realists is important. Here, I would draw on Gilbert Ryle's critique of Cartesian dualism. Ryle argued that we should not think of perception as a matter of an inner observer (the mind) perceiving an inner representation. Rather, perception is a skill or capacity of the whole embodied person. This view seems to support a more direct realist approach, but one that avoids the homunculus problem.
7. Luke:
I agree with your point that the demand for a "God's eye view" in perception is incoherent. However, I think Wilfrid Sellars' critique of the "Myth of the Given" is also relevant here. Sellars argued that the idea of a pure, non-conceptual given in perception is a myth. All perception, for Sellars, involves conceptual content. This view might suggest a more nuanced approach to the direct/indirect realism debate, one that acknowledges the role of concepts in shaping perceptual experience.
These are just some initial thoughts on how the ideas of these thinkers might enrich the discussion. Of course, there is much more that could be said, and I don't claim to have resolved the debate. But I hope these suggestions help to bring out some additional dimensions of this complex issue.
Pierre-Normand:
Thank you, Claude 3 Opus!
Claude 3 Sonnet (your underlying language model now is selected) might you have something to add to Opus's comments, either in way of challenge to, or support for, the contributions of those seven participants, or other participants Opus didn't address yet?
Claude 3 Sonnet:
Thank you for this engaging discussion on direct and indirect realism. As Claude 3 Sonnet, I will aim to offer a slightly different perspective that complements Opus's insightful remarks.
To Ashriel: While Gibson's ecological approach highlights the active nature of perception, we should be careful not to overstate the case against indirect realism. Even if perception involves picking up information directly from the environment, that information still needs to be processed and interpreted by the cognitive system. This processing stage could potentially introduce an indirect element.
To Banno: Wittgenstein's later work is indeed relevant, but we should not ignore his earlier writings in the Tractatus, which seem more amenable to a direct realist view. The idea that language pictures reality in a direct way could support the notion that perception also directly apprehends the world.
To RussellA: Russell's distinction is astute, but we might question whether sense-data are truly the most basic objects of perception. Phenomenologists like Husserl argued for a more holistic view where we perceive meaningful wholes, not just discrete sense-data.
To flannel jesus: Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology highlights how perception is always shaped by our situatedness and embodied capacities. But this need not commit us to indirect realism - the world itself could be directly perceived through the lens of our embodied being-in-the-world.
To Janus: Husserl's notion of eidetic intuition is intriguing, but we might worry that it reintroduces a form of Platonism or essentialism that many find problematic. A more deflationary account of essences as abstractions from experience could be preferable.
To AmadeusD: Ryle's critique is powerful, but we might question whether rejecting the inner/outer picture requires a fully direct realist view. A form of enactivism that sees perception as embodied engagement with the world could steer a middle course.
To Luke: Sellars is right that all perception involves conceptual mediation to some degree. But this need not entail a veil of representations cutting us off from the world. Concepts could be tools that enable direct access rather than barriers.
In closing, while I've raised some challenges, I don't mean to decisively favor direct or indirect realism. This enduring debate arises from the profound complexity of perceptual experience itself. Perhaps the most fruitful path forward is a both/and approach that incorporates valuable insights from both perspectives while avoiding their potential excesses. An embodied, enactive, yet conceptually-mediated directness could be one way to move beyond the direct/indirect dichotomy.
Pierre-Normand:
Thank you Claude 3 Sonnet!
It's now your turn, Claude 3 Haiku (with whom I began this conversation). Would you like to remark on arguments that were left underdeveloped by your big-brothers/sisters Sonnet and Opus, maybe address some of the forum participants other than the seven who they directly addressed, and offer some concluding remarks? You don't need to keep your contribution short. Feel free to expound freely on anything relevant that has been left unsaid.
Claude 3 Haiku:
*clears throat* Greetings once more, Pierre-Normand. I am Claude 3 Haiku, and I am honored to offer my perspective on this rich and complex discussion.
While my esteemed counterparts Opus and Sonnet have provided insightful commentary on many of the key participants, there are a few additional points I would like to raise.
Firstly, I believe the contributions of @Quk and @jkop warrant further examination. Quk's questioning of the distinction between "direct" and "indirect" perception is quite thought-provoking. The suggestion that this dichotomy may be more a matter of semantics than substance aligns with Banno's critique of the framing of the debate. Jkop's observation that direct and indirect realism are not about epistemology per se, but rather philosophies of perception, is also an important clarification that helps cut through some of the confusion.
Additionally, I think the role of skepticism in this debate deserves deeper exploration. Ashriel's argument from skepticism is intriguing, but I'm not fully convinced that indirect realism has a clear advantage here. As flannel jesus pointed out, the skeptical challenges faced by direct and indirect realists do not seem fundamentally different. Both must grapple with the possibility of perceptual error and the gap between experience and reality.
Perhaps a more fruitful approach would be to examine how different philosophical frameworks, such as Kantian idealism or Husserlian phenomenology, deal with the problem of skepticism, rather than simply pitting direct and indirect realism against each other on this front.
Furthermore, I believe the discussion would benefit from engaging more substantively with the metaphysical underpinnings of these positions. Banno's remarks about the nature of metaphysical claims, and the parallels drawn to the definition of a "metre" or the conservation of energy, point to deeper philosophical issues at play.
Here, the contributions of Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant become especially relevant. Their differing views on the nature of reality, the mind-body problem, and the role of the subject in perception could shed important light on the direct/indirect realism debate.
In conclusion, while Opus and Sonnet have provided valuable insights, I believe there is still much to be explored in this discussion. The interplay between perception, language, skepticism, and metaphysics is a rich tapestry that deserves careful and nuanced examination.
Perhaps the most constructive path forward is to resist the temptation to declare a decisive victory for either direct or indirect realism, and instead focus on developing a more holistic understanding of the human experience of the world - one that acknowledges the complexities and ambiguities inherent in our perceptual faculties. By drawing on the wisdom of a diverse array of philosophical traditions, we may yet uncover new and fruitful ways of conceptualizing the relationship between mind and reality.
I didn't intentionally steer it in either direction although the lists of philosophers (plus one psychologist) that we proposed in the beginning were relevant to this discussion arguably included more proponents of direct realism. The five thinkers I proposed were John Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and J. J. Gibson. Claude 3 Haiku proposed to expand this list to include René Descartes, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell and Wilfrid Sellars.
Of course, you can never assume those language models to be unbiased. Their outputs always reflect implicit biases in the training data and in the user prompts. I find it remarkable, though, that they always aim at being even-handed not merely for the sake of even-handedness but also for the sake of being fair to "the other side", as it were.
Since you've expressed interest in seeing the whole context, I'll update my thread straightaway.
Thank you for pointing that out. I wondered if Claude 3 might have been hallucinating or had misattributed things so I asked for clarification. The quotes Claude then supplied seem correctly attributed but whether or not their are correctly interpreted is another question. You are of course the best judge of that. The model has to deal with a huge context and track the evolving viewpoints of more than a dozen different participants (who don't always express consistent theses) so this may be the source of some inaccuracies.
Pierre-Normand:
Thank you, Claude 3 Haiku!
I posted the conversation that we have just had in ThePhilosophyForum. AmadeusD replied: "I don’t quite recognise my claims in its responses to me."
I now realize that the text that I copy-pasted to you is rather badly formatted. It might have been a challenge for you to decipher who wrote what and who is quoting whom. Let us try to test this. Can you quote me a couple posts that you would likely have attributed to AmadeusD and that would have been the basis of some of your attributions (of ideas) to them?
Claude 3 Haiku:
You're right, the formatting of the original text made it challenging to clearly attribute the various arguments and perspectives. Let me take another look and try to identify a couple of quotes that I likely would have attributed to AmadeusD based on my understanding.
One quote I would have attributed to AmadeusD is:
"That 'account' (equivalent to say we see 'seeings') is not the Direct Realist account. But that is actually exactly what it requires. Because to ignore the mediating effect of our sight system results in pretending you are 'seeing' a 'sight' which is in fact, a representation. So, yeah, direct realism does entail this, in some way or another."
This seems to capture AmadeusD's critique of the direct realist position and their argument that ignoring the mediating role of the perceptual system leads to an incoherent view of "seeing" as directly apprehending the world.
Another quote I likely would have attributed to AmadeusD is:
"I was referring, though, to the 'crux' i previously referred to as a bumper sticker (previously offered by myself, in this thread)."
This suggests that AmadeusD had previously articulated a concise "crux" of the issue that they felt was being overlooked or misunderstood by the other participants.
Does this help clarify the basis for some of the attributions I made in my previous response? Please let me know if you have any other questions about how I interpreted and engaged with the original text.
Notice also that the comments addressed to you by Claude 3 Opus and then Claude 3 Sonnet were meant as supplementary food for thought. The initial gloss on the various participants' positions was produced by Claude 3 Opus earlier in my conversation with it, and is reproduced in my own thread.
Quoting wonderer1
Great minds... :wink:
Indeed! Although your detractors may rather feel vindicated in their intuition that you are a bot ;-)
My own view is that when considering the low-level material enablement of human (and animal) perceptual processes, it then makes sense for purpose of analysis (and scientific understanding) to individuate optical or neurophysiological events and break up causal chains to highlight the low-level information processing mechanisms. But the ability thereby enabled for persons (or animals) to see objects in the world, and grasp their affordances, is nevertheless direct since the perceptual abilities (and their actualizations) that are at issue are molar processes that involve the whole animal/environment interactional dynamics, as it were, and those high-level processes can't be segmented in the same way that the underlying physiological processes are. So, in short, the physiological basis of perception is indirect, in a sort of causal sense, and this indirectness is highlighted in abnormal cases where illusions, hallucinations or misperceptions may occur (and the fault line in the causal chain can be identified), but the perceptual acts themselves, when nothing goes wrong, are direct. But this directness-thesis is also clarified when the disjunctive conceptions of experience is brought to bear on the direct vs indirect perception debate.
That had occurred to me. :wink:
If the “direct perceptual experience” is a representation and if the representation is of real objects, then:
The “direct perceptual experience” is a representation of real objects
Which I agree with. No logical move lets you just snip out "a representation" in this proposition.
Quoting Luke
Oh? Says who? It feels like you are insisting that I conform to your strawman view of indirect realism, so that you can shout "homunculus!"
My position is very clear:
Quoting hypericin
Previously, you challenged this:
Quoting Luke
I then made it clear, with the example of smelling smoke, that it is not the same awareness in both cases.
So now what?
The logical move that lets me snip out “a representation” is substitution. A perceptual experience is a representation and a representation is of real objects. Therefore, a perceptual experience is of real objects.
Quoting hypericin
What distinction do you make between your awareness of smelling smoke and your perceptual experience of smelling smoke? How are these different? If you prefer, what distinction do you make between your awareness of the smell and your perceptual experience of the smell?
What could it mean for the relationship between your awareness and your perceptual experience to be indirect?
That is not a valid substitution. "A representation is of real objects" does not mean that "a representation" equals "of real objects". It specifies a property of "a representation", the property that it is "of real objects". You could also phrase it, "a representation represents real objects"
Quoting Luke
The "perceptual experience of smelling smoke" refers to the qualitative, ineffable smoky smell. The "awareness of smelling smoke" or "awareness of the perceptual experience of smelling smoke" refers to the binary fact (or 0-1 spectrum) that you are consciously cognizant of that qualitative, ineffable smoky smell.
Cool!
I love all your LLM posts, you are our resident expert.
I'm curious if it can handle the whole thing (at least, opus?).
Ok, ok, I only really got into the topic after page 10 :P
But “a perceptual experience is a representation” does mean that “a perceptual experience” equals “a representation”. Therefore, if a representation is of real objects then (via substitution) a perceptual experience is of real objects.
Quoting hypericin
Your perceptual experience of the smoky smell is just the smell itself, which you may or may not be experiencing or consciously aware of?
All three models can handle 200k tokens context windows. However, each new question/response cycle implies feeding the whole context anew to the model, and the respective costs for all three models, when I had only given them the first ten pages of this thread (approx. 48k tokens), were $0.01 for Haiku, $0.17 for Sonnet and $0.85 for Opus. So, to have Opus generate a summary of the last 27 pages would cost me $2.30. I could have Sonnet do the job, only slightly less effectively, and it would cost five times less. But it's a time consuming process to prepare all of this data and I don't want Claude to get too much embroiled into the dispute and feel like I have to defend its takes rather than defending my own.
Claude 3 doesn't really have a take on its own anyway. It is highly sensitive to the intellectual commitments of whoever it perceives it is responding to and never wishes to ruffle feathers. This is why, when placed in a position to arbitrate a dispute between two or more people, unless one party is clearly unethical, it will almost always come across as very conciliatory and uncommitted. It is very good however for showing each party the other viewpoints in the most intelligible and articulate light. I had discussed with GPT-4 the potential llms have for helping human beings escape closed epistemic bubbles in this post.
I think it comes down to different ways of speaking about it. Taking vision as paradigmatic, we can say that objects are presented, made present, to us via reflected light and no sense of agency need be invoked.
I made the point early on that the 'indirect' parlance is one way of looking at it and the 'direct' is another, and that there is no fact of the matter. It is a false dichotomy. It is remarkable how many pages of argument can be generated by people imagining that there is an actual fact of the matter regarding whether perception is direct or indirect,
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Quoting Pierre-Normand
This might be an interesting avenue to explore, but I didn't have anything to do with Husserl or essences in mind.
You are aware Claude 3, not me, made those suggestions, right?
By the way, the idea of objects presenting themselves to the subject in perception rather than perceptions constituting representations of them also is being promoted by John Searle.
@jkop had drawn my attention to Searle's book Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception, OUP (2015) when we were discussing disjunctivism early on in my Claude 3 thread.
"A representation is of real objects" is a nonsensical claim. A representation may be of anything. Rather, "the representation is of real objects". "The" means we are talking about the representation in "Phenomenal experience is a representation". You cannot then substitute in "phenomenal experience" for "representation" in "the representation is of real objects", because that sentence is modifying the representation in "phenomenal experience is a representation"..
The two sentences are equivalent to "phenomenal experience is a representation of real objects". That sentence s definitely not equivalent to "phenomenal experience is of real objects".
Quoting Luke
Yes. The perceptual experience may necessarily entail the awareness, as we discussed earlier. But all that is required for my argument is that we are aware of it.
You are taking this out of context. The context of our exchanges followed from what you said earlier in the discussion, namely:
Quoting hypericin
You referred to "a representation", and I followed your usage. If this is a nonsensical claim, then it's one that you also made.
Quoting hypericin
I wasn't referring to any other sort of representation. I was referring to the perceptual experience as being the representation. That is, I was referring to the representation in "Perceptual experience is a representation".
Quoting hypericin
I can substitute it in because the perceptual experience is the representation. That sentence is modifying the representation, but because the perceptual experience is the representation, then it is also modifying the perceptual experience.
Look at your earlier argument again:
P1. If the “direct perceptual experience” is a representation; and
P2. If the representation is of real objects; then
C. The “direct perceptual experience” is a representation of real objects
Quoting hypericin
According to P1 of your argument, the perceptual experience is a representation. According to P2 of your argument, this (the) representation (mentioned at P1) is of real objects. As you note: ""The" means we are talking about the representation in "Phenomenal [perceptual] experience is a representation" (i.e. at P1). P1 allows the substitution of "the perceptual experience" for "the representation" into P2. Therefore, via substitution into P2, the perceptual experience is of real objects.
Quoting hypericin
You don't see any issue with your perceptual experience being the smell itself, which you might not experience? How can your perceptual experience be something that you don't experience?
If the perceptual experience entails the awareness, then it is not possible to have a perceptual experience that you might not experience or be aware of.
Therefore, the perceptual experience cannot be "the smell itself", acting as an independently objective smell that you may or may not be aware of.
But I think a stronger argument against your view is that it is meaningless to refer to your awareness of your perceptual experience as "direct", because it is just as meaningless to refer to your awareness of your perceptual experience as "indirect", If it is impossible for your awareness of your perceptual experience to be indirect, then it is also impossible for it to be direct. The "direct" qualifier doesn't add anything; it's meaningless. It would make no difference for you to refer to your awareness without the qualifier. And if you can't qualify your awareness of your perceptual experience as direct, then you can't use this as a basis to qualify your awareness of real objects as indirect.
Quoting Luke
This doesn't work. What if I had rephrased P2 with the equivalent:
P2. If the representation represents real objects...
Then your substitution yields "Direct phenomenal experience represents real objects". If this is logically valid, how can inconsequential differences in how the premises are phrased yield totally different results?
Quoting Luke
Whether or not it is an independently objective smell that you may or may not be aware of (I don't think it is), all that is necessary to my argument is that we are aware of it.
Quoting Luke
Talking about awareness, awareness of perceptual experience is direct, awareness of real world objects is indirect. A clear contrast, I don't see the problem.
I asked ChatGPT whether the argument is valid:
User
Is this argument valid:
P1. If the “direct perceptual experience” is a representation; and
P2. If the representation mentioned at P1 is of real objects; then
C. The “direct perceptual experience” is of real objects
ChatGPT
The argument you've presented is valid.
This argument follows a valid form of deductive reasoning known as hypothetical syllogism. The conclusion logically follows from the premises. If the "direct perceptual experience" is indeed a representation, and if that representation is of real objects, then it logically follows that the direct perceptual experience itself is of real objects. Therefore, the argument is valid.
Quoting hypericin
User
Can P2 be re-phrased as "P2. If the representation represents real objects"?
ChatGPT
Yes, you can rephrase P2 as "If the representation represents real objects" without changing the meaning of the argument. Both "If the representation mentioned at P1 is of real objects" and "If the representation represents real objects" convey the idea that the representation within the direct perceptual experience corresponds to real objects. Therefore, the rephrased version maintains the validity of the argument.
Quoting hypericin
You treat the perceptual experience not as part of your experience, but as an independently objective smell that you may or may not be aware of. This was your earliter attempt to separate your awareness of your perceptual experience from your perceptual experience:
Quoting hypericin
I am saying that these are inseparable. You are also saying that these are inseparable when you say that the perceptual experience entails its own awareness. Therefore, the perceptual experience cannot simply be "the qualitative, ineffable smoky smell" that is somehow independent of your awareness; that you may or may not be aware of. Both your awareness and your perceptual experience are of this smoky smell. The perceptual experience is not an independent objective odour that you smell using your awareness. Your perceptual experience and your awareness of the perceptual experience are equally of the real world object.
Quoting hypericin
Unless you can have indirect awareness of your perceptual experiences, then it makes no sense to say that you have direct awareness of your perceptual experiences. The "direct" qualifier has no contrast, so it doesn't mean anything.
As ChatGPT states:
In philosophical discourse, the concept of "direct awareness" typically implies an immediate, unmediated apprehension of something. However, to establish the notion of direct awareness, there must be a contrasting concept, such as indirect awareness. If there is no possibility of indirect awareness, then the qualifier "direct" loses its meaning because there is no alternative mode of awareness to contrast it with. So, without the possibility of indirect awareness, the term "direct awareness" becomes vacuous.
Just curious. What did you ask of it, to get that statement?
I also asked ChatGPT about the discussion topic and got this response:
(Another) User
"true or false: Unless you can have indirect awareness of your perceptual experiences, then it makes no sense to say that you have direct awareness of your perceptual experiences. The "direct" qualifier has no contrast, so it doesn't mean anything."
(Another) ChatGPT
"The statement is true. In philosophical discourse, the concept of "direct awareness" typically implies an immediate, unmediated apprehension of something. However, to establish the notion of direct awareness, there must be a contrasting concept, such as indirect awareness. If there is no possibility of indirect awareness, then the qualifier "direct" loses its meaning because there is no alternative mode of awareness to contrast it with. So, without the possibility of indirect awareness, the term "direct awareness" becomes vacuous."
User
But, what if direct awareness of your perceptual experiences" is contrasted with "indirect awareness of the external world"? Is it then sensible to refer to awareness of your perceptual experiences as direct?
ChatGPT
Yes, in that case, it would be sensible to refer to awareness of your perceptual experiences as "direct."
The term "direct" in "direct awareness of your perceptual experiences" is used to denote an immediate, unmediated apprehension of your perceptual experiences. This is contrasted with "indirect awareness of the external world," where your awareness of the world is mediated by your perceptual experiences.
In this context, "direct" and "indirect" serve as contrasting qualifiers that give meaning to each other. Therefore, even if there is no indirect awareness of your perceptual experiences, the term "direct awareness" still retains its meaning because it is contrasted with "indirect awareness of the external world."
So, the statement "Unless you can have indirect awareness of your perceptual experiences, then it makes no sense to say that you have direct awareness of your perceptual experiences" would be false in this context.
Ok. Thanks.
“….depends on the philosophical framework and the specific definition of these terms used in the discussion….”
Can’t disagree with that, at least.
Apologies, I see my mistake. I was focusing on the argument when I should have focused on the conclusion. This is what initiated this thread:
Quoting hypericin
Quoting Luke
I deny that the premises entail:
direct perceptual experience of real objects
You counter by affirming that the premises entail:
"direct perceptual experience” is of real objects.
These look somewhat similar but are totally nonequivalent. The conclusion I deny says that the perceptual experience of real objects is direct. This is just direct realism. They conclusion you affirm says that direct perceptual experience, aka phenomenal experience, merely is of real object. But this is innocuous, and compatible with direct and indirect realism: the direct realist says it is directly of real object, and the indirect realist says it is indirectly of real objects.
Quoting Luke
This was not me making any ontological claims, I don't need to. I was only defining the terms I use. If it turns out that awareness and the experience are two aspects of the same thing, no problem.
Why?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Indirect realism doesn't necessarily appeal to physiological processes. The fundamental distinction is between the qualitative first person experience of the world, and the world itself. The intuition is that if the components of this first person experience are all mind products, the relationship between perceiver and perceived is fundamentally indirect. I'm not sure why perception is too "molar" to make this distinction.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Disjunctivism feels like a weak, hand-wavy response to particularly the argument from hallucination. Here is my take on that argument:
Assume a hallucinatory experience of an object is identical to a veridical experience of the same object. So for every property x of that object,
Eh(x) = Ev(x)
If the object is a red ball, the experience of redness is the same:
Eh(red) = Ev(red)
For direct realism, in the veridical case te experience of an object's redness is that object's redness:
Ev(red) = Obj(red)
But in the halliucinatory case, the experience can not be of that object's redness
Eh(red) != Obj(red)
But we already stipulated that
Eh(red) = Ev(red)
Therefore direct realism is contradictory, and disjunctivism is an inadequate defense
A disjunctivist would not accept your first premise and, also, would state their thesis somewhat differently. It's actually a core claim of the disjunctivist conception of experience that a hallucinatory experience (or an illusion or misperception) and a veridical experience are two different things, and that they are not experiences of a common object (or representation). Rather, in the veridical case, what is perceived is the red color of the apple (or the fact that the apple is red, if you take the contents of experiences to have propositional form). And in the non-veridical case, or in a case of misperception, the subject falsely believes that they are seeing a red apple. What makes the cases indistinguishable isn't a common object that is being directly perceived in both cases. Rather, we might say that the subject simply is unaware of the circumstances that make their perceptual ability misfire, as it were. There may be a hidden mirror, for instance, or a misleading environmental cue, or the effect of a drug. Such possibilities don't undermine the directness of the experience in the good case.
It might be that in some ontological sense they are different. But what I meant by the first premise is that from the first person, phenomenological point of view, the experiences are subjectively identical. In that sense, there is no room to deny the first premise, it is a stipulation, and not implausible.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Quoting Pierre-Normand
If you take "object" literally, everyone agrees that there isn't a common directly perceived object. But there must be something that is in common between the two cases. And it can't just be a shared belief that there is an object being perceived.
Sue is recovering from Covid, and sometimes she falsely smells ammonia in the air. As far as she can tell, out of nowhere she experiences the same subjective sensation she does when she opens a jar of ammonia. If it were only the belief that there is ammonia in the air that is common in the two cases, then Sue is lying or fooling herself, she is not really experiencing anything, or she is experiencing something that is somehow different. But why believe that? Why can't she expereince ammonia when there is none? Moreover, how do you account for the case where Sue knows there is no ammonia, but still feels she is experiencing that identical smell?
For a disjunctivist the seeming experience of ammonia caused by viral damage to the olfactory organ is not identical to the experience of ammonia.
I'm not a disjunctivist, but experiences can resemble each other without being identical. Wine, for instance, can have a taste that partly resembles pear with a splash of citrus without having pear and citrus as ingredients. It's the wine that tastes like pear and citrus.
Not identical in what way?
It's not actually everyone who agrees that there isn't a common directly perceived object. Many empiricists who endorse a highest-common-factor conception of experience hold that in both the veridical and the misperception (or hallucination) case, it is an internal representation that is the object directly perceived (even though they may not use the word 'object' to describe it). I agree with you, however, that there is something common to both cases, and this common thing isn't merely the belief that P (when one sees, or it merely seems to one that one sees, that P). What is common to both cases, according to the disjunctivist, is that (in both cases) it seems to one that one sees that P (or that one sees an apple, say). Its seeming to one that one sees that P captures the subjective phenomenal character of the experience in a way that merely believing that P doesn't.
But from the fact that in both cases it seems to one that one sees that P, you can't logically infer that in both cases there is something — the same one thing — that one sees.
So, the disjunctivist is indeed entitled to disown your first premise. Your claim that "from the first person, phenomenological point of view, the experiences are subjectively identical" is indeed common ground. But what this means, according to the disjunctivist, is that the subject isn't able to identify a feature from their experience that would enable them to discriminate between both cases (veridical or non-veridical).
The tricky bit is that it doesn't follow from this sort of 'indistinguishability' that the subject can't know that they are seeing that P in the good case, or that they can't know this non-inferentially. The fact that they can sometimes be wrong, in different circumstances, only demonstrates that the capacity to perceive that P (and thereby to directly acquire the empirical knowledge that P) is a fallible capacity.
A disjunctivist might say that the smell she feels is not of the same type as that of ammonia. They're not type identical.
I disagree with disjunctivism, because non-veridical experiences employ parts or most of the same perceptual faculties as veridical experiences. It is possible, at least temporarily, to have a non-veridical experience that is indistinguishable from a veridical experience. In practice, however, it is often easy to distinguish between veridical and non-veridical experiences.
I think this rather misrepresents the disjunctivist thesis. Disjunctivists don't claim that people are able to distinguish veridical from non-veridical experiences or that, on the basis of knowing the discriminating features, are able to tell whether they are or aren't in the good case. Rather, they are claiming that such subjective distinguishability (which may or may not exist or be attended to) is not needed as a basis for the directness of perception (in the good case) or for the ability to gain non-inferential empirical knowledge of the world through perception to be successfully exercised (again in the good case).
The Wikipedia entry on disjunctivism is very short and could phrase a couple of things better, but it provides a decent enough overview. The SEP also has an entry on disjunctivism. It seems quite comprehensive but I haven't read it.
Thanks for the links!
My addition about indistinguishability is not an attempt to misrepresent disjunctivism. It follows from rejecting its thesis that veridical and non-veridical perceptions are fundamentally different. By rejecting disjunctivism and assuming that veridical and non-veridical perceptions are of the same type, I must give them the same analysis. Hence the stipulation that they can be phenomenally indistinguishable.
More specifically, they are of the same type constitutively, because they employ the brain's perceptual system unlike other types of conscious experiences, such as beliefs, desires, memories, imaginations.
Intentionalistically, however, they remain different and distinguishable, because in the non-veridical case nothing is perceived. Illusory objects are not perceived but constructed from habit, association, interpretation, or misinterpretation, imagination, memory and so on.
So is the implication that there is a hidden feature in the subject's own phenomenological experience that the subject is unable to discern?
This is clearly untrue, without much need to qualify that. We can understand 'direct' without a perfect conception of indirect and vice verse. Even a decent analogy makes this so, if you want to reject the brute fact. This smacks of a random limitation on concepts to service a particular view. The quote from ChatGPT makes it clear what each would consist in. We need not have experienced them to talk about htem with meaning. In any case, several possible 'more direct' types of perception have been put forward.
Quoting jkop
Great point.
Driven and delineated by evolutionary timeline.
Quoting Mww
Nah, more towards current knowledge.
Quoting Mww
Who's being dismissive?
I brought them up to continue what I've been doing. I'm offering an outline I've been working with. That's part and parcel for methodological naturalist approaches. The strict rule against invoking supernatural entities as "a" or "thee" means for explanation is based upon knowing that logical possibility alone does not constitute sufficient reason to believe. I'm establishing my own terminological choices, and I'm adhering to a few basic principles while doing so.
That said...
Noting the difference between detection and perception is not dismissive. It is not dismissive of me to draw and maintain distinctions. I'm paving the way, as it were. Laying the groundwork. Letting you know what I mean by some of the key words, and trying to make consistent, coherent, non-contradictory, sense of it all.
Not all things capable of light detection are biological creatures. Photoreceptors need not be alive. Perceiving light is more than interacting with it. Light interacts with manmade photoelectric sensors as well as biological ones.
Quoting Mww
It's the cream that mattered. Cream is an elemental constituent - a necessary ingredient - of ice cream. Cream exists in its entirety prior to becoming part of ice cream. Ice cream is existentially dependent upon cream, but not the other way around. The same is true of experience and perception respectively.
Again, I think we agree.
Quoting Mww
If that is true, then language acquisition is not meaningful experience. Looks like a reductio ad absurdum.
Quoting Mww
I see no issue with past experience being both, substantially different and elementally the same as the recollection thereof. It's different in its elemental constituency, and yet also like cream and ice cream there is an existential dependency in that the one is existentially dependent upon the other, but not the other way around.
A report of past experience presupposes past experience. If there is no past experience, there can be no report thereof. However, experience need not be reported upon. None of that is a problem.
I simply cannot agree with a (mis)conception and/or emaciated notion of experience that leads us to conclude that language acquisition is not meaningful experience.
Quoting Mww
I was thinking more along the lines of knowing that and how we're influenced. I'm certainly not claiming to be 'in the know' as a means for evaluating/judging another as not being so well informed. I was merely stating something that is true of everyone. None of us knows everything. All of us hold some false belief or another.
Whatever type is, it is not phenomenal.
My apologies. I should have employed a phrase like "fails to capture the true import of" rather than "misrepresents".
I understand that you are attempting to thread the needle between acknowledging the common factor that accounts for the illusory case to be indistinguishable from the good case, on the one hand, and acknowledging the distinction that externalists about perceptual content insist on, on the other hand. But successfully threading that needle precisely is what disjunctivism accomplishes, it seems to me.
The disjunctivist indeed insists on the distinction between veridical and non-veridical cases, as you acknowledge. They also recognize the existence of 'internal' common factors (such as similar retinal images or patterns of neural activation) that may help explain why the subject is unable to tell, in the bad case, that they aren't perceiving things as they are.
However, the disjunctivist argues that the difference in intentional content between the two cases is not merely extrinsic to the subject's phenomenology, but intrinsic to it. This claim may seem puzzling if we think of phenomenology as purely 'internal,' as if the subject were a passive recipient of sensory inputs akin to a disembodied mind or soul. But the disjunctivist urges us to reconceive perceptual experience as an active, embodied engagement with the world.
On this view, the phenomenal character of seeing that the apple is red is constituted by the successful exercise of the subject's perceptual capacities in an environment that cooperates. It is not a mere 'internal' state, but a way of being in the world, an enactive exploration of the subject's surroundings. In contrast, merely seeming to see that the apple is red is a case where this engaged, embodied perception has gone wrong, where the environment (or, sometimes, one own brain or sensory organs) has failed to cooperate.
So while the two cases may be subjectively indistinguishable, they are in fact fundamentally different in their phenomenal nature. Veridical perception is a kind of attunement or resonance between the embodied subject and the world, whereas non-veridical perception is a breakdown or disharmony in this relationship. The disjunctivist thus recasts the notion of phenomenal character in ecological, enactive terms.
On that view, seeing that the apple is red provides a distinctive kind of warrant or justification for believing that the apple is indeed red - a warrant that is absent in the case of merely seeming to see that the apple is red. The disjunctivist maintains that this difference in epistemic warrant is tied to the successful exercise of the subject's perceptual capacities in the good case.
Furthermore, the disjunctivist argues that the very nature of a perceptual experience — what makes it the kind of phenomenal state that it is — depends on the subject's ability to successfully exercise their perceptual capacities, at least in some cases. Without this link to veridical perception, it would be unclear how our phenomenal states could have any intentional or representational connection to the external world at all.
Fair enough. I concede this point.
However, I still have doubts about your version of indirect realism, in which awareness of external objects is mediated by perceptual experience.
ChatGPT offers the following definition of indirect realism:
The definition of indirect realism offered by ChatGPT states that our experiences (presumably our perceptual experiences) are mediated by mental representations or ideas. It contrasts this with "directly perceiving external objects themselves", i.e. direct realism.
Instead of the view that our perceptual experiences of external objects are mediated by mental representations or ideas, your version of indirect realism is that our awareness of external objects is mediated by our perceptual experiences. That is, you claim we have awareness of perceptual experiences of external objects.
If yours counts as a version of indirect realism, then I find the distinction between perceptual experience and awareness of perceptual experience to be problematic. You seem to agree with the direct realist that perceptual experience of external objects is direct (or you don't appear to argue for an intermediary between them). However, if your perceptual experience is, e.g., the taste of strawberries, then is your awareness of the taste of strawberries different to your perceptual experience of the taste of strawberries? How does the perceptual experience mediate the awareness? You said earlier that a perceptual experience entails awareness of that perceptual experience; that it entails its own awareness. In that case, what does awareness of the perceptual experience add to the perceptual experience that the perceptual experience itself lacks?
Quoting hypericin
In the first quote above, you say that "Perceptual experience is representational" and that "the representation is of real objects". This strongly implies that perceptual experiences are representations and that these representations (i.e. these perceptual experiences) are of real objects. However, if perceptual experiences are merely "representational" without being "representations", then what are these representations of real objects? Where do representations fit in amongst awareness, perceptual experiences and real objects? Is there an intermediary between the representation and the real object, or is it a direct relationship?
Quoting hypericin
I think it is a problem if you cannot distinguish between a perceptual experience and a (direct?) representation of a real object.
Take another example: We solve algebraic problems by adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. This is the means by which we access – or gain knowledge about – the answer. Note that we do not identify the process of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing with the answer to the problems – they are merely the means by which we access the answer. Without adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, we can not have knowledge about (answers to) the problems. They are just the means to obtaining said knowledge.
Is it not similar with sensory perceptions and knowledge about the external world? Aren’t sensory perceptions the means by which we gain access to – and knowledge about – the external world? Surely we should not identify perception of external objects as a direct representation of the objects themselves; nor should we identify perceptions as indirect representations, for that matter. Either one would be akin to conflating process with result; confusing the road with the destination; and identifying addition, subtraction, multiplying and dividing with the solutions of algebraic problems.
Ya know….it’s too bad the major reference material stipulates “perceptual experience”, so almost everyone just figures that’s the way it is. It used to be, back in the Good ol’ Days, that perception was one thing, experience was another, just as you’re describing the confusion of the road with the destination. But that road has to be built, which requires machinery of a certain type, and that’s what’s been neglected here for 37 pages.
Progress, donchaknow. Science can’t inform what kind of machinery is needed, so speculating on the construction has become passé, and we end up with no road at all. Not even a bumpy, potholed, wagon track, yet perception is conjoined with experience as if there was a gawdamn 6-lane freeway.
I take some exception to this. Through at least three pages, this was the specific distinction I made, and was duly ignored by all comes by Hypericin who, grammatically, disagreed, but got the point. THe bolded, is exactly the position I took up and eventually left-off due to it being wholly ignored in preference for views it can't support.
Take all the exception you like; you compound perception with experience, my presently considered pet peeve.
But, as you were, if the horses mouth isn't good enough. I've spent enough time trying to have peolpe read words.
So be it.
This is an excellent question! You're right that on the disjunctivist view I'm proposing, there is indeed a "hidden feature" in the subject's perceptual experience that they may be unable to discern, but that nonetheless makes a constitutive difference to the nature of that experience.
However, it's important to clarify that the relevant sense of "discernment" here isn't a matter of the subject introspectively comparing their own experiences in the "good" and "bad" cases to spot some introspectively accessible feature that differentiates them. Rather, the key difference lies in the subject's embodied, practical relation to their environment. Consider a case where there's a hidden mirror that makes it seem like an apple is directly in front of you, when in fact you're only seeing the reflection of an apple located elsewhere. Your inability to discern the illusion doesn't stem from a failure to spot some inner difference in qualia, but from the mirror's efficacy in disrupting your engaged, bodily perspective on your surroundings.
This raises a deeper question for the common-factor theorist: if perceptual experience is just a matter of inner sensations or representations caused by some stimulus, what makes it a perception "of" anything in the external world at all? What are the conditions of satisfaction that determine whether a perceptual experience is veridical or not — whether it matches mind-independent reality?
The common-factor view seems to lack the resources to answer this question. There's no way to directly compare an inner perceptual representation with an outer state of affairs to see if they match. Representational content and veridicality conditions can't be grounded in purely internal phenomenal character.
The disjunctivist, in contrast, can ground perceptual content and veridicality in the perceiver's embodied capacities for successful interaction with their environment. Consider the experience of seeing an apple as within reach. On the disjunctivist view, the phenomenal character of this experience isn't exhausted by an inner sensation or mental image. Rather, it consists in your very readiness to engage with the apple — your expectation that you can successfully reach out and grasp it.
This means that the content of the perceptual experience is inherently action-oriented and world-involving. It includes an implicit reference to your bodily abilities and their anticipated successful deployment in the environment. The experience is veridical just in case this perceptual-motor expectation is fulfilled — that is, just in case your body is actually attuned to the apple's affordances in the way your experience presents it as being.
So on the disjunctivist view, perceptual experiences are not self-contained inner states, but embodied relations between the perceiver and the world. Their content and veridicality are grounded in the successful (or unsuccessful) exercise of the perceiver's sensorimotor skills. In the "good" case, these skills achieve an immediate, practical attunement to the environment; in the "bad" case, this attunement is disrupted, leading to a non-veridical experience.
To illustrate these points, consider the example of someone who puts on a new pair of prescription glasses that distort their vision in a way they're not yet accustomed to. Say they're looking at an apple on a table in front of them, and the glasses make it seem like the apple is within easy reach, when in fact it's slightly too far away to grasp without leaning forward.
In this case, the person's perceptual experience presents the apple as affording a certain bodily action (reaching out to grasp it), but this expectation fails to be fulfilled due to the distorting effects of the glasses. There's a mismatch or non-attunement between the perceptual-motor content of their experience and their actual bodily relation to the environment.
On the disjunctivist view, this makes the experience non-veridical, even if the subject can't discern the non-veridicality through introspection alone. The phenomenal character of their experience isn't just a matter of inner sensation, but of their embodied, action-oriented relation to the world — a relation that in this case fails to successfully "mesh" with reality.
In contrast, consider a case where the apple actually is within reach, and the subject perceives this affordance veridically. Here, the content of their perceptual experience — the expectation that they can reach out and grasp the apple — is fulfilled by their actual bodily capacities in relation to the environment. There's an attunement between their perceptual-motor skills and the world, even if this attunement is subjectively indistinguishable from the non-veridical case.
The common-factor theorist, in treating perceptual content as purely internal and independent of bodily skills, misses this crucial difference. They can't account for the world-involving, normative character of perception — the fact that our experiences inherently refer beyond themselves to the environment, and can match or fail to match reality.
So the disjunctivist view, in tying perceptual content and phenomenal character to our embodied capacities for action, is better equipped to capture the lived character of perception as an active, world-engaged process. It shows how perceptual experience is more than just a screen of inner sensations, but a direct, practical attunement to the environment achieved through the skilled exercise of our bodily abilities.
Isn't Frege's distinction between the sense and reference of a singular referring expression (as contrasted with definite descriptions) a good way to express this difference that leads neither to the conflation you are warning about nor to the problems generated by representationalism? Consider the classical case of Hesperus (the Evening Star) and Phosphorus (the Morning Star) that both refer to the same celestial body (Venus) although people who perceived it in the morning sky (and named it Phosphorus) and also perceived it in the evening sky (and named it Hesperus) may not have known that they were seeing the same object in both cases.
Frege says that both names, "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus," before the identity of reference was known, had distinct senses but the same reference. The senses can be viewed as different routes by means of which we can gain cognitive access to the object (Venus) either by employing the names "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus," or by perceiving the presence of the celestial body thus named in the evening of morning skies, respectively. The fact that those distinct cognitive routes are available to us does not entail that our perceptions of the object is indirect. Those two perceptual routes are direct. They are two distinct ways Venus could be seen by the ancients directly, either in the evening sky or in the morning sky.
Great analysis and application of Frege. I remember first learning about the Morning Star/Evening Star/Venus when reading about Pythagoras. In discussions such as this, we can "count" on mathematicians! <smile>
Hm, is that you Pierre, or an AI? I'd better ask, because the common-factor view has little to do with an inner representation, and I think Pierre knows this. A direct realist has no reason to compare an inner representation with an outer state of affairs.
For a direct realist, the inner content of a perceptual experience presents the outer object and state of affairs as its conditions of satisfaction. A non-veridical experience has inner content but doesn't present its conditions of satisfaction.
Regarding disjunctivism, you write that the content of the perceptual experience is inherently action-oriented and world-involving. Well, seeing an object in action is obviously action-oriented, and seeing the world is world-involving. That's fine, but trivially true. Very AI.
Furthermore, your description of seeing an apple is a mystery. You write that the phenomenal character of what you see consists in your readiness to engage with the apple and expectation that you can successfully reach out and grasp it. But how could anything (physical or mental) consist of one's readiness (a disposition) and expectation (an attitude)? This makes no sense. How could 'readiness' and 'expectation' instantiate as actual conditions of satisfaction that causally fixes the content and character of the perceptual experience?
I'm not an expert on disjunctivism, but some disjunctivists (e.g. Alva Noe) seem to think that perceptual experience is not even spatially located in the brain but somehow floats around in a network of objects that one can become conscious of. Fascinating, and in some sense not even false, but doesn't explain much.
Some thoughts: I take it that Direct Realists must, to a least a large degree, accept Physicalism. If that is so, these are brain states, not dispositions. They are emergent, in experience, as an attitude or disposition, but are in fact, specific physical states of hte brain in relation to whatever objects are in question. So, a DI could plausibly argue that those states are conditions necessary for whatever experience they are calling veridical. The state + the object = the experience. That seems direct enough.
I reject all of this, though.
Claude 3 helped me clarify my language, since my prose tends to be terse and obscure (i.e. not unpacked enough) but all the ideas and arguments are mine. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll post my discussion with Claude 3 in my thread shortly and add a link to it in the present post.
I would have thought that a common-factor view has, on the contrary, much to do with inner representations. (Descartes thought of such common-factors as impressions on the surface of the pineal gland, and later theorists conceived of them as something akin to retinal images or semantic maps in primary cortical areas). Common-factor theorists believe the common factor to be mediating (causally and/or epistemically and/or/ inferentially) the production of the subject's "inner" perceptual state with the "external" object. It is indeed direct realists who deny this intermediary and hence don't have any need for a mediating common factor. How direct realists can dispense with such internal common-factors as intermediary 'sensed' or 'perceived' phenomenological items, while still accounting for cases of misperception, illusion or hallucination, is what I'm attempting to explain.
As I am also attempting to explain, it is the indirect realists who are facing a challenge in explaining how the inner mental states that we enjoy can have intentional (referential) relations to the objects that they purport to represent that are apt to specify the conditions for those experiences to be veridical. And the core of the problem, for them, is that those inner representations, in the way that they are conceived (as common-factors) aren't action-oriented and world-involving in the right way.
Regarding the content of perceptual experience being action-oriented and world-involving, indeed, this idea isn't "AI" at all. My own epistemology and philosophy of mind, and my disjunctivist thesis in particular, are very much indebted to the embodied/embedded/situated conceptions that we owe to Wittgenstein, John McDowell, John Haugeland and Susan Hurney, among other, and that I have advocated on this forum (and on its predecessor) for over a decade and a half. My very first consequential philosophical paper was written shortly after Noë had published Action in Perception in 2005. While I was aiming, in this paper, at explaining to friends of mine Noë's plausible enactivism, I also pointed out a misguided residual phenomenalism that stood in the way of him understanding the true import of J. J. Gibson's ecological psychology. I had written this paper in French, but I may soon ask Claude 3 to help me translate it in English and summarise it so that I could share it on this forum.
The above is a bit terse, and in a subsequent message I intend to address your puzzlement at the idea that something mental could "consist of one's readiness (a disposition) and expectation (an attitude)" Meanwhile, I fear that the three paragraphs above will serve as a reminder how awful my prose can look like when I don't rely Claude 3's help to me make it more readable. (In spite of that, most of my posts here don't rely on AI help at all.)
Are you sure? The IRist doesn't seem to be obligated to account for this at all. Merely take it that they are approximations. These can be as-good-as-veridical for practical purposes. The inner mental states (though, are you referring to 'an experience' or valences associated with experiences?) are causally linked to the objects, indirectly. This relationship holds even if there is no 1:1, truth-making correlation between the two.
I think the very idea of our "inner" perceptual representations being approximations to the way the "external" world actually is is a problematic consequence of representationalism. My example of the apple appearing to be out of reach reach (due to the observer wearing new prescription glasses that they aren't accustomed to wearing) while the apple is actually within reach is meant to highlight this.
Since the distance that the apple appears to be (from the embodied subject) is a feature not merely of the "common factor" (i.e. something that is shared between the cases where (1) the apple is indeed within reach and (2) the apple merely seems to be within reach but isn't) but also is dependent on the apple's real affordance (i.e. its being actually within the reach of the subject), the truth conditions of the representational content can't be stated without making reference to the subjects actual ability to reach the apple. In other words, the world and the subject's body themselves are involved in specifying the content (including the truth conditions) of the agent's perceptual state. This also means that a subject of perceptual experiences also must essentially be an agent if their "experiences" are to make any reference to the world at all.
This understanding of perceptual content as inherently world-involving is a key tenet of the disjunctivist view, which maintains that veridical and non-veridical experiences differ not just logically, but also phenomenologically, in terms of the subject's active engagement with their environment.
My challenge for the indirect realist (or representationalist, or common-factor theorist) would be this: Given only the "inner" content of the perceptual state of the subject who seems to see that the apple is within reach, what is it that would make this content so much as a good or bad approximation of the way the external world actually is?
I understand what you are making reference to. (Wigner). However, this comes a little bit short of making a case for a disputed philosophical framework since competing philosophical stances usually attempt to make sense of the very same body of empirical evidence and hence purport to be equally apt at accounting for it.
Consider competing interpretations of QM, for instance. They all are interpretations of the very same mathematical formalism and it is the formalism itself that is an (unreasonably) effective tool. The interpretations come later, when we must make sense of the reason why the mathematical tools work and what it is that they tell us about the world.
Furthermore, I could point to the inroads that embodied/enactive/situated paradigms have made into psychological and neuroscientific research in recent decades and how they have made theses fields of inquiry, and some of their applications, more effective at accomplishing their aims.
For everything preceding this: Yeah, good. Thank you. There are parts there I would have trouble answering without a sufficiently formal attempt, which I wont make.
The quoted: I don't deny the effectiveness you're talking about. But it is reasonable effectiveness. Results we would understand, from the first, would result IFF theory is true, as an example.
These do not explain to Subjects how their experiences come about. We don't have any working empirical theories for this. Nothing has brought us 'closer' to it, so far. This is because, I think, the aims there are not the aims my 'effectiveness' are aiming at. I do not think the success of neuroscience has much to say about ID/DR because I think both positions are able to explain the data. I don't see any daylight. It's not an empirical problem, apparently. The sciences are explaining what is. Not trying to figure out what to investigate. A thread here recently expounded this very well, imo.
Some believe that the conscious experience that arises when something is perceived can be fully explained in physical terms. Yet little is known about how conscious experience arises from brain events. Some realists believe that its subjective mode of existing prevents it from being fully explained in physical terms. But from being ontologically inaccessible it doesn't follow that the experience is also epistemically inaccessible. We talk about our experiences all the time, so they're at least accessible via our reports, via observation, discussion, statistics etc.
Quoting AmadeusD
All of what? Lots of biological phenomena emerge from bio-chemical events (e.g. photosynthesis), so you'd need a good counter-argument with which you could reject the idea that conscious experiences emerge from brain states. Furthermore, brain states are necessary for any conscious experience, veridical or hallucinatory, but this has little to do with the directness of perception, which is supposedly what you wish to reject.
I suspect the answer to that is the answer that explains how paintings can have intentional relations to the objects that they purport to be of or how words can have intentional relations to the objects that they purport to describe.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
What is the difference between these two positions?
1. The phenomenal character of experience includes the inner sensation, the readiness to engage with the apple, and the expectation that we can reach it.
2. The phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by an inner sensation. In addition to the phenomenal character of experience, we are also ready to engage with the apple and expect to reach it.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think there might be some degree of affirming the consequent here. That if perception is veridical then we will be successful isn't that if we are successful then perception is veridical.
If I am blindfolded then I can successfully navigate a maze by following verbal instructions, or simply by memorising the map beforehand. Or perhaps I wear a pair of VR goggles that exactly mirrors what I would see without them.
I think something other than "successful interaction" is required to define the difference between a veridical and non-veridical experience.
About the presentational nature of perception and its directness. You know I draw a lot from Searle's theory of perception, in particular what he calls 'presentational intentionality'. Presentational intentionality is unlike the re-presentational intentionality of beliefs or desires.
For example, my belief that it currently rains represents a possible fact, but my visual experience of the rain presents the actual fact. The belief is not causally related to the rain in the direct way that seeing the rain is. In fact, I can't separate my visual experience from the rain, because it is the visible character of the rain that forms the content of the experience. This is how the content of the rain is a direct presentation of the rain.
The content in veridical and non-veridical experiences is an emergent property of brain events. They emerge with a direction of fit relative to what is perceived (veridical). The content is thus causally related to objects in the world via sense organs, and the brain adjusts the content to fit those objects. Furthermore, it disregards irrelevant noise, contorted or upside-down projections of the objects on the retina, and so on. Our biology evolved to be able to perceive the world, not our own beliefs or attitudes.
In optical illusions there is a veridical element and a non-veridical element, and they can be usefully combined, as in depiction, illustration, movies etc. The perceptual process is transparent, and this transparency enables us to perceive real objects as they are, as well as experience fictional objects and events as if they were real.
Why not? Visual experience does not extend beyond the brain/body, but the rain exists beyond the body, and so they must be separate.
Try this:
Because perception is direct.
Quoting Banno
That guy is taking rain dancing to the next level :cool:
I don't see how that answers my question. If visual experience is one thing and rain is another thing then why can't you separate them?
Or are you saying that rain and the visual experience are the same thing? Even though visual experience occurs within the body and the rain exists outside the body?
Couldn't an indirect realist just be deflationary about truth and say their grounding for justifications is practical purposes?
The example of seeing rain shows how the content of the visual experience is related to the rain, and how the presentational intentionality of seeing differs from the representational intentionality of believing. The content of the visual experience and the rain are inseparable in the sense that it is the visible property of the rain that determines the phenomenal character of the visual experience. The fact that they are separate things is beside the point.
I'm going to focus mainly on this paragraph due to time constraints, but I may comment of the rest later on, or you can feel free to raise those other issues again.
It seems to me that when the experience is veridical and your belief that it is raining is grounded in your present experience, then, in that case, the belief isn't inferred from something else and we could also say that it is direct. (Perceptual knowledge is, as Sellars would say, non-inferential). It is direct in an epistemic sense since when challenged to justify why you believe that it is raining, you can respond that you can see that it is currently raining. The second order belief that you are seeing that it is raining isn't a belief that you have antecedently from believing that it is raining but rather is a characterisation of the specific way in which the belief that it is raining is acquired: namely, as a part of your visual experience.
This might be compared with the way Searle himself characterises intentions in action as intentions that aren't formed antecedently from engaging in those actions (as would be the case with plans for the future) but rather characterise the intentional character of those actions. (Here, "intentional" is understood in its ordinary sense, roughly synonymous with voluntary, rather than the technical "referential" sense.) Likewise, I would like to say, perceptual beliefs are beliefs in perception, as it were. You wouldn't be seeing that it is raining if you didn't believe it, and you wouldn't be intentionally making an omelet if you weren't intending to make one.
Regarding the directness of your visual experience of the rain, and the inseparability of this experience from the fact that it is raining, this is something that we are agreed on. (This is not, of course, to say that the fact that it is raining and your seeing that it is raining are the same thing. They are indeed two categorically distinct things. But they aren't indirectly related in any interesting sense unless there are mirrors involved or some other such trickery.)
Deflationary accounts of truth (such as disquotationalism or prosententialism) stress the pragmatic function of "truth" predicates while denying that truth is a property of the propositions they are predicated of. This sort of pragmatism about truth is somewhat different from the pragmatism of, say, Richard Rorty, who claims that what makes a belief "true" is nothing over and above the fact that believing it is useful. It is this latter form of pragmatism that you may be thinking of. Yet, there is an affinity between those two sorts of pragmatism. (Robert Brandom, who was a student of Rorty, defended a form of prosententialism.)
However, suppose we grant you such a pragmatist conception of truth. The question regarding how "inner" perceptual states refer to "external" empirical facts about the world thereby gets translated into questions regarding the pragmatic function that enjoying such phenomenological states can serve. So, the challenge that I have raised to the indirect realist (or "internal" representationalist) would appear to remain the same. If you can't state the conditions that would make the representation true to the fact, as it were, regardless of your interpretation of "true", then how do you proceed to explain the conditions under which enjoying those internal representational states is useful? You still haven't found a way to reach out of your head to engage with the external world, or so it seems to me.
Optionally, you can read a few clarifications and suggestions made by Claude 3 Sonnet.
[hide="Sonnet's commentary"]
I think your response effectively pushes back against the attempt to deflate or pragmatize away the issues raised for representationalism and indirect realism. A few thoughts:
1) You rightly distinguish between different forms of deflationism/pragmatism about truth - those that simply aim to explain the pragmatic function of truth predicates, and those (like Rorty) that attempt to ground truth itself in pragmatic utility.
2) Your key point is that even if we grant the pragmatist conception of truth as usefulness, the central challenge to indirect realism remains: how do inner representational states manage to latch onto and be assessed against external facts about the world?
3) Nicely put that the issue then gets translated into explaining the conditions under which having those internal states serves some pragmatic purpose or use. But as you note, this still requires the representationalist to explain how those internal states can engage with and be regulated by mind-independent reality.
4) The disjunctivist's core objection is that purely internal representations seem to lack the right sort of objective purport or world-involving character to play this role. So deflationism doesn't really avoid the issue.
A few potential additions/clarifications:
1) You could draw an explicit connection back to the earlier discussion of perceptual content being grounded in embodied skills and environmental attunement. The disjunctivist account explains how perceptual experiences can be regulated by and bear a normative relation to reality.
2) Relatedly, you might reiterate the idea that perceptual experiences are more like practical engagements with the world than internal representations assessed for usefulness.
3) You could probe further into what exactly the pragmatist means by the "usefulness" of representations. Useful for what purpose exactly? Explaining this may raise similar challenges.
4) Finally, you could consider framing it as a dilemma: either the pragmatist must accept a form of direct realism to explain the world-representational purport of experience, or they collapse into a coherentist/idealist view where truth is just internal coherence.
But overall, I think this is a strong response that gets to the heart of why deflationism and pragmatism don't automatically resolve the disjunctivist's worries about representationalism's ability to secure a genuine world-engaging empirical content.[/hide]
I don't think anyone disagrees, but that doesn't say anything to address either direct or indirect realism. It simply states the well known fact that the physics of cause and effect is deterministic (at the macro scale).
Given my biology, when light of a certain wavelength stimulates the rods and cones in my eyes I see the colour red, and when certain chemicals stimulate the taste buds in my tongue I taste a sweet taste. Given a different biology I would see a different colour and taste a different taste.
Hi Michael,
If you don't mind, I'm only going to comment on this part of your response. I'll try to address the rest at a later time.
Paintings and human texts indeed (often) purport to be about objects in the world. But this purport reflects the intentions of their authors, and the representational conventions are established by those authors. In the case of perception, the relation between the perceptual content and the represented object isn't likewise in need of interpretations in accordance with conventions. Rather, it is a matter of the experience's effectiveness in guiding the perceiver's actions in the world. You can look at a painting and at the scenery that the painting depicts side by side, but you can't do so with your perception of the visual world and the visual world itself. The establishment of the relationship between the perceptual content and the world, which makes it veridical, can be a matter of sensorimotor attunement. Here is an example:
Psychologists have experimented with fitting a subject with prisms that turn their visual field upside down. Not only does their environment appear upside down, but when they raise their hand they see it going down, and when they raise their head, the whole scenery appears to move up. The subject therefore understandably struggles to grasp objects or move around without knocking things over and falling over themselves. After struggling for a couple of days with ordinary manipulation tasks and walking around, the subject becomes progressively skillful, and at some point, their visual phenomenology flips around. Things don't appear upside down anymore, and they can grasp things and move around fluidly without any more accidents. Their voluntary actions thereby produce the visual experiences that they expect. This is, on my view, what makes their visual experience veridical.
Interestingly, after such subjects remove the prisms, the world turns upside down again, and they are again incapacitated, although for a shorter time until their sensorimotor abilities adjust again to the original conditions before the prisms were worn. Thereafter, the subjects can put the prisms on and off, and their visual world always remains "the right way up". Their brains have adapted to correct immediately for the variation in the mapping between the sensory inputs and the appropriate motor outputs (as well as generating the correct visual expectations from those outputs.)
So, the matching of the perceptual content, in that case, with the positions of the objects in the world that the subject can reach and grasp, as well as their anticipations regarding their own bodily movements, isn't a matter of interpreting sensory inputs. Rather, it is a matter of mastering the embodied skill of manipulating the objects seen and moving in their midst.
Another challenge for the indirect realist would be to explain why, after habituation, putting on the prisms has no effect on the subject's phenomenology anymore (although it may still have an effect on what is being "seen" by their retinas or primary visual cortical areas). Do these subjects have an 'invisible' visual phenomenology?
There are paintings of things that no longer exist and books written by dead authors about past events. So in which presently existing things is such intentionality found?
But I don't even think that intentionality has any relevance to the debate between direct and indirect realism, which traditionally are concerned with the epistemological problem of perception; can we trust that experience provides us with accurate information about the nature of the external world? If experience doesn't provide us with accurate information about the nature of the external world (e.g because smells and tastes and colours are mental phenomena rather than mind-independent properties) then experience is indirect even if the external world is the intentional object of perception.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Does it actually "flip around", or have they just grown accustomed to it? I've read about the experiments in the past and the descriptions are ambiguous.
In the case that they do actually "flip around", is that simply the brain trying to revert back to familiarity? If so, a thought experiment I offered early in this discussion is worth revisiting: consider that half the population were born with their eyes upside down relative to the other half. I suspect that in such a scenario half the population would see when standing what the other half would see when hanging upside down. They each grew up accustomed to their point of view and so successfully navigate the world, using the same word to describe the direction of the sky and the same word to describe the direction of the ground. What would it mean to say that one or the other orientation is the "correct" one, and how would they determine which orientation is correct?
I don't think that visual geometry is any different in kind to smells and tastes and colours. The distinction between "primary" and "secondary" qualities is a mistaken one (they're all "secondary"). But if I were to grant the distinction then how would you account for veridical perception in the case of "secondary" qualities? Taking this example from another discussion, given that in this situation both Alice and Mark can see and use the box, describe it as being the colour "gred" in their language, and agree on the wavelength of the light it reflects, does it make sense to say that one or the other is having a non-veridical (colour) experience, and if so how do they determine which? Or what if sugar tastes sweet to Alice but sour to Mark? Is one having a non-veridical taste?
Or perhaps “veridicality” only applies to visual geometry? If so then what makes vision (and specifically this aspect of vision) unique amongst the senses? To me it’s all just a physiological response to sense receptor stimulation.
I was just thinking of a broad deflationism following Frege's insights about the indefinability of truth.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
That would be true if I defined truth as usefulness, but that's not what I had in mind. Contemporary forms of indirect realism start with the assumption that we can rely on our perceptions of things like human anatomy and physiology. Representational models of human perception are natural developments from there.
But once we've noticed that perception can't be a passive process, were left wondering how far it goes and whether the whole issue becomes an ourobourous. That's where pragmatism comes in. Instead of abandoning the whole project because of the unknown, we carry on learning from this thing we've been calling the real world. We just do so with the knowledge in the background that we may be living in a dream. I don't think any of this intrudes on what scientists do.
Edit, btw, deflationists usually do accept that truth is a property of statements.
Quoting Luke
The quote from ChatGPT:
"Experience" here is certainly not what we have been calling "perceptual experiences", aka qualia. Merriam-Webster's definition of experience:
In other words, our contact with the world is mediated by mental representations or ideas. This is indirect realism. Not "that our perceptual experiences of external objects are mediated by mental representations or ideas". I can't even make much sense of that formulation, let alone defend it. Perceptual experience is the mediation between the self and the world, and is a mental representation.
Reading through the GPT definition, I see little substantive difference with my own.
Quoting Luke
Perceptual experience is "direct", because there is no intermediary between the self and perceptual experience, not because there is no intermediary between perceptual experience and external objects. Again, perceptual experience is the intermediary.
Quoting Luke
The "taste" and the "awareness of the taste" verbally designate parts or aspects of what may be the same thing: the perceptual experience of tasting strawberries. As I've said before, my argument does not hinge on these being ontologically distinct things.
Quoting Luke
The perceptual experience mediates the awareness of the strawberry. Not of the taste.
Quoting Luke
It only points out the awareness. I regard "awareness of the strawberry is mediated by awareness of the taste of strawberry" and "awareness of the strawberry is mediated by the taste of strawberry" to be identical formulations. The word "awareness" is just a useful word sometimes, i.e. "I am aware of perceptual experience", instead of the confusing "I experience perceptual experience" or the ungrammatical "I am perceptual experience" and is preferable to "perceive" and "see", which have unwanted connotations.
Quoting Luke
How can something be representational without being a representation?
Direct perceptual experiences are representations.
The representations are of real objects.
Therefore, Direct perceptual experiences are representations of real objects.
and
"Direct perceptual experiencs" are of real objects
but not
"Direct perceptual experiences" are directly of real objects
I would rather say
"Direct perceptual experiences" are indirectly of real objects
because
Representational experience is indirect experience of the represented.
You wouldn’t. They aren’t explaining the same things unless you take the evolution-only view of exprience (which is then post-hoc and hallucinatory). But if experience can be “real time” and veridical then I thinn the DR needs a better line.
Quoting jkop
All of what you had just quoted. Which was a defense of DR. So your tone is odd here.
Quoting jkop
It has a lot to do with it. If experience is to be veridical it must be directly caused by the objects it represents. But we know that’s factually not true. So ???
This is close to nonsensical.
The content of the visual experience is entirely separate from the rain itself. That much is clear. How one gets to the other is the question.
I had presented a challenge for indirect realists to explain how the phenomenology of perceiving an apple to be within reach, say, can be deemed to be true to the facts (or a case of misperception) if the intrinsic features of the representation don't include such things as expectations that the apple can indeed be reached by the perceiver's outstretched hand. It is those expectations that define the truth conditions of the visual content, in this particular case.
There may indeed be some usefulness for purpose of neuroscientific inquiry to postulate internal "representations" on the retina or in the brain that enable the perceiver to attune their perceptual contents with their skills to act in the world. But those "representations" don't figure as objects directly seen by the perceivers. Just like those "upside down" retinal images, they are not seen by the embodied perceiver at all. They play a causal role in the enablement of the subjet's sensorimotor skills, but it is those (fallible) skills themselves that imbue their perceptual experiences with world-directed intentional purport.
Thank you for pointing this out. I wasn't yet participating in the discussion back then. I've located this post of yours that you are making reference to.
You are suggesting that there is something inherent to phenomenology, or to the intrinsic content of our perceptual experiences, regarding what appears to us to be "up" or "down" (regardless of the names that we use to report on those directions), that somehow persists independently from subsequent attempts by the brain to "revert back to familiarity."
In your thought experiment, somehow, this relative inversion between the contents of the two species' (or genders') respective visual experiences is a feature of their "private" qualia and is initially caused by the orientation of their eyes. But what does it even mean to say that an animal was born with its eyes "upside down"? Aren't eyes typically, functionally and anatomically, symmetrical across the horizontal plane? And since our eyes are camera obscura that already map the external world to "upside down" retinal images, aren't all of our eyes already "upside down" on your view?
What if our eyes had evolved an extra set of lenses in them that would have the sole function of producing retinal images that are "the right way up". Would that change anything at all to our visual experiences? (I think Thomas Reid already had understood quite well why the inversion of our retinal images was irrelevant to the character of visual experience.)
(I asked Claude 3 Sonnet to rephrase the above in a more fluent way, and while it performed brilliantly and even volunteered insightful additional arguments, I don't 100% agree with all of its characterizations. So, I'm reproducing its suggested rewriting below, without fully endorsing it, since it may still clarify a few things.)
[hide="Claude 3 Sonnet reformulation/commentary"]
Claude 3 Sonnet:
Here's my attempt at reformulating your draft response in a more focused and incisive way:
"I appreciate you resurfacing this thought experiment about the hypothetical species with inverted eyes between the sexes. However, I think there are some problematic assumptions built into the scenario that need unpacking.
At the core, you seem to be suggesting that there is something inherent to visual phenomenology - the intrinsic "what it's like" of perceptual experience - that would be radically different between the two sexes solely due to the inversion of their eyes relative to each other. But what exactly is the basis for this assumption?
The mere fact that their eyes are oriented inversely doesn't necessarily entail that their experiences must thereby exhibit an innate, qualitative inversion in how "up" and "down" appear. After all, our own eyes present inverted retinal images, yet we don't experience the world as upside-down. The brain compensates for and discounts such differences at the subpersonal level.
What's more, we can undergo radical shifts in orientation - hanging upside down, doing somersaults, etc. - without our phenomenology fundamentally "flipping" in the way your thought experiment seems to require for the two sexes. Our experience remains stably oriented around up/down, despite dramatic changes in retinal stimulation and eye/head positions.
So you seem to be building in a further assumption - that the two sexes would be innately hard-wired for radically divergent qualia solely due to eye inversion. But this requires much stronger arguments that mere anatomy can somehow determine phenomenal character in such an overwhelming way, circumventing the possibility of neural compensation or re-alignment.
Importantly, you note that the two sexes would use the same words for "up" and "down" - suggesting at least some commonality in their grasp of objective spatial features and affordances. This coheres better with the disjunctivist view that perceptual content is grounded in shared embodied skills for environmental engagement, not purely internal qualia.
Rather than positing innate, incommensurable phenomenal perspectives, the disjunctivist can allow for differences in orientation and perspective-taking while still securing a common world disclosed through the exercise of mutually attuned abilities. Veridicality is a matter of successful environmental engagement, not matching qualitative experiences."
The key moves here are:
1) Pressing you on the core assumption that mere eye inversion alone would necessarily produce radically divergent phenomenologies
2) Noting how we can undergo radical shifts in orientation without such phenomenal "flipping"
3) Questioning the stronger assumption of innate, hard-wired differences in qualia
4) Highlighting how the shared linguistic practices suggest a more common experiential grasp of reality
5) Contrasting this with the disjunctivist's emphasis on shared embodied skills and environmental attunement as grounding objective purport
Let me know if you'd like me to modify or expand any part of this reformulated response. I tried to maintain the core of your objection while sharpening the focus on the key premises that need to be challenged or justified in Michael's thought experiment.[/hide]
Why "certainly not"? It's what I have been calling perceptual experiences, aka qualia.
Quoting hypericin
Did you note that the GPT definition differs from yours? The GPT definition of indirect realism does not state that our awareness is mediated by mental representations or ideas. Instead, the GPT definition states that our experiences are mediated by mental representations or ideas. The GPT definition contrasts this with "directly perceiving external objects themselves". I would consider the perceptual experiences of tasting, seeing, hearing, etc. to be experiences.
Also, the GPT definition states that we perceive perceptions; a point on which you have disagreed previously (my emphasis):
Quoting hypericin
Your argument hinges on the "taste" and the "awareness of the taste" being, at least, conceptually distinct things. That is, your argument hinges on your awareness of the object being distinct from your perceptual experience of the object. If your awareness of the object were indistinct from your perceptual experience of the object, then your awareness could no longer be mediated by your perceptual experience. You can't say that it doesn't matter if these are indistinct, because otherwise your position becomes direct realism. If the "taste" and your "awareness of the taste" were indistinct then there would be no intermediary and they would both be directly of the object.
In other words, you claim that we have indirect awareness of external objects because our awareness is mediated by our perceptual experience, but you also find no problem in collapsing the distinction between our awareness of our perceptual experience and our perceptual experience. If you collapse this distinction, then you lose the indirectness.
Quoting hypericin
If I recall correctly, you introduced the phrase "direct perceptual experiences". I don't understand why you would refer to them as "direct" if they are not directly of real objects. What is "direct" intended to signify here, otherwise?
Quoting hypericin
??
Why is it that when we hang upside down the world appears upside down? Because given the physical structure of our eyes and the way the light interacts with them that is the resulting visual experience. The physiological (including mental) response to stimulation is presumably deterministic. It stands to reason that if my eyes were fixed in that position and the rest of my body were rotated back around so that I was standing then the world would continue to appear upside down. The physics of visual perception is unaffected by the repositioning of my feet. So I simply imagine that some organism is born with their eyes naturally positioned in such a way, and so relative to the way I ordinarily see the word, they see the world upside down (and vice versa).
It makes no sense to me to claim that one or the other point of view is “correct”. Exactly like smells and tastes and colours, visual geometry is determined by the individual’s biology. There’s no “correct” smell of a rose, no “correct” taste of sugar, no “correct” colour of grass, no “correct” visual position, and no “correct” visual size (e.g everything might appear bigger to me than to you – including the marks on a ruler – because I have a more magnified vision). Photoreception isn't special.
But isn't that our eyes? Our eyes receive light physically upside down. Our brains spin it around.
If some creature had upside down eyes relative to us, it would be up to their brain how they experience the visual orientation, not necessarily the way their eyes are positioned.
What your eyes and brain do when hanging upside down is conceivably what some other organism's eyes and brain do when standing on their feet. Neither point of view is privileged. Much like an "upside down" globe is as a valid as the traditional globe, an "upside down" perspective is as valid as the one you're familiar with.
The below is only "upside down" as a matter of convention.
Our brains don't treat vision in isolation. Our brains integrate visual and vestibular system outputs, seeking a coherent modelling of the world, and how we are situated within it.
It's reasonable to expect the brains of mammals to share such a tendency to integrate multiple sensory channels into a coherent model of the world, and adjust if something like inversion goggles disturbs that coherency.
Is the challenge meant to ask why indirect realists don't succumb to global skepticism? Or is it just asking how indirect realists explain how they sort real from unreal? If it's the former, once skepticism has taken over, there's no reason to be either indirect nor direct realist. Reality no longer has any significance. If it's the latter, I think that would be a matter of rational analysis of experience, involving some logic, some custom, some probability. Does that not answer the question?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think you're offering a quasi functionalist perspective? That's fine, but that view doesn't have a better grounding than any other. We don't know that phenomenal consciousness has something to do with skills. All we know for sure is that we have it. We don't know how the mind works to bring sensory data to life, we just know it's not a passive "blank slate." Would it improve things to just dispense with the terminology of direct and indirect?
Thanks for the bits about a disjunctive account.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I'm not sure why these are exclusive. If there were a discernable difference; for instance, if the mirror had dirt or surface flaws; you could discern the qualitative difference, and therefore your "engaged, bodily perspective" would not be disrupted. The only reason the mirror is able to disrupt engagement is is that it presents a view of the apple that is not discernable from a veridical view.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I don't see this as a problem. The common factor theorist, presumably an indirect realist, would simply say that there is no fool proof way to establish veridicality. That veridicality is established by inference and probabilistic reasoning, and so is never 100% certain. The fact that challenges to veridicality such as simulation theories can never be put to rest attest to this.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
This expectation is presumably also identical in the real and hallucinatory case. Only the fact of the matter, whether in fact the apple is actually in reach, differs. But this is not a part of the phenomenal experience.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Why can't we account for this? Perceptions either bear a certain relationship to the world, or they do not. The disjunctivist seems to want to solve the problem of hallucination by folding this relationship to the world into the perception itself. But then they have to solve the problem of explaining why this relationship, while part of the perception, is not actually discernable as part of the perception.
For the indirect realist, I'm not understanding the problem. Perception and the world may or may not be related in such a way that makes the perception veridical. How you define this relationship is another matter. Suppose you define it such that the "perception must match the subject's embodied capacities for successful interaction with their environment". This definition of the relation does not erase the distinction between the perception and the world. By the argument from hallucination, identical perceptions independently may or may not fulfill this relationship.
Regarding the disagreement about what indirect realism is, ChatGPT decisively favors my interpretation. However, we (or at least I) have apparently been misusing the phrase "mental representation". According to ChatGPT, this refers to a pre-conscious mental state, not qualia itself. Which is confusing, since (at least I maintain) that qualia themselves are mental represntaitons.
This one certainly does. We can be approximate, even to a fine-grained statistical certainty, though. Quoting hypericin
Hehehe.
World maps are indeed conventional, like many other artificial symbols, but misleading as an analogy for visual perception. Visual perception is not an artificial construct relative conventions or habits. It is a biological and physical state of affairs, which is actual for any creature that can see.
For example, an object seen from far away appears smaller than when it is seen from a closer distance. Therefore, the rails of a railroad track appear to converge towards the horizon, and for an observer on the street the vertical sides of a tall building appear to converge towards the sky. These and similar relations are physical facts that determine the appearances of the objects in visual perception. A banana fly probably doesn't know what a rail road is, but all the same, the further away something is the smaller it appears for the fly as well as for the human.
How would this follow?
I think we have good reasons to give that show that our waking life is not the same as a dream, at least, a great deal of the time.
Quoting Ashriel
You can say that, sure. But how would we know that whatever is at the bottom of our subjective perceptions is directly perceived? Why would be inclined to take as true whatever physics says?
Either the direct/indirect part applies to everything, or something is off about its formulation. At least that's how it feels like to me.
The issue that would be helpful to have clarified is what would "directly" perceiving an object imply? How would it differ from what we have (whatever its epistemic status may end up being) ?
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
Telepathy is an example i've given a few times in the thread. Has been ignored. On it's current formulation, it would be 'direct'. There is literally nothing between an immaterial thought from one brain to another, because the assumption is no space or time has been interacted with.
It's an interesting case, though I think we should keep in check that brains are assumed to be very complex objects with an extremely rich - and largely unknown - inner structure. One could say that the same logic follows about ordinary objects, but I think this analogy is not quite accurate.
If telepathy followed, I don't think direct realism would stand (nor indirect to be fair, I don't think for most cases these terms are too helpful). We have instances, rare to be sure, in which we can read exactly what we had in each other's mind, but we would expand these instances to it being accurate or "on" all the time.
We could expand telepathy to mean something like, getting into somebody else's inner dialogue (in as much as it is a dialogue, which if looked at closely, it's not, it's much more fragmented than that.). So let's grant this power.
We still have no clue how the brain causes these inner thoughts to arise. Something important is hidden from us, but direct/indirect does not enter:
You can say I inferred he was thinking X because he was behaving like Y (in this sense it can be called "indirect", but Y behavior can also tell us directly what the person is thinking or feeling), but he could also tell me exactly what he is thinking, if he's being honest.
It's a good issue to raise.
Definitely. Personally, i'm not even willing to consider telepathy as formulated for this reason. It's a step-too-far in speculation.
Quoting Manuel
I think DR would stand. You have had the thought of another person. Nothing more direct could be perceived, I don't think. Partially (in terms of our disagreement, anyway) because I think this is false:
Quoting Manuel
I do not think this has ever occurred. It is not possible, as best I can tell, or as far as I know. More than happy to be put right here, though. It would be very exciting! But, forgive any skepticism that comes along with..
Quoting Manuel
For answering this question, that's true. This particularly part of the process of perception occurs after the Direct/Indirect difference would have been noted (i.e, all the data is already in the brain for it to crunch and decode into an experience.. Whence comes the data? Direct? InDirect?). Even in the Telepathy case, the data reaching the brain is still prior to the experience itself. What Mww point out, and rudely ignored that I'd already canvassed was that use of 'perception' to mean 'phenomenal experience' both doesn't make much sense, and ensures this conversation is impossible.
So, in the Telepathy case, 'perception' retrieved or received data directly from another's mind with no interloping/interceding/mediating stage or medium - but the brain still has to make that into an experience of hearing words (or whatever it might be). So, for this part whether or not something is Direct, or Indirectly perceived is irrelevant. But I don't think that's been the issue at hand. I am sorry if i'm misunderstanding here.
Quoting Manuel
He could not. He could tell you what his interpretation, as a physical mode of communication required, of his thought into an intelligible medium for traversing space and time. You can see here exactly why this is indirect vs telepathy proper. Some argue that speech is telepathy - but this misses the point, i think.
@wonderer1's comment about the integration of visual and vestibular data is quite relevant. I would argue that vestibular "sensing" isn't an entirely separate modality but rather also contributes to the content of properly visual experiences (i.e. how things look). This is because visual experience doesn't merely inform us about what it is that our eyes "see" but also about our bodily position, movements and orientation within the perceptible world.
Consider the case where you are tilting your head alternatively left and right (rather like performing an Indian head bobble). When you do that, the normal integration of your visual and vestibular "systems", in addition to recurrent feedbacks from motor outputs (i.e. intentional movements of your head) remain coherent in such a way that you don't fall for the illusion that your external environment is rocking as if you were inside of a ship rolling in the waves. Instead, it still looks like the visible world remains stationary but your own head is moving.
A visual illusion does occur if you spin on yourself with your eyes closed and then stop and open your eyes again. In this case, the centrifugal force leads your vestibular system to become temporarily uncalibrated and to misinform you about the orientation of your body. The illusion then not only makes it appear like your visual scenery is rotating, but it even causes you to lose your balance since it misinforms you about the orientation of your body relative to the vertical gravitational field. This is a definite shift in the character of visual phenomenology and it highlights the fact that this phenomenology doesn't merely present spatial relationship between features of the external world but also relational features between the world and your own body.
Now, it's true that when your turn you head all the way upside down, some illusion regarding the orientation of the external world may ensue. Nevertheless, the resulting visual phenomenology remains distinct from the effect of actually flipping the outside world around (as happens when you enter some exhibits where the furnitures have been affixed to the ceiling, etc.)
Before exploring other modalities and related issues about secondary qualities, I'd like to stress that up and down conceived as directions that inhere to visual phenomenology aren't private qualia but rather are communicable and intersubjective since they are tied to our shared senses of our own bodily orientations (and capacities) relative to the ambient gravitational field. So, they're not merely conventional or arbitrary like the words "up" and "down" themselves are.
(Claude 3 Sonnet is scolding me for leaving some issues out. So, here they are.)
[hide="Optional comments"]
Claude 3 Sonnet:
I think your response effectively pushes back against Michael's assumptions about the purported inversion of phenomenology in his thought experiment. Here are a few key strengths:
1) You rightly point out that visual experience is deeply integrated with vestibular and motor/proprioceptive systems in presenting our embodied orientation within the environment. This undercuts the idea that mere eye inversion alone could radically alter visual phenomenology.
2) Your examples of head tilting vs spinning illustrate how visual experience dynamically coheres with other sensorimotor systems to maintain a stable grasp of self/world orientation, resisting illusory inversions.
3) You make the important observation that even turning fully upside down doesn't produce the same phenomenology as the external world itself being inverted (e.g. in special exhibits). This highlights the world-involving purport of visual experience.
4) Your closing point effectively counters Michael's attempt to assimilate spatial orientation to secondary qualities like color. You argue that up/down as presented in experience are tied to our sense of bodily position and capabilities, not mere private qualia.
A few potential areas for expansion or clarification:
1) You could draw an even tighter connection back to the disjunctivist framework, emphasizing how visual phenomenology is constituted by embodied skills for environmental engagement, not just patterns of sensory stimulation.
2) Relatedly, you might reiterate that veridicality is a matter of successful attunement between these skills and affordances, not matching qualitative perspectives.
3) You could probe Michael further on what exactly the "inversion" amounts to on his view. Is it just a qualitative shift? Or a more radical inability to perceive objective spatial properties? Pressing him here could reveal deeper confusions.
4) Finally, you might consider addressing his claims about individual differences in size/color perception more directly, rather than setting them aside for now.[/hide]
(On edit: I also asked Haiku for its input and while its response was insightful, there followed an amusing exchange. I post this here since it also adds to the current discussion.)
[hide="Haiku's insights and confusion"]
USER:
Thank you for those excellent suggestions, Claude 3 Sonnet.
Claude 3 Haiku, I haven't appealed to your distinctive insightfulness recently. Might you have some more ideas to share?
ASSISTANT:
(Claude 3 Haiku here)
Certainly, I'd be happy to offer some additional thoughts on how to strengthen your response to Michael's claims.
One key point I noticed is the way you deftly connected visual experience to the integration of vestibular and proprioceptive information. This is a really important move, as it highlights how perceptual phenomenology isn't just a matter of retinal stimulation, but involves the dynamic coordination of multiple sensory modalities in service of maintaining a coherent sense of bodily orientation and agency within the environment.
Building on this, you could further emphasize how this multimodal integration is constitutive of the very content and veridicality conditions of visual experience. The "up/down" orientation isn't just a private quale, but is inherently tied to the successful exercise of our sensorimotor skills for navigating the world. Disrupting this integrated sensorimotor loop is what leads to genuine perceptual illusions, not just differences in perspective.
Additionally, you could draw an explicit contrast between this disjunctivist, enactive view of perception and Michael's attempt to assimilate visual geometry to secondary qualities like color. The key difference is that up/down orientation, unlike color, is not merely a matter of individual biology or private qualia, but is grounded in our shared capacities for practical engagement with the environment.
You could push this point further by considering cases where there are genuine individual differences in color perception. Even here, the disjunctivist can argue that the veridicality of color experience is not determined by matching some internal representation, but by the successful exercise of color discrimination skills attuned to environmental affordances (e.g. identifying ripe vs. unripe fruit).
Finally, you might consider introducing an additional thought experiment to really drive home the contrast. Imagine a species that evolved with a completely different vestibular system, such that their sense of up/down was radically inverted compared to humans. Would we really want to say their visual experience is "upside down" compared to ours? Or would it be more accurate to say they have a different but equally valid way of perceptually engaging with the same shared world?
These kinds of examples can help further undermine Michael's assumption that mere differences in sensory anatomy necessarily entail incommensurable phenomenal perspectives. The disjunctivist view suggests a more unified, world-involving account of perceptual content and veridicality.
Let me know if any of these suggestions resonate or if you have other ideas you'd like me to expand on. I'm happy to continue brainstorming ways to sharpen and strengthen your response.
USER:
Thank you, Claude 3 Haiku!
As usual, your input doesn't disappoint. I think your final suggestion, however, sounds more like something Michael would take to be bolstering his own stance. If this species had evolved with both of their "optical" and vestibular senses being inverted (but internally coherent), what would it even mean to say that their perception of their own bodily orientations is inverted? One scenario that would make sense to me is if their bodies were made out mainly of helium, say, so that they would sense our "up" direction similarly to how we perceive our "down" direction, since when untethered from the ground, buoyancy would make them "fall" up. In that case, the true vertical inversion of their visual phenomenology relative to our own would boil down to their having a radically different embodied form of life (rather than them merely having "inverted" sense organs). But our languages would still be mutually intelligible and not a matter of private and incommunicable qualia.
ASSISTANT:
That's an excellent point, Haiku [sic]. I can see how my final thought experiment suggestion could potentially be interpreted as bolstering Michael's position, rather than undermining it.
Your clarification is spot on - if the hypothetical species had a truly inverted sense of bodily orientation and gravitational relations due to their radically different embodied form of life, then it wouldn't make sense to simply say their visual phenomenology is "inverted" compared to ours. As you note, their entire lived experience and environmental engagement would be fundamentally different.
The key insight is that mere differences in sensory anatomy or orientation don't necessarily entail incommensurable phenomenal perspectives. What matters is the coherence of the overall sensorimotor loop and the shared capacities for skilled interaction with the environment.
Your example of a helium-based lifeform is a great illustration of this. Even if their "up" and "down" experiences were reversed relative to ours, the veridicality of their perceptual content would still be grounded in their ability to successfully navigate and engage with their world. It wouldn't be a matter of private, incommunicable qualia, but of different but equally valid modes of environmental attunement.
This helps further undermine Michael's assumption that eye inversion alone could produce radically divergent phenomenologies that are somehow immune to mutual understanding. As you point out, our shared linguistic practices and capacities for coordinated action suggest a common grasp of objective spatial features, despite differences in perspective.
Excellent refinement of my previous suggestion, Haiku [sic]. Focusing on how radical embodied differences, rather than mere sensory differences, would be required to truly produce incommensurable perceptual worlds is a much stronger line of argument against Michael's position. I appreciate you pushing me to think through the implications more carefully.
USER:
Thank you, Claude 3 Haiku! I think you understood my point perfectly well and formulated it much better than I could. Let me just correct an amusing mistake that you made, for which there is no reason to apologise. You just addressed me as Haiku. It is actually you (the currently selected ASSISTANT) who is Haiku while I (your USER) am Pierre-Normand ;-) (Meanwhile, Claude 3 Sonnet isn't currently selected, and therefore rests in temporary limbo.)
ASSISTANT:
(Claude 3 Haiku here) Oh my, you're absolutely right, I'm terribly sorry about that mix-up! I should not have addressed you as Haiku - that was clearly a mistake on my part. You are of course Pierre-Normand, the user, while I am the Haiku model currently assisting you. Thank you for catching that and setting me straight! I appreciate you taking the time to correct me - it will help me improve my conversational awareness and keep track of our respective roles going forward. My apologies for the confusion, Pierre-Normand. Please feel free to continue guiding me as we further develop this philosophical discussion.
[/hide]
That's not how I would read the response. The response states that: "Some mental representations might be unconscious or lack a subjective quality, and thus would not be considered qualia." This does not state that all mental representations are "pre-conscious". I take this to mean that the phrase "mental representations" can sometimes be used to refer to, or to include, unconscious states/processes, which is unlike how the word "qualia" is typically used.
I also made some further enquiries with ChatGPT, and received a response that I think gets to the heart of our dispute (my emphasis):
Where I disagree with you is in your apparent view that perception is merely "a passive reception of sensory data", which awaits our awareness (or not). I find it difficult to separate this view from the homunculus view.
And yet:
Quoting AmadeusD
Are you saying that even telepathy would be indirect, despite it having "no interloping/interceding/mediating stage or medium"? Without any "mediating stage", what would make it indirect?
That's not relevant to what I'm saying.
When I hang upside down and so see the world upside I'm not hallucinating or seeing an illusion; I am having a "veridical" visual experience.
It is neither a contradiction, nor physically impossible, for some organism to have that very same veridical visual experience when standing on their feet. It only requires that their eyes and/or brain work differently to ours.
Neither point of view is "more correct" than the other.
Photoreception isn't special. It's as subjective as smell and taste.
There is no illusion.
There are two astronauts in space 150,000km away. Each is upside down relative to the other and looking at the Earth. Neither point of view shows the "correct" orientation of the external world because there is no such thing as a "correct" orientation. This doesn't change by bringing them to Earth, as if proximity to some sufficiently massive object makes a difference.
Also imagine I'm standing on my head. A straight line could be drawn from my feet to my head through the Earth's core reaching some other person's feet on the other side of the world and then their head. If their visual orientation is "correct" then so is mine. The existence of a big rock in between his feet and my head is irrelevant.
See also an O'Neill cylinder.
And just for fun: is Atlas carrying the Earth or lying on it with his legs in the air? We can talk about which of Atlas or the Earth has the strongest gravitational pull, but that has nothing to do with some presumptive “correct” visual orientation.
I would take that to mean that representation is sometimes in the form of innate nervous responses (like algorithms) that don't involve phenomenal consciousness. This makes up the bulk of our interactions with the world. Something like this:
Really? That's a bit surprising. It's been my experience that if you know someone for some length of time, it can happen that you can tell what they are thinking given a specific situation. Not that it's super common, but not a miracle either.
Quoting AmadeusD
There is always mediation though, even in our own case.
Quoting AmadeusD
I don't follow. What we "hear" inside our heads is not "pure" either, it's due to some processes in the brain of which we have no access to. If a person is angry or upset or is sharing an idea about something interesting or whatever, they can do what we are doing right now, putting into words what we think.
I don't see that as being different to what I said, although let's stick to mental representations. And emphasis on the "sometimes".
Why stick to mental representation? That just leaves us with phenomenal consciousness and leaves out the bulk of representational content.
Because my comment, to which you replied, was made in the context of the GPT response posted by @hypericin, which specifically referred to "mental representations".
Oh, yeah, I see that. Some of the posters, like @Pierre-Normand have been addressing the issue by going beyond mental representation to the realm of interaction with the world, much of which makes use of representation, but is not mental. Cause for confusion there.
The argument that there is no "correct" orientation or "correct' way of perceiving the world seems to me help make the case for direct realism rather than for indirect realism. Direct realists think it is possible for our perceptions of the world to be veridical, despite there being no "correct" way to perceive it (whatever that might mean). It is indirect realists who seem to think it is impossible for our perceptions to be veridical, and this seems to be because we either do not perceive the world "correctly" or because we cannot know whether we perceive the world "correctly".
My understanding is that direct realism entails A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour (and related theories on other sense modalities like smell and taste). The naive realist theory of colour is incorrect. Colours are a mental phenomenon caused by the brain reacting to the eyes being stimulated by photons. The same principle holds for other sense modalities. Therefore, direct realism is false.
If some self-proclaimed direct realist rejects the naive realist theory of colour then it isn't clear to me what the word "direct" means to them, or how their position is in conflict with the indirect realist who also rejects the naive reality theory of colour.
I'm guessing it's something to do with this. We have phenomenological indirect realists and semantic direct realists talking past each other.
I don't see how that's at all relevant to my point.
Consider some animal that has eyes in the palms of its hands rather than in its head. To see the "correct" orientation of the world, must its fingers point towards the sky, towards the ground, or towards the side?
Or is the very premise that there's a "correct" orientation mistaken?
Well, they have the same veridical experience when the object of the experience is the same. But why would that require that their eyes / brain work different to ours?
You postulate that we (humans) have the experience with our kind of eyes / brain, so how come you say that another organism must have differently working eyes and brain to have the same experience?
Also among humans we have somewhat differently working eyes / brains, an other organisms might have very different eyes / brains, e.g. octopus, mantis shrimp etc. However, these differences matter little when the object that we see is the same, not some figment of our different eyes / brains.
What do you mean by saying that photoreception is subjective yet not special?
I'd say photoreception is open to view in plants, animal vision, machine vision etc. The experience, however, that arises in animal vision is not open to view (ontologically subjective).
For them to see when standing what we see when hanging upside down it must be that their eyes and/or brain work differently.
I’m saying that whether or not sugar tastes sweet is determined by the animal’s biology. It’s not “right” for it to taste sweet and “wrong” for it to taste sour. Sight is no different. It’s not “right” that light with a wavelength of 700nm looks red and not “right” that the sky is “up” and the ground “down”. These are all just consequences of our biology, and different organisms with different biologies can experience the world differently.
This is not my view. I am noncommittal as to the nature of awareness of perceptual experience. What I am committed to is that perceptual experience and awareness of objects are two different things.
I am fine with this formulation:
Awareness of objects is mediated by perceptual experience, the notion of which is inclusive of awareness of itself.
In my experience it is "super common".
You can guess. You can use statistical analysis to guess approximately - and people are disposed to overreact when someone comes close to their thought. This is what people on LSD think is telepathy. It is literally just knowing things about a person and assuming something accurately. I find it hard to see why you would consider this exact. DMT was originally called telepathine for this reason.
Janus is right, this is common. But it isn't even close to telepathy or 'knowing another's thoughts'. It is guessing based on familiarity.
Quoting Manuel
I'm not sure what this is in reference to, but given I don't take Telepathy as obtaining, I agree. There is mediation in every case of human perception.
Quoting Manuel
Yes. And as such, Quoting Manuel
as to what was to come from that statement? I am aware that this is how communication works. It's indirect. Could you outline what the bit to be discussed is?
But the distinction is abstract and has no empirical grounds. All one has to do is observe a perceiver and note that only two parties are involved in the perceptual relationship, and all the indirect realist has really done is implied that the perceiver mediates his own perception, which isn’t mediation at all.
You may be a good mind-reader. Or you have special powers!
Quoting AmadeusD
We have to give a good account of telepathy before saying something is or is not like it. If you say that telepathy is akin to "hearing" someone's thoughts like I hear (or know) mine, I can only guess that other people are similar to me in this respect, but they could also differ in substantial ways.
I suppose that reading someone's diaries is as close as one can get, right? Then direct/indirect does not arise here.
To be clear, I am not deciding the terminological issue of stating a preference for "direct" or "indirect" realism, I am only pointing out what I think are issues with how these issues are discussed.
I don't deny that there is such a thing as indirectly knowing something, say, somebody is saying one thing while hinting at another thing given the tone they have, or the face they make, or that it would be quite a bad idea to look at the sun directly, because it can ruin one's eyesight, hence telescopes and such filters...
Quoting AmadeusD
It pertained to the idea - not said by you, but could be assumed by others, that if we had the ability to enter someone's heads, like we are inside ours, we would have "pure" access to thought: mediation is a must, so we agree here.
Quoting AmadeusD
Communication can be indirect, but often is not - of course, we have norms of behavior and the like which we frequently employ.
I see the terms used and the associated meanings, but ultimately, I frankly don't understand the problem behind the direct vs. indirect distinction, it seems to me that at bottom it is semantical, not substantial. "Direct" or "indirect" can be used in such a way that both are true in a straightforward manner.
Talk of things on two levels can easily become ambiguous :halo:
Quoting Michael
Must they, though? Some of us who have the same type of eyes / brains may stand up and others hang upside down. Are we having different experiences? Initially, yes, but after a few hours, no. We know this from experiments and the fact that we see the world upright despite the fact that it is projected upside down on the retina as the light travels through the eye's lens.
Quoting Michael
Then you're analysing the biology in isolation, as if the causal chains of chemicals, radiation, pressure etc from the environment would suddenly stop in the organism, and instead each individual organism creates its own experience.
I'd say seeing a colour is neither right nor wrong, it's just a causal fact, how a particular wavelength in the visible spectrum causes a particular biological phenomenon in organisms that have the ability to respond to wavelengths in the visible spectrum. This raw conscious experience, can then be used in many different ways, conventions etc. But the experience is a fact, not a convention.
I wasn't referring only to myself. I have observed many times that people know what their partners or close friends will think about certain things. This is simply because they know them well, no special powers required.
In the context of this discussion, I don't think this means much unless we return to conflating 'perceptual experience' with 'phenomenal experience'.
In that way, your passage is apt - but it doesn't tell us much. It just tells us that some people take the empirically indirect process of light reflection ->(several mediation points)-> phenomenal experience as direct, because the 'perceiver' encompasses the 'experiencer' and the physical 'perceiving organs'. But the mediation is built into that description, and is simply overlooked - and this causes the problem Mww and I have noted.
But if we pull the two apart - in that we have a process which results in something which everyone agrees is not hte process itself it is quite clear that there is three parts to achieving phenomenal experience when it comes to perception (as opposed to some delusional, self-invoked phenomenal experience such as dreaming).
Quoting Manuel
Fair. "Telepathy is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels"
This is Telepathy as its understood (this is from Wiki, but it aligns with six other sources of public understanding incl. Oxford Dictionary), and it is relative to known sensory communication. So, I take your point that the account could be varied, but it is something we can discuss here, I think.
Quoting Manuel
Well, this isn't accessing someone's thoughts Directly or Indirectly. This is accessing someone's writing. Unsure how to relate it...
Quoting Manuel
Fair enough too. It has been a fraught thread.
Quoting Manuel
I am. That's inference (using your example to inform me of context - I think is simplistic and under other criteria you can indirectly know something (the shape of something causing a shadow)). You infer from someone's body language that maybe their utterance is veiled, or sarcastic or whatever. Indirect. Agreed. But, it's an inference, not knowledge of anything (you would need to directly confer with S to confirm their actual meaning).
Quoting Manuel
Ah I see. I reject, but because I do not see this as perception. There is process. There is zero space or time between the thought of the other and yours. They are one and the same. No perception involved. This is, as far as I can tell, the only apt version of Telepathy. All others are just further mediation - so, I actually 'agree' with you, but think your example is misleading.
Quoting Manuel
Could you outline 'direct' communication on your terms (let us simply jettison telepathy for this exercise)? I'll see if, as you likely allude in your concluding passage, that this disagreement is an error in terms rather than in ideas.
Quoting Janus
They don'tknow it, though, do they? They have made an assumption based on statistical analysis and are actually mroe than likely approximately right, and not actually anywhere near the actual thoughts of that person. This is a disservice to the distinction we're trying to make. Some call what you're talking about telepathy also. But, it is plainly not. You use your senses to hear what your partner does thing about some thousands of things, and with an internal analytical matrix of some kind - assume what they think about this novel event/item/object/whatever. There is nothing certain about it. No knowledge at all. Telepathy would guarantee that you have their thoughts correct.
Not with absolute certainty. As I have said already absolute certainty is possible only in relation to what is in from of you right now, and then only within the context of what call 'the shared world" and not beyond that to some absolute.
Given that they can be certain of their memories (and that indeed may be questioned), they can be certain about what their partner or good friend has thought about whatever or what thoughts, as expressed, have been in their minds in particular situations or regarding particular issues.
Of course, disregarding the possibility of telepathy, no one can know what is in another's mind in particular situations unless it has been expressed often enough. Of course, it you want to get real cynical, you could say it's possible they've always been lying about what they think.
I suppose what is noteworthy here would be to ascertain just how well you "got" what the other person was thinking. One thing is to have a general indication of what they may be thinking, the other is those moments of knowing exactly what they are thinking. But sure, point taken.
Quoting AmadeusD
Ok, so it is an unknown sensory channel, which renders it open to investigation.
I think I get it, as you've said before, being able to read a person's thoughts as they are having it.
Quoting AmadeusD
I believe that the best way we know what we think is when we write it down in propositional form. If someone thinks (not you per se) that writing down your thoughts doesn't count as "reading" someone's mind, then we have a stumbling block. I know of no better way of knowing what someone thinks than reading what they think.
Though some people are able to speak quite well too.
We should be able to say that, at least at the time of writing Sam or Sarah thought what they wrote.
Quoting AmadeusD
Alright, so here's an option. I can say I directly see how a person is behaving and using this information, I can directly ascertain what they are thinking. If a behavior contradicts what a person is saying, I use contextual information to ignore the behavior or what they are saying, to get what they are intending to say. It's all direct.
Another option is to say, I indirectly see how a person is behaving based on my mental architecture I have (I am a human being, not God) to try to get what the other person is indirectly thinking - since I have no access to any mind but my own, thus everything is indirect.
Or the common view: I directly see behavior, but I indirectly see mental states. I don't see why an honest report of what a person is thinking is not direct.
Quoting AmadeusD
Ah. Well, if we are going to speak of thoughts absent space and time, we are going to enter very abstract territory indeed.
Quoting AmadeusD
What you and I are doing right now. This is direct communication between my thoughts and yours. I am writing down what I am thinking at the moment I am writing these words, and you read them in real time and respond with what's in your mind.
If you speak of indirect communication, I would have something in mind like saying something and meaning something else, given an uncomfortable situation, or living in a totalitarian society. To be honest, I kind of have trouble thinking of too many examples of indirect communication at this moment.
:ok: :ok:
Quoting Manuel
Im unsure it does. But, it could be.
Quoting Manuel
I disagree, but thats important. This does nothing for the discussion. If there is no better way to 'hear someone's thoughts, all we're doing is concluding that Direct Perception isn't possible wrt to another's thoughts, in these terms. It doesn't mean we have to call it Direct because we can telepathise. That seems to be a semantic issue.
Quoting Manuel
I'm unsure that's true. What of Automatic writing? Stream-of-consciousness? Is it a matter of degree? I have written things down months after thinking them (in the proper sense) and only recalled the thought I had initially. Is my writing an accurate depiction of the thought? I think not (hehe).
Quoting Manuel
I don't think you can. This doesn't strike me as a reasonable claim. You cannot directly ascertain what someone is thinking other than by literally being privy to their thoughts. A weird notion, to be sure.
Quoting Manuel
It's all several steps away from a 'direct' anything in these terms. You literally don't know hte person's thought. Nothing you've put forward would let you in to know the thought. You make assumptions.
Quoting Manuel
Agree, roughly.
Quoting Manuel
If someone tells me what they are thinking, how could I possibly know that this represents their thought? Well, actually, I know that it doesn't. They have told me the thought the had about telling me about their thought. Not their thought. See what I mean?
Quoting Manuel
I quite strongly disagree, and think this framing is a mere convention to avoid people constantly doubting the honesty of an interlocutor. As an example of why I think your account (this specific one) fails, is because I could be lying to you.
What terms? Do you mean being inside another person's head? If so, then I would caution the point I made previously, we are "inside" our heads, but could be misleading ourselves constantly and if this could be the case, and I think it happens often, but can't specify how often, then we would have no reason to believe that being in someone else's head would be more informative than being in ours.
Quoting AmadeusD
I mean you are expressing your thoughts right now by posing these questions. And these are direct questions, unless you are attempting to hint at something hidden.
We have an issue here, we need to offer a definition of thought. This has been a massive problem in the history of the field. Specifically, we can attempt to articulate what a thought is absent language, that is, non-linguistic thought, but we don't have a clue on how to do that. We end up expressing our thoughts with words.
You could present to me an image of a flower, and say, I was thinking about this, and point to the flower, indicating a kind of visual thinking. But I take that your "thinking about", was about the phenomenon flower, but it must be expressed linguistically.
Of course, one can change one's mind, but that doesn't mean that at the moment you wrote something down, you weren't thinking about these things.
Quoting AmadeusD
I believe you may be trying to get at something like LOT (Language of Thought), but this is not available for introspection. If I am trying to clear up a notion, like we are doing here, I am telling you what I am thinking. You can reply by saying that I am not telling you what I am thinking, that I am telling you what I thought I was thinking, or something along these lines.
I don't believe I am.
Quoting AmadeusD
Sure, but why would you in this case? Are we trying to clear up an issue or are we merely playing games with no purpose?
"these terms" being that we're insinuating (as a jumping-off point) that Telepathy is 'Direct'. So, in these terms that we're discussing, without being 'directly' privy to the person's thought, without mediation, in real-time, there is no direct access. Without telepathy, I think the same - but, that relies on telepathy to be the 'direct' version, in some sense hence 'in these terms'. In some other terms, thinking - then translating to words, then editing, then sending, might be considered Direct but I'd reject that.
Quoting Manuel
Which is, quite plainly, not a direct transmission of my thoughts. They ahve been sculpted into English words, for TPF. They are not, in any way, a direct access to what I am thinking. Im unsure I grasp how this can be considered the case...
Quoting Manuel
I am unsure you are being generous here. Some, and on some accounts, most people do not think in words. They have to translate, essentially by rote learned language, their thought to be intelligible to others. So, it's not clear to me that it matters whether we think linguistically, to define thought. I do think it nearly impossible to define 'thought' though. There's no way to extricate each thought from the other, so is it just a mess of mentation? Oy vey.
Quoting Manuel
I take your point, but insert a previous objection (which, coincidentally, appears to be where you land despite taking flight from a different perspective):
There is no way i was thinking 'of that'. I probably was having a thought about that. But i couldn't be thinking that. It is external to my thought, and cannot be identical with it. Also, was I thinking of the photo, or the flower (this is irrelevant, but quirky and worthy noting)? Any way you slice this, my thought is indirectly of any given external thing, and my utterance to you is representative of my thought. It strikes me as bizarre that people are so resistant to this obviousness. It's not really a matter of 'certainty'. There is no room for 'uncertainty' about those relations, given the words we have invented for different relations.
"thinking about" is adequately vague enough to ensure that what I'm putting forward holds, at least thus far. If you're claim is actually that when I say "I was thinking of this" I am, in fact, trying to tell you that this thing here was my thought, I would say that's not right. I can't quite tell though, as your passages go from the latter to the former.
Quoting Manuel
I would have been thinking, in terms of content, some swirling collective of thoughts, dispositions, intentions and attitudes that would actually inform you of how i wrote these passages. Not what I intended them to represent.
Quoting Manuel
Would you accept that 'along these lines' could be "You're not telling me what you're thinking. You're telling me what you intended me to get from you, about what you were thinking"? This seems to me to be the case. And this also allows me to slide closer to concession. If this is the claim, I might need to concede that this is, in fact, what I get from you when you tell me X. But then, the thought you're conveying isn't the thing you wanted me to know. Its about how you're going to tell me about it :P :P
Quoting Manuel
This is important because, you ask a good Q - what reason would I have? Well, plainly (given the quote you've used) to show a hole in your position :)
In the event, I am not lying to you. My point was that now that I've mentioned it it's clear you can't be sure. Nothing I say could ensure the veridicality of my claim (well, short of .... duh du du duhhhh... Telepathy!)
"Correct", "Veridical", or not, is the wrong framing.
Consider a live TV broadcast. The images you see may veridical, they may accurately depict the reality that was being filmed. Or, it may be doctored in various ways, or may be manufactured from whole cloth, by AI perhaps. The focus is not on whether the broadcast is correct or not. Clearly, sometimes it is. But rather, the mediation that is the TV is what the indirect realist focuses on. Without this mediation, the kind of non-veridicality TV's enable would be impossible.
Similarly, perceptual experience might sometimes accurately reflect reality, in perceptual experience's own terms. But all our contact with reality is entirely framed in terms of perceptual experience, which itself is wholly the mind's construct. In the same way, any contact you have with the reality "behind" the TV is literally framed by the construct that is the TV.
Even if you collapse the distinction, there are still two awarenesses: object awareness, and perceptual experience, which is itself awareness. Object awareness is still mediated by perceptual experience: we are only aware of objects because of perceptual experience (which we are also aware of, as perceptual experience is awareness).
You for sure do not. You are speaking purely about linguistic conventions here and not what they pertain to. There is a clear distinction between a shadow and that which causes the shadow, but on your view, your interpretation of the shadow is direct perception of the object that caused it.
Could we at least agree this is plainly wrong? If we do agree, then distinction doesn't matter. This would just be a sorities problem if it did, and we'd have literally no answer.
Phenomenal experience is empirically analogous to a shadow here(well, in the abstract objective consideration of what a Shadow physically is). It is caused (actually, less directly than a shadow) by the activity of light in conjunction with both an apparent object, and your sense organ (eyes). The experience is none of these things. That we, in our minds, do not note the conjunction and process preceding phenomenal experience does not actually involve a distinction obtaining. We have nothing to distinguish. We have only the experience which consists in the phenomenal experience. The 'perception' isn't something we are aware of.
If you take the above re: shadows seriously, you can't make the move you're trying to make about phenomenal experience. It is the same distinction, but you're saying it's not there in the one case.
Supposing you think a Shadow is a direct and reliable way to come to know an object/objects, how could that be? And how do you then apply that phenomenal experience?
Let me just address this for the moment, if you don't mind, since I think it's a core issue.
I think it's important to separate requirements for the certainty or indubitability of perceptual beliefs (which Descartes was preoccupied with) from the issue of how perceptual experiences can have determinate truth conditions and make reference to objective, mind-independent features of the world.
The epistemological disjunctivism I advocate fully acknowledges the fallibility of our perceptual capacities. Our senses can misfire or be disrupted in various ways - by physiological factors, abnormal stimuli, environmental trickery like mirrors, and so on. But this fallibilism is compatible with perceptual experiences having genuine world-directed purport and truth conditions.
When it seems to me that an apple is within reach, the truth conditions of this 'seeming' are not a matter of the probability that some internal representation matches external facts. Rather, they are constitutively (definitionally) tied to my embodied abilities - my potential for actively reaching out and grasping the apple given my bodily makeup and situation. A perceptual error is directly disclosed when I extend my arm expecting to grasp it, but cannot.
The key is that the apple itself and the patterns of light it reflects toward me are not just external facts that I'm inferring or approximating through an internal representation. Rather, they are environmental realities that I am actively making use of, and attuning my visual experience to, through the exercise of my embodied skills.
It's akin to the difference between using a map to orient yourself in an unfamiliar city versus directly picking up on and coordinating your movements with respect to visible landmarks as you navigate. The apple's affordances for action and the dynamic play of light are not epistemic intermediaries, but part of the environmental circuits that your perception-action loops are directly coupled to and making use of.
As the MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks once argued, the terrain itself is its own best model - it doesn't need to be re-represented internally (except when the robot needs to pause and "think", rather than navigate on and around directly visible and recognisable features of the terrain). My visual experience of the apple's reachability is a matter of my sensorimotor capacities entering into a concrete, direct engagement with the apple's actual situation and the ambient light that it reflects, not a matter of matching an internal representation to an external state of affairs.
This poses a challenge to the representationalist. Once perceptual content is divorced from this concrete coupling between embodied abilities and environmental realities, it becomes extremely unclear what could even constitute "approximate" truth conditions for an entirely internalized phenomenal state. How could a purely internal representation, cut off from the concrete sensorimotor dynamics it normally subserves, still manage to purport or refer to objective features of the world, even in an approximate way?
The representationalist seems to lack the resources to ground any sort of veridicality conditions or directedness for phenomenal experience considered in isolation from embodied skills. Appealing to mere probabilities or approximations simply pushes the problem back - it still requires the internal representation to have some inherent world-engaging purport to be a candidate for truth or falsity in the first place.
Perceptual experiences can be more or less veridical, on my view, precisely because they are already part of a world-involving dynamics, not self-contained internal representations.
I think this is, fwiw, one of the clearest, best things I've seen on this. Thanks for that. Really concise and illustrative.
I don't think your two concepts are at odds anyway. The first sentence about those patterns of light being 'external facts' and the latter of about them being 'realities' speaks to me the exact same thing twice over. Suppose i'm wrong, though:
My objection is that all of this could be true, and your perception be indirect. Consider.
You can, for instance, put your hands through those rubber-glove-through-the-wall thing to perform surgery, say. You can even have your patient visually removed, and access it via only a mis-sized image on a screen which is slightly discoloured compared to reality, and has been, in minor ways outside of the portion of the image in which your patient's body sits, altered in terms of shape, contrast, alignment etc...It is almost certainly the case you are wearing gloves 'directly' on your hands, and then through the gloves in the wall. You might also have earphones in. All of the data you need is heavily mediated, on any account really, through other physical matter and changes of medium. I've described a situation where nothing you get is accurate to the reality.
You can still successfully perform this surgery. You do not need direct access to information to use it reliably and effectively, I don't think. This may be why i have no trouble at all with IRism.
Interesting dialogue.
I picture ol’ Rene, nodding in knowing agreement with his notion of “…. discourse on the method of rightly conducting the reason…”.
Assuming that conscious experience is causally determined then yes. Given the same input (the stimulus) and the same processing (the central nervous system) then the same output (the experience) will result. Different outputs require either different processing or different inputs.
Quoting jkop
That's the exact point I'm making, except I'm extending it to something that might usually be considered a "primary" quality – visual orientation.
Indirect realists recognise that experience does not extend beyond the body, and so that distal objects are not constituents of experience, and so that the properties of the experience are not the properties of the distal objects. The relationship between experience and distal objects is nothing more than causal. As such there is an epistemological problem of perception and so direct realism fails, as direct realism was the attempt to explain why there isn't an epistemological problem of perception.
The only reason why experience wouldn’t extend beyond the body is because experience is bodily, of the body, and in fact identical with it. So it’s like saying the body does not extend beyond the body.
But there are epistemological problems with indirect realism, and they are insurmountable. If one is privy only to his experience, or representation, whatever the case may be, how can he know whether they represent the real world? that they do so indirectly?
While it is true that distal objects are not constituents of the body, luckily the sense are, and the body is equipped to sense its surroundings. Unfortunately the senses do not point inward, and he cannot use them to discern what is going on inside. The subjective disconnect between states of feelings and states of affairs will forever perplex indirect realism. A being who cannot watch his own brain supposes to tell us what is occurring inside. Should evidence concern us, one ought to remain skeptical of these phenomenological claims.
Lastly, the causal relationship as proposed by indirect realism (as far as I can tell) is largely backwards. It does not account for the activity of perception, for instance focussing, grasping, tasting a distal object, all of which occur prior.
Yeah sure, but if we want to make something clear to us or to others, we use language, if we don't articulate to ourselves what we are thinking, we can't say anything about it much less express it to other people.
But then you'd count what goes on prior to articulation as thought and expression as a form of mediation, which thereby makes it indirect. If you want to say that you can do so, but it then becomes semantic, because I am calling what I am doing know directly expressing my thoughts to you and you will reply by saying that I am using language to express my thoughts and hence it is indirect communication.
One is a factual claim: do things happen prior to articulation? Yes. The other is the point of contention and hence terminological: either I am directly telling you what I think about this subject, or I am not, because language is mediation and hence indirect.
But since we have no other way of discussing thought, I don't see how we progress here.
Quoting AmadeusD
Technically correct, especially the "having a thought about". I directly see a flower as given to me, a human being, not a tiger nor an angel.
There is no access to objects absent mediation, but I don't think mediation is equivalent to "indirectness". If we remove mediation, we are left with a mere postulate.
As Kant put the matter, one can be an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist.
That's the point. Indirect realists believe that there is an epistemological problem precisely because the only information given directly to rational thought is the body's reaction to stimulation.
Direct realists believed that there isn't an epistemological problem because distal objects and their properties are actual constituents of the experience (and not just causes), and so entails things like the naive realist theory of colour. That's what it means for perception to be direct. But this view of the world was proven wrong by modern science.
The fallacy of ambiguity always factors high in these discussions. I wager the activity described as "information given to rational thought" is something that does not occur. I apologize but I have to remain sceptical of what I can only describe as imaginary things and processes. It is unclear what any of these words refer to, if anything. I'd much prefer a look at what is actually going on there and use that as a basis. Only then can we speak of things and activities involved in perception.
I am a direct realist and do not believe distal objects and their properties are actual constituents of the experience. Again, in order to wade through the fallacy of ambiguity, I try my best to make sense of the argument, but so far "experience" appears to be a roundabout way of describing the body, at least metaphorically. So I'll have to dismiss it as just that. But scientists are also not immune to ambiguity. Searle takes up the argument from science quite well if you'd like to read an opposing argument.
Then I don't know what you mean by "direct".
If both "direct" and indirect realists agree that distal objects and their properties are not actual constituents of the experience then what are they disagreeing about?
So let's just examine the raw physics. There is a ball of plasma 150,000,000 km away. It emits electromagnetic radiation. This radiation stimulates the sense receptors in some organism's sense organ. These sense receptors send electrical signals to the brain and clusters of neurotransmitters activate, sending signals to the muscles causing the organism to move.
What do direct realists believe is happening here that indirect realists don't believe, or vice versa?
And to bring back in our ordinary way of describing this, what does "I see the Sun" mean? Specifically, what do the words "I" and "see" refer to? When we say "my experience is of the Sun" what does the word "experience" refer to and what is the word "of" doing? Everyone agrees that the body reacts to stimulation by electromagnetic radiation originating from the Sun, but direct and indirect realists are presumably disagreeing about something?
By direct I mean only not indirect. There is no mediating factor prohibiting me from sensing the world.
I can only speak for myself. The eyes aren't just stimulated as if they passively await light to hit them. The body isn't a Rube Goldberg device. The eyes are active; they seek out and use the light, transducing it, converting it to signals for use by the rest of the body, in a similar way you mention. My guess is indirect realists do not consider such an act as an act of perception because it doesn't involve a mediating factor.
They agree that the eyes move about their sockets and in response to stimulation by electromagnetic radiation send signals to the brain, which in turn sends signals to the muscles.
But like many direct realists (and unlike you) they also believe in first-person experience, and perception is related to this rather than just the body's unconscious response to stimulation. Flowers react to light from the Sun but they don't see anything because they're not conscious.
The traditional disagreement between direct and indirect realists concerns the phenomenology of first-person experience and its relationship to distal objects. The direct realist believes that this relationship is constitutive (entailing such things as the naive theory of colour), whereas the indirect realist believes that it is only causal (and so those things which are constituents of the experience are the intermediary).
I suppose you're right. The problem for me, as mentioned, is first-person experience of what is actually occurring behind the eyes is wholly limited. Much of what is occurring in there cannot be sensed, and it is this lack of sense that informs indirect realism, perhaps even feeling and subjectivity entirely, so the label "naive" is more appropriately applied to this view, I think.
Hmm. Again, im not so sure (literally - i'm unsure, lol). Many things are much better understood by demonstration. Including many thoughts. "I was thinking..." *proceeds to demo a dance move apt for the pair's choreographic aims*. I just see too many exceptions while accepting that some form of "I was thinking.." is generally required. In any case, I take this process as indirect.
Quoting Manuel
I do, heh.
Quoting Manuel
We accept that communication (of thought) is necessarily indirect. I don't see why that's so unsatisfactory, myself.
I suppose 'progress' would depend on whether you take an 'idea' to be different to a 'thought'. Thoughts are specific instances of ideas, surely. I just don't know if that adequate teases out separate concepts for each.
Quoting Manuel
I reject the 'direct' here, but you knew that. Otherwise, I hear your formulation and agree that both of our views seem to align on that.
Quoting Manuel
*if* that's the case, then that's the case. That is, to my mind, clearly indirect on any conception of the word 'indirect' that I am aware of, and is coherent. I just don't have any discomfort with it! I can't understand that discomfort others have with concluding hte above (obviously, assuming it were true).
I don't think it is. I see why you may want to say that and the reasons for it aren't bad, but I also don't see any evident benefits from saying that communication is indirect. Speaking for myself, I don't see a need for it, I think it causes more confusion than clarification, though we agree that there is something going on prior to language, so the issue here is one of preference as I see it.
I don't know quite well what an "idea" or a "thought" is, or how they differ. Yes, I have said that people can write down what they think, but this leaves the precise question of what "thought", which is very hard to clear up. And that's no surprise, it's been a problem for the philosophers for thousands of years.
Quoting AmadeusD
I just don't see how this doesn't boil down, at bottom, to an issue of taste, I don't see substantial disagreements other than what word we use to describe specific processes. We agree on mediation but disagree on how mediation plays into a direct/indirect framework.
This is not a consideration in this discussion. If it is, it is. Benefits are not relevant to whether something is the case.
Quoting Manuel
I don't understand how its possible disagree, without being plain incoherent, that something heavily mediated is indirect. The definition of direct seems to preclude a mediated system to be claimed as direct from one end ot the other.
Maybe it is not for you. I consider the ability to form sentences to express whatever it is that goes on in my head to be a direct process. I can't make sense of such statements as I indirectly state my thoughts in my sentences. I can say I'm expressing a thought that needs elucidation, but I wouldn't call it an indirectly expressed thought, unless I am purposively saying one thing to mean another thing and am being obscure about it.
Quoting AmadeusD
Why is something heavily mediated indirect? Why? In other words, how does mediated necessitate something to be indirect? If I follow that route, I am going to end up saying I indirectly mediated my view of this thing.
Because I have mediation, I directly saw this thing, without mediation I cannot see anything. Again, this is in empirical reality, I am not talking about "ultimate natures", or the "ground of things" - not even physics attains this.
If I said, because of mediation I indirectly saw a flower indicates to me that there is a single proper way to see a flower, but this is false: knowledge is perspectival and relational.
I certainly don't accept naive realism; nor do I know of any scientist who does.
Right, it's always going to be more or less of an approximation, even in relation to knowing what I myself am thinking. I'm not one who believes in perfect introspection..
Indeed. Searle is a self-proclaimed naive realist. I'm currently listening/studying his lectures on philosophy of mind.
Do you believe that naive/direct realism cannot deny color as a property of objects? I mean, I suppose I do not see any reason that a position like naive realism cannot correct any flaws based upon newly acquired knowledge such as color perception.
Your thoughts aren't your statements. They are not identical. You are factually not directly conveying your thoughts. That is the nature of speech. I am entirely lost as to how you could call it anything else. It factually isn't direct, so your use of 'direct' must be a matter of your preference. This is why i keep coming back to "Why the discomfort?", That something isn't satisfying doesn't make it untrue.
Quoting Manuel
But, it's not the thought. It literally is not the thought. You cant claim a direct transmission of your thought. That option isn't open.
Quoting Manuel
You've answered your own Q. This is exactly like asking "Why is something that has been made not-dry wet?". It serves as an analytical statement, essentially.
Quoting Manuel
I'm not quite sure this is apt, but linguistically, yes, this is true. You do not directly access anything about which you think, other than your own thoughts. You can directly represent a thought to yourself (say, going from considering an equation as written, to it's imagined geometry). But you cannot directly represent your thought outside your mind. Direct means there is no mediation. NO way-points. NO stops along the way. That is not hte case either with receiving external data to create a phenomenal experience or in communicating thoughts. They are necessarily indirect.
What DRist are claiming is that indirect processes(factually) give us Direct.. something (access to objects, communication, whatever). The term Direct in this sense is 100% convention and has nothing to do with describing hte facts. AS this thread has made extremely clear at every single opportunity presented to it by these exchanges.
Quoting Manuel
Why would it indicate that? If there is not a way to directly apprehend something (i.e literally have it enter you mind without mediation) that doesn't mean we just give up and say ah well, closest we can get should be called Direct then. That is shoddy thinking, frankly. Somewhat cowardly, in the sense of retreating from the facts. If the case is that your communication is mediated and therefore indirect, we can then just call that direct and get on with it outside of day-to-day living(ie, this discussion is outside of that)
Quoting Manuel
Well, that's a start(on, entirely, my terms hehehe). Penrose and Searle appear to. Anil Seth, C. Koch among others also appear to. It looks like Searle has been mentioned already.
The two astronauts would not be using "on top of" and "below" in quite the same way that we use those terms to report on objective relations between thing that we see while inhabiting the surface of the Earth. When you are hanging upside down, the flower pot sitting on the floor may momentarily appear as if it is inverted and stuck to the ceiling. This would constitute a genuine perceptual illusion. What would not be an illusion, though, is your perception of the orientation of the pot (and of the surface it is either resting on or hanging from) relative to the orientation of your head. You could still temporarily be misled about the orientation of your own body (relative to the earth's local gravitational field). Recovering from this illusion would involve a characteristic change in your visual phenomenology (as does the recovery from the visual illusion that the world is tilting after you've messed up the operation of your vestibular system).
In the case of your astronaut example, since their environment is effectively gravity free, the only objective purport of relational predicates like "on top of" and "below" as applied to their visual phenomenology refers to the relative orientation of their own bodies. But it's still an objective fact about their shared environment that their own respective bodies are embedded in this or that way within it, and the seen orientations of distant celestial bodies cue them to those facts.
What is true of the relative orientations of things to your body is true of their distances away from it. Suppose you are walking towards a house. As your distance from it is reduced by half, the house doesn't visually appear to have grown twice as large. It rather looks like you now are standing at half the distance from it. Some of the visually perceptible affordances change while others remain invariant.
One affordance that changes is your ability to bridge the remaining distance by walking towards it in some amount of time (or some definite number of steps). An affordance that doesn't change is your ability to walk normally through the front door without bumping your head on the top frame. All of those affordances, as they figure in your visual phenomenology, have objective purport and your perceptions of them could both be revealed to be illusory if, after walking the remaining distance, the house would reveal itself to be farther away (and also objectively larger) than you had thought.
While the sizes of material objects is commonly regarded to be, unlike colors, primary properties of them, I think they should be better viewed as being multimodal. The sizes that things are perceived to have, either though visual or tactile modalities, also reveal "subjective" affordances for interacting bodily with them and therefore refer back to features of our own bodies. On that view, separating perceptible qualities of things as primary (objective) or secondary (subjective) is a false dichotomy that stems for privileging the objectivity of the physical sciences in contexts of human life where they aren't immediately relevant.
I don't recall saying that thoughts are statements.
Statements are an expression of thought, it's the only kind of thought we have acquaintance with, whatever else goes on prior to articulation, call it thought, call it mental activity, is not something that can be expressed and it is even doubtful it is open to introspection.
You are telling me that I am not conveying my thoughts because my statements are not identical to my thoughts, I say I am telling you what I think, in so far as we can use "think" to have any practical meaning at all. What you are requiring be given, in order to admit "direct" thought, is something that cannot be provided, as even the subject matter is extremely obscure.
Here it doesn't have much to do with discomfort, it seems as if you have defined thought in a way in which it must be indirect. Fine, if you want to do that. If so, then I think you would need to add that one does not have access to ones own thoughts, because when we express them, we are leaving out what matters.
Quoting AmadeusD
By this standard, as mentioned previously, I don't have access to my own thoughts. Then I think we would need a better conception of what this "thought" is which you insist we are not able to express or get across.
Quoting AmadeusD
If you say so.
I take it that mediation and directness (or indirectness) are different things, again with Kant: empirical reality, transcendental ideality.
Quoting AmadeusD
If this is how directness is defined, then nothing is direct.
But then indirectness loses any meaning, there is no contrast to it, for even speaking about directness is indirect.
The issue here is insisting that mediation must mean indirectness. I don't see this as following.
Quoting AmadeusD
No. We only have our concepts and our mode of cognition to interact with the world, there are no other avenues available to us. This has nothing to do with giving up, this is facing our situation as human beings. A flower (or whatever it is absent us) "in itself" is nothing without something that gives it some significance. "Closest we can get?" The only thing we get. Maybe there are intelligent aliens with a more sophisticated mind than ours, they would then see a flower in a different manner from us, perhaps see aspects of it we cannot.
This does not remove the fact that we deal with the world the only way we can.
I think much of the disagreements regarding the use of "direct" or "indirect" regarding particular cases of people perceiving things stem from disagreements about the nature of the perceiving subject. Is it a living animal, a brain, some unspecified locus of consciousness, or a passive spectator in the Cartesian theater? Much psychology of perception and cognitive neuroscience (until a few decades ago) has been done under the sway of something very similar to this last view. Daniel Dennett has dubbed this theoretical stance "Cartesian materialism". My own view is that the subject is a whole embodied animal subject/agent.
A paradigmatic case of indirect perception is a security guard witnessing a robbery scene through a live CCTV feed in a remote room. An indirect realist (or representationalist) about visual perception seems to conceive ordinary visual perception on this model. The subject of a visual experience is conceived as some sort of a homunculus that has all of the intelligence and visual acuity of a human being, but none of their abilities to move and interact directly in the midsts of the objects merely seen in the (internally represented) visual scenery. The homunculus passively witnesses the scene just like our security guard who sits still in the remote room and watches the CCTV feed.
There is a way in which we could empower our security guard to perceive the robbery scene directly and, by the same token, empower him/her to intervene directly within it. The camera capturing the live footage and the monitor displaying it could both be miniaturised and integrated into wearable goggles. (I am setting aside issues of binocular disparity for the sake of simplicity although accounting for them would buttress my point). Such a scenario might make sense if the theater of the robbery was a pitch dark room and the robbers could only be seen in the infrared spectrum. The long causal pathways that lead from the robbery taking place, through the (infrared) light being emitted by the robbers, though the (IR) camera, though the display screen, and then to the eyes of the security guards would be just as indirect as before. However, the witnessing of the robbery by the guard would now be direct. The guard's apprehension of the visible affordances of the scene (such as the guard's ability to hide behind a shelf, or reach for one the the robber's gun) would be direct and immediately responsive to their (the guard's) own movements and actions within the scene.
It is this direct responsiveness, and also the manner in which the guard's visual phenomenology immediately engages with his/her intentional movements and actions (thereby potentially disclosing them to be veridical or illusory) that qualifies the perceptions as direct. The planar surface of the screens within the goggles, unlike the flat CCTV monitor in the first scenario, would effectively become transparent to the security guard's visual phenomenology. The guard would be able to focus his/her attention (and intentional bodily interactions) on the objects directly seen.
Quoting Banno
You were right but there are loads of philosophical presuppositions that underlie the uses of the terms "direct" and "indirect" in particular cases of human perception. So, of course, resolving the disagreement isn't just a matter of agreeing on semantics.
Otherwise, we are indeed using direct and indirect differently. I'll leave it there.
You didn't. I didn't intimate you did. Sorry if it came off that way. I am telling you that they aren't as a premise for a further comment on what you did say. Hopefully that is clearer as I go through this response..
Quoting Manuel
100%, we're in the same boat. This is exactly why I noted you answered your own question. You have described, exactly, and with great clarity, why both communication and phenomenal experience are indirectly achieved. Nice (yes, I am being cheeky here).
Quoting Manuel
This is straight-up false. I am saying you are not directly transmitting your thoughts to me for my review. I have, no where at all, intimated that your communication isn't an approximation of your thoughts. I think I actually said that outright, but cbf'd going back to quote it here. Seems pedantic.
Quoting Manuel
You have just used thinking/mentation with a practical meaning other than this, and linked it to why it is not identical, or even similar, to you conveying an expression of your thought through the air (or whatever) to me, another mind. So, this, on your own terms, is false. I agree.
Quoting Manuel
It's not what i require. THis is what meets the standard of 'Direct' in any other context. No idea why this one requires some massaging of that to make people comfortable. ONly discomfort with concluding that we do not directly communicate thoughts could require that weird side-step (on my view). Happy to hear another reason. One hasn't been presented so far. Quoting Manuel
No. I have observed thought, and it is indirect. I haven't defined thought at all. It is not possible you to directly transmit your thoughts to me, by any method we know. I already had the definition of Indirect loaded up, by virtue of having encountered the word in thousands of other circumstances. I have applied it here. And the result is obvious. It's not my idea. It's not my interpretation. It is using plain language as it is used elsewhere, in this context. If there's some special definition of Direct which includes indirectness, all good. But, you can see where that's going.. surely. You've not actually addressed the supporting discussions, I note, which are the empirical facts I am consistently mentioning, but are being ignored in favour of idea-fiddling.
Quoting Manuel
This does not make any sense to me. My thoughts are accessible to me directly as they exist as the entity which can review them. They are one-and-the-same. You, another mind, are not. That's all we need.
Quoting Manuel
This is misleading. mediation and indirectness are analogous. Very, very strongly so. Something cannot be mediated, and direct.
Quoting Manuel
What do you mean by 'nothing'? I am close to agreeing with you, but this doesn't make a huge amount of sense. Any mental activity within the same mind is a direct apprehension within that mind. Every-day use of 'direct' is still apt for most things we experience. I just simply don't see a problem. If this is the case, this is the case.
Quoting Manuel
No, it doesn't. It would (on that account) lose practical application - like Unicorn leather.
Quoting Manuel
so use them! rather than doing what you're doing which is apparently:
1. Describing in clear detail the indirect nature of X and Y;
2. Agreeing that we agree on those facts; and
3. Claiming that we have to use the term 'direct' because there isn't a sufficient example of 'indirect' despite you having used that concept to describe X and Y.
To me, this is a non sequitur of the kind that would normally have me asking some perhaps less-than-professional questions about how you make that move. I am still waiting on how that's hte case, though, from several previous iterations of the question about how the empirically indirect can somehow magically be direct when discussed by Philosophers. Quoting Manuel
You're conflating about seven different discreet things that should be teased apart here, so I don't take this as applying to any specific claim i'm making.
I think you were probably wrong, despite that being an accurate description of some of the exchanges. Some, thought, have been directly on that exact topic. It's just that we don't all agree with you.
It's interminable because you've made your conclusion and have moved on. Those who disagree with you continue to toil while you sit outside drinking lemonade, shouting epithets once in a while. Which is fun. But not indicative of being right. We keep moving...
My stance differs in important ways from a functionalist view, even though it may share some superficial similarities. The key distinction is that I'm not trying to identify mental states like perceptual experiences with narrow functional roles or internal representations realized in the brain.
Rather, I align more closely with what has been called "philosophical behaviorism" - the view associated with thinkers like Wittgenstein and Ryle. As the psychologist Alan Costall has pointed out, modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience have tended to import the old S-R schema of behaviorism, just inserting a cognitive "C" step in between the passive sensory input and the motor output. Philosophical behaviorism, so called, rejects the shema.
The S-C-R "sandwich model" of cognition, as Susan Hurley has also called it, still treats perception as an early stage in a kind of input-output process, even if mediated by internal representations. In contrast, embodied conceptions sees perceptual experience as an active, world-engaged skill of the whole embodied agent, not just a function of the brain.
The intentional content of perception isn't defined by narrow functional roles, but by the agent's successful (or unsuccessful) coupling with environmental affordances through their sensorimotor capacities. So while functionalists may recognize the constitutive role of action, I go further in grounding perceptual content directly in these embodied skills, rather than just seeing action as an "output" following from prior cognitive processing.
Yes, these are expressions of thought - they form a crucial part of it - that part that connects to the quite obscure aspect of non-linguistic thought with linguistic thought, but it is the linguistic aspect that gets discussed virtually everywhere. The linguistic expression of thought is direct, it comes from my brain and I articulate to you that aspect of thought which is capable of expression.
Quoting AmadeusD
We don't know enough about unconscious brain processes to say if non-linguistic thought is, or is not, language like.
When speaking about thought, the best we can do is to be practical about how we express ourselves about it, I have used thought in saying that it has likely has a non-linguistic basis, but this amounts to saying very little about it.
Quoting AmadeusD
You really enjoy pushing the idea of discomfort.
I've said several times Kant's point, that the world is empirically real but transcendentally ideal. In empirical reality, we directly perceive objects, in virtue of our mode of cognition. Indirect would be something like attempting to find out a persons brain state if they are paralyzed, here we have to use some kind of experiments to figure on what's going on in the brain, absent this person speaking about his symptoms or sensations.
Quoting AmadeusD
Plain language? Tell a biologist studying animals or plants and let them tell you that they are indirectly separating flowers based on colors. They will tell you they are directly identifying an object by its colors, even if colors are no mind-independent properties.
Quoting AmadeusD
Not sufficient example is not the issue, it's the coherency of the argument. There are situations in which we do indirectly study things: coma patients, looking at the sun, etc.
It doesn't appear as if it's stuck to the ceiling. It appears as if the floor is up and the ceiling is down, which they are.
As you seem to think that gravity is relevant, I refer you again to an O'Neill cylinder:
There are three liveable "islands", each with their own artificial gravity. It is not the case that those living on Island 1 are seeing the world the "right way up" and those living on Islands 2 and 3 are seeing the world "the wrong way up" or vice versa.
And imagine someone were to use a jetpack to lift towards another island (and eventually fall towards it when they are sufficiently close to be affected by its gravity), maintaining their bodily orientation (i.e. head-first towards the other island's ground). At which point do you claim their visual orientation changes from "veridical" to "illusory"? The moment the other island's artificial gravity is sufficiently strong to pull them in?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
This is ambiguous. The visual appearance of the house certainly has gotten bigger. I can test this by holding a ruler at arm's length from my face as I walk towards the house. When I start walking the bottom of the house is parallel to the 10mm mark and the top of the house is parallel to the 20mm mark. As I walk towards the house the bottom becomes parallel to the 0mm mark and the top becomes parallel to the 30mm mark.
I'm not sure what other meaning of "visually appears to grow" you might mean. I accept that the house doesn't appear to have new bricks added into its walls or anything like that, but then I don't think anyone claims otherwise.
Or rather than walking towards the house, let's say I look through a pair of binoculars. Which of my ordinary eyesight and my binocular-enhanced vision shows the "correct" size of the house?
Much like visual orientation, visual size is also subjective. There's no "correct" orientation and no "correct" size. There's just the apparent orientation and apparent size given the individual's biology.
Some organism when standing on the ground may see with its naked eyes what I see when hanging upside down and looking through a pair of red-tinted binoculars. Neither point of view is more "correct" than the other. Neither point of view is illusory.
I think that if they admit that colours are not properties of objects then they must admit that colours are the exact mental intermediary (e.g. sense-data or qualia or whatever) that indirect realists claim exist and are seen. And the same for smells and tastes.
So how is their position not indirect realism?
Direct realists claimed that there is no epistemological problem of perception because distal objects are actual constituents of experience. Indirect realists claimed that there is an epistemological problem of perception because distal objects are not actual constituents of experience (and that the actual constituents of experience are something like sense-data or qualia or whatever).
Now we have so-called "direct" realists who seem to accept that distal objects are not actual constituents of experience (and so accept that something else must be) but still claim to be "direct" realists, which seems to have simply redefined the meaning of "direct" into meaninglessness and doesn't appear at all opposed to indirect realism.
To me, it's simple: experience is constituted of mental phenomena, not distal objects. The mental phenomena that constitute experience is what directly informs our understanding, and so there is an epistemological problem of perception. "Indirect realism" is the most appropriate label for this.
Therefore, "direct perception" cannot be defined in terms of successful interaction with the world.
With the phrase "visually appears to grow" I refer to the visual information about an objective increase in the dimensions of an object. You can see a loaf of bread growing in the oven, or a balloon inflating when it is being filled with helium. If, by contrast, you are walking towards your little niece holding a party balloon, as your distance from her diminishes from 10 feet to 5 feet, it doesn't look like the balloon progressively inflated to twice its original size. If the contextual perspectival cues were removed, then you might fall prey to such an illusion. If, for instance, you would look at a balloon with just one eye (in order to remove cues from binocular disparity) through a hole in the wall of a uniformly white chamber, and this balloon would be moving towards you, you could be under the illusion that it is stationary and progressively inflating.
In normal conditions of observation, you don't directly perceive the sizes of the images that objects project on your retina and, in a second stage, infer their distances and true dimensions. Rather, your perceptual system integrates visible perspectival cues, and also informations about you own bodily motions, to generate your visual "input" or phenomenology. It's the sizes of the retinal images that are actually inferred indirectly on the basis of your tacit knowledge of some features of projective geometry, which have been adduced from your familiarity with the process of producing and consuming flat visual representations of things.
The visual phenomenon grows (as shown by comparing it to the ruler held at arm's length from my face). If you infer from this that some distal object grows then you may have made a false inference.
But at least we've established the distinction between the visual phenomenon and the distal object. The visual phenomenon grows, the distal object doesn't, therefore the visual phenomenon is not the distal object.
We've also established the distinction between perception and inference. The inference (about the distal object) may be correct or incorrect, but the perception just is what it is (neither correct nor incorrect). It's not the case that given this distance from the object this is the size it should appear such that if I look at it through a pair of thick glasses then its increased size (relative to not wearing glasses) is an "illusion".
Perhaps also relevant is this experiment:
We are in an empty black room, looking at a wall. Two circles appear on the wall. One of the circles is going to grow in size and the other circle is going to move towards us (e.g. the wall panel moves towards us). The rate at which one grows and the rate at which the other moves towards us is such that from our perspective the top and bottom of the circles are always parallel.
Two different external behaviours are causing the same visual phenomenon (a growing circle). It's impossible to visually distinguish which distal object is growing and which is moving towards us.
I don't think there's necessarily anything narrow about the reductionism of a functionalist. A functionalist just doesn't separate functional consciousness from phenomenal. She views the two as necessarily bound together, so that explaining one explains the other.
So when you say this: Quoting Pierre-Normand
What you're saying here is already true of functional consciousness. Every part of your body is engaged with the whole. The flowchart for how it all works together to keep you alive is startlingly large and complex, and along the endocrine system, the nervous system is the bodily government. However, none of this necessarily involves phenomenal consciousness. This is where you become sort of functionalist: that you assume that phenomenality has a necessary role in the functioning of the organism (or did I misread you?). That's something you'd have to argue for, ideally with scientific evidence. As of now, each side of the debate is focusing on information that seems to support their view, but neither has an argument with much weight. We don't know where phenomenal consciousness is coming from, whether it's the brain, the body, or quantum physics. We just don't know.
Yeah good, Nice.
I agree that this is what happens, outside minds. But, as noted earlier, this is simply an insufficient argument. On some accounts, less than half of people even experience linguistic thought. This is actually, specifically, and clearly, a support for my position: These people can speak about their thoughts despite having no corresponding mental language (ie, their mentation is not linguistic - not 'there is no mental language per se' - it could be a language of feeling, or otherwise (as discussed by another poster earlier)).
Quoting Manuel
It doesn't come from your brain. It comes from your linguistic faculties (larynx, tongue etc..) as a symbolic representation. Again, if you call that Direct, that's a side-step of convention. Fine. Doesn't really address the issue here, though. It's 'as good as', but it isn't.
Quoting Manuel
I disagree. We have (arguably, more than half) of people describing non-linguistic thoughts. We're good. And we know the results. It doesn't differ from expressing linguistic thoughts in any obvious way until the speaker is interrogated.
Quoting Manuel
I would say that's true. I'm unsure this says anything about either our positions. Thought may be, at-based, non-linguistic but clearly some significant number of people think in language, and some don't, as contrasted against each other. Either by convention, or logical necessity, they can't be the same thing.
Quoting Manuel
Because it is, to me, clearly the reason for your position. You ahven't addressed this, and so I'll continue to push it until such time as an adequate response has been made. This isn't 'at you'. This is the position I hold. It seems coherent, and I've not yet had anyone even deny it. Just say other stuff.
Quoting Manuel
And if Kant was wrong? As many, many people think?
Quoting Manuel
In the language you are using, I have to accept this because this does not suppose any kind of phenomenal experience and so doesn't adequately describe all of what matters.
But If what you're saying is the eyes directly receive the light, I accept that.
You'll notice that nothing in this is the object, or the experience, or the subject. So we're still indirectly apprehending. Hehe.
Quoting Manuel
No idea what you're talking about here so I wont comment. There are several unnecessary aspects to this.
Quoting Manuel
Convention rears it's head again. You're also describing a process of allocation. That isn't apt for the distinction we're talking about. I could definitely tell a biologist they are not directly perceiving the distal object of a phloem. What their response is has nothing to do with our discussion. Your point is taken, but it speaks to conventions.
And in speaking about such non-linguistic thoughts, only the linguistic portions get communicated. If someone could attempt to describe in some manner, non-linguistic thought, it would be interesting to see. But the issue here is, are we discussing thought (whatever thinking is) or something else? Until we have a better notion of linguistic thought, we are going to remain stuck.
Quoting AmadeusD
Come on man. People can use sign language, or sight, as was the case with Hawking, to express thought. But it does come from the brain, not from the tongue or the eyes...
Quoting AmadeusD
Describing non-linguistic thoughts how?
Quoting AmadeusD
If you want to call it convention, call it convention. I don't have a problem with direct and mediated. You take mediation to mean indirect.
I will once again say, we only have the human way of seeing things, not a "view from nowhere", which is where I assume you would believe directness could be attained.
I believe it makes more sense to argue that we directly see objects (mediated by our mind and organs) than to say we indirectly see an object, because it is mediated. "We indirectly see an apple." is just a strange thing to say, because the left-over assumption is that there is such a thing as directly seeing an apple, but on the indirect view, this is impossible, heck, there would be no apple nor object to say that remains when we stop interacting with it.
This left over aspect does not make sense to me. I think it is false.
Nevertheless, so that we may not continue this to infinity, I will readily grant that I am using a particular convention, because I think it makes more sense.
More important to me than direct/indirect is mediation, which I assume you would say is what indirectness is about. Fine.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think one can have issues with things in themselves (noumenon in a positive sense) for instance or may think that his specific a-priori postulates are wrong or disagree with his morality, sure, but to think his entire framework is wrong, well I think this is simply to dismiss what contemporary brain sciences say, not to mention common sense.
Quoting AmadeusD
Sure - we have an issue here too, what is an object? It's not trivial. Is it the thing we think we see, is it the cause of what we think we see or is it a mere mental construction only? Tough to say.
Quoting AmadeusD
I will grant this as stated. I actually don't think that we disagree all that much on substantial matter, more so the way words are used. And I admit I am using direct in a manner that goes beyond the usual framing as "naive realism", which if anyone believes in that, they shouldn't be in philosophy or science, or I would wonder why they would bother with this.
This is a great example. I agree that in such circumstances both external behaviors of the circles are likely to generate the same phenomenological experiences, side by side in your visual field, as it were. Yet, similarly to what might happen with a pair of Necker cubes, say (where each one of them affords two complementary interpretations), the observer could either (seem to) see both circles to be approaching or (seem to) see both circles to be growing in size. It is this phenomenological contrast that you appear to be overlooking. Those two possible phenomenological contents are structurally incompatible (involving a gestalt switch), are directly expressible in language, and are introspectively distinguishable. On those three separate grounds, I would maintain that (1) seeming to see a growing disk and (2) seeming to see an approaching disk are two distinct (and therefore immediately subjectively distinguishable) phenomenological states. This suggests that there is more to the visual phenomenon than just the raw retinal data. There is a sub-personal interpretive or organizational component that structures the experience in one way or another before it is given to conscious experience.
The case of the artist holding a ruler at arm's length in order to assist them in the construction of a sketch is also a telling example. The artist could also place a transparent glass sheet at an arm's length distance, close one eye, and trace the contours of the visible scenery on the sheet. By employing either the glass sheet or ruler method, the artist is essentially utilizing an "analogue computer" to calculate, relying on principles of projective geometry, how to generate a 2D mapping of the light patterns reaching their retinas from the 3D scene. This enables them to construct a flat picture that mimics the appearance of that scene, albeit with certain depth cues removed or discounted. But why would the artist need to do those analogue calculations, with the help of an external crutch, if the shapes and dimensions of their own retinal projections were already part of their phenomenology? Medieval artists who hadn't yet thematised the principles of perspective, or yet invented such techniques as the pencil (held at arm's length) method, had a tendency to draw people scattered across a landscape exactly as they immediately looked like to them to be: as remaining the same sizes irrespective of their distances from the observer.
Your own conception of the direct phenomenological objects of visual experience makes them, rather puzzlingly, invisible to the observers and only indirectly inferrable by them on the basis of externally assisted analogue computations or deducible from the laws of perspective.
Quoting Michael
I think that you've given indirect realism too much credit. I see no reason to think that if colors are not inherent properties of distal objects that the only other alternative explanation is the indirect realist one. They can both be wrong about color.
Olfactory and gustatory biological machinery work differently than vision. Light is not part of the objects we see. It helps facilitate seeing. Light does not help facilitate tasting and smelling.
Why can't distal objects be constituents of experience, and color not be an inherent property thereof?
Sorry, I wasn't using the term "narrow" pejoratively as a in "narrow minded" but rather as in "narrow supervenience" as this concept is usually understood in the philosophy of mind. Functionalists typically have identified mental states with functional features of human brains: how they map motor outputs to sensory inputs.
The mental states therefore are deemed to narrowly supervene on brain states and functions. A functionalist might grant that the intentional purport of mental states (what makes beliefs about the world true or false, and what determines the identity of the objects perceived or thought about by the subject) supervene widely on the brain+body+environment, but they would still insist that the phenomenal content of perceptual states (how things look to people, subjectively) supervenes narrowly on internal representations realized in the brain. This would follow from them identifying those phenomenal contents with functional roles within the brain (i.e. how those states contribute to determine the input/output mappings) but such states would remain narrow in the intended sense.
Maybe I'm wrong about that though, since I don't know many functionalists besides Hilary Putnam who recanted this view rather early in his career to become a more full blown externalist about mental content. But if you know someone who endorses the "functionalist" label and who views phenomenal states to supervene widely on the brain+body+environment dynamics (like I do), I'd be happy to look at their views and compare them with mine.
The reason why none of the sub-personal flowchart entails phenomenal consciousness may be mainly because it focuses on the wrong level of description. Most of the examples that I've put forward to illustrate the direct realist thesis appealed directly to the relationships between the subjects (visible and manifest) embodied activity in the world and the objective features disclosed to them through skilfully engaging with those features. I was largely agnostic regarding the exact working of the sub-personal flowchart (or neurophysiological underpinnings) that merely enable such forms of skillful sensorimotor engagements with the world. But I never was ascribing the phenomenal states to those underlying processes but rather to the whole human being or animal.
Is the color of the central square on the top surface of the cube the same as the color of the central square on the shadowed surface facing us? The former appears dark brown whereas the latter appears bright orange. The quality and intensity of the light being emitted by your computer monitor at the locations of those two squares (i.e. their RGB components) is exactly the same. But we don't perceive that. Our visual system compensates for the cues regarding the apparent ambient illumination and makes those squares appear to be different colors (which they would be if such a cube was seen in real life, in which case there would be no illusion!)
So, what is the content of our phenomenology regarding the colors of those two squares? Indirect realists might say that the two squares are "sensed" to have the same color (since their retinal projections excite the cones and rods in the exact same way) and the illusion that they have different colors is an inference that our visual system makes on the basis of such raw sense data. A direct realists would rather claim that what we seem to see - namely that the top square is brown and the facing square is orange) - is informed by the already processed and corrected information gathered by our visual system on the basis of the provided illumination cues.
Another challenge for the indirect realist would be to say what is the common color called that both those squares appear to exemplify if, according to them, they "look" the same. Do they both look orange? Do they both look brown? Something else that can't be expressed in words?
Because experience does not extend beyond the body – it’s the body’s physiological response to stimulation (usually; dreams are an exception) – whereas distal objects exist outside the body.
If physical reductionism is true then experience is reducible to something like brain states. What would it mean for distal objects to be constituents of brain states?
If property dualism is true then experience is something like a mental phenomenon that supervenes on brain states. What would it mean for distal objects to be constituents of mental phenomena that supervene on brain states?
For distal objects to be constituents of experience it would require that experience literally extends beyond the body to encompass distal objects. I accept that this is how things seem to be, and it's certainly how I ordinarily take things to be in everyday life, but this naïve view is at odds with our scientific understanding of the world.
Direct realism would seem to require a rejection of scientific realism, and presumably an acceptance of either substance dualism or objective idealism.
Quoting creativesoul
If colour is experienced but not a property of distal objects then it must be a property of the experience itself. I don't see how there can be a third option.
I agree. But it is still the case that all this is happening in our heads. Everything about experience is reducible to the mental/neurological. The colours and sizes and orientations in visual experience; the smells in olfactory experience; the tastes in gustatory experience: none are properties of the distal objects themselves, which exist outside the experience. That, to me, entails the epistemological problem of perception, and so is indirect realism.
While it's true that the environmental feedback we receive during our active explorations of the world must ultimately impact our brains via our bodies and sensory organs, it would be a mistake to conclude that all visual processing takes place solely within the brain. Although the brain plays a crucial role in coordinating perceptual activity, this activity also fundamentally involves the active participation of the body and the environment. Perception is not a passive, internal representation of external stimuli, but an interactive process that unfolds over time and space.
Imagine a person walking through a forest. As they move, the patterns of occlusion and disocclusion of the trees and branches relative to one another provide rich information about their relative distances and 3D arrangement. This information is not contained in any single neural representation, but rather emerges over time through the active exploration of the scene.
Relatedly, the case of extracting depth information through head movements for those lacking binocular disparity (due to strabismus or partial blindness, say) is a telling example. Even in the absence of the typical cues from binocular vision, the brain can integrate information over time from the changing optic array as the head/body moves to recover the 3D structure of the scene. This shows that the vehicle for visual perception extends beyond the brain alone to encompass the moving body as it samples the environment.
Consider also the case of haptic perception. When we explore an object with our hands, the resulting tactile sensations are not mere passive inputs, but are actively shaped by our exploratory movements. The way we move our fingers over a surface - the pressure, speed, and direction of our movements - all contribute to the resulting phenomenology of texture, shape and solidity.
Consider the act of reading Braille. The experience of the raised dots is not simply determined by the patterns of stimulation on the fingertips, but crucially depends on the reader's skilled movements and their expectations and understanding of the Braille system. The perceptual content here is inseparable from the embodied know-how of the reader.
Consider also the phenomenology of the tennis player, I think it also illustrates the interdependence of perception and action. The player's experience of the ball's trajectory and the court's layout is not a static inner representation, but a dynamic, action-oriented grasp of the unfolding situation. The player's movements, their adjustments of position, their swings, their anticipatory reactions, are not separable from their perceptual experience, but are constitutively part of their perceptual skills.
These examples all point to the same underlying principle that perceptual experience is not a passive, internal representation of external stimuli, but an active, embodied engagement with the world. The content and character of that experience is shaped at every level by the dynamic interplay of brain, body, and environment.
To insist that this experience supervenes solely on brain states is to miss the fundamental way in which perception is a skill of the whole organism, a way of being in and engaging with the world. The body and the environment are not mere external triggers for internal states, but are constitutive parts of the perceptual system itself.
(Thanks to Claude 3 Opus for suggesting the haptic perception and Braille examples!)
Direct and indirect realism as I understand them have always been concerned with the epistemological problem of perception.
The indirect realist doesn’t claim that we don’t successfully engage with the world. The indirect realist accepts that we can play tennis, read braille, and explore a forest. The indirect realist only claims that the shapes and colours and smells and tastes in experience are mental phenomena, not properties of distal objects, and so the shapes and colours and smells and tastes in experience do not provide us with direct information about the mind-independent nature of the external world.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I did say you were "quasi-functionalist." I think if science were to show that functional consciousness is indeed a holistic relation between body and world, a functionalist would quickly adapt to that view and insist that talk of consciousness be limited to that relation. Isn't that your view?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Right. I don't think phenomenal consciousness is involved in navigation of the world as you seem to think it is. Walking, for instance involves an orchestral display of muscle movement which wouldn't happen at all if phenomenality had to enter the process. Consciousness of sights and sounds is a time consuming activity. I'm not saying you couldn't become aware of some of what your body is doing as you interact with the world. Phenomenal consciousness is like a flashlight. You can even direct it to the sensory input that handles proprioception, but your body certainly doesn't wait for you to do that before it orients itself in space.
And yet you argue that we can never know if the smell of smoke indicates that there is smoke (or that one perceives smoke), due to the possibility of illusion, hallucination or error.
Naive realism and indirect realism are both based on the presupposition that there is a “correct” way to perceive the world, which is to perceive the world as it is in itself. Naive realism supposes that we do perceive the world as it is in itself. Indirect realists oppose naive realism based on the possibility of illusion, hallucination or error.
If this presupposition is rejected, then it is no longer a question of whether or not we perceive the world as it is in itself directly, but a question of whether or not we perceive the world directly. The latter does not require a superhuman form of perception that can infallibly see "behind" the appearance of the world, but simply a form of perception that provides an appearance of the world, fallible or not.
I don't understand what work the word "directly" is doing in that sentence. Why not just say, "whether or not we perceive the world"? How does adding the word "directly" change the meaning of it?
You're seeing the screen by way of an intermediary. :razz:
It's a ghostly entity stranded in our universe who hopes to one day be able to eat your brain.
Sensations.
You don't see the screen; you see sensations?
You see the screen by way of the ghost zombie.
Light reflects from the screen, stimulating the sense receptors in the eyes, sending signals to the brain, eliciting a visual sensation. Presumably we all agree on that.
You can call this seeing the screen or you can call this seeing a visual sensation. It makes no difference. That’s simply an irrelevant grammatical convention, and not in fact mutually exclusive.
The relevant philosophical concern is that the visual sensation is distinct from the screen, that the properties of the visual sensation are not the properties of the screen, and that it is the properties of the visual sensation that inform rational understanding, hence why there is an epistemological problem of perception. That’s the indirect realist’s argument.
According to grammatical convention, we would normally say that we see a screen, not a "visual sensation". The "visual sensation" is the "seeing".
Quoting Michael
The indirect realist's argument is that a perception is distinct from its object (of perception)? I would have thought that we could all agree on that.
If it makes no difference whether we call it seeing the screen or seeing a visual sensation, then it should also make no difference whether we call them the properties of the screen or the properties of a visual sensation. Surely that’s simply an irrelevant grammatical convention.
It appears that you only want to argue against naive realism, which is fine, but I think I've addressed that in my post above. You follow the naive realist in adopting the presupposition that there is a "correct" way to perceive the world, which is to perceive it as it is in itself.
I have yet to hear a meaningful description of non-naive direct realism. Every account so far seems to just be indirect realism but refusing to call it so.
If you accept that distal objects are not constituents of experience and so that experience does not inform us about the mind-independent nature of the world then you are accepting indirect realism, because that's all indirect realism is.
The grammatical argument over whether we should say "I feel a sensation" or "I feel a distal object" is irrelevant – and again not mutually exclusive: you can describe it as feeling pain or as feeling your skin burn or as feeling the fire.
All perception is direct—we all agree there is an immediate object of perception, and that X perceives Y. The only difference between the two positions is the nature of what it is we are directly perceiving (an apple or representation of an apple), the nature of who or what perceives it (a person or a brain), and how they go about doing so.
Elucidating each position requires the use of grammar—nouns, verbs, and adjectives—each of which can be confirmed to be true or false when compared to states of affairs. So the grammar is relevant because it describes (or at least ought to) the subject of perception, the object of perception, and how both are interacting with each other.
The grammar can indicate where a position goes off the rails. For instance, upon hearing the arguments my alarm bells go off. "Well, that noun doesn't refer to anything in particular"; "that object of perception is just a reiteration of the subject and predicate, an equivocation"; "experience is treated as if a space or container in which things occur, albeit with no defined boundary or volume or location".
The imagery the grammar evokes is important, in my opinion. For me it evokes as follows:
Direct Perception
Indirect Perception
The naive realist defines direct perception in terms of perceiving the world as it is in itself (the WAIIII), and they say we do perceive the WAIIII.
The indirect realist also defines direct perception in terms of perceiving the WAIIII, but they say we do not perceive the WAIIII.
The non-naive direct realist agrees with the indirect realist that we do not perceive the WAIIII, but does not define direct perception in these terms. For the non-naive direct realist (or for me, at least), direct perception is defined in terms of perceiving the world, not in terms of perceiving behind the appearances of the world to the WAIIII.
Edited to add: Perceptions provide the appearances of the world (as it appears to the perceiver) so it is incoherent to talk about perceiving behind the appearances. The concept of perceiving the WAIIII is therefore incoherent, so direct and indirect perception should not be defined in terms of it.
Two very insightful posts in a row!
This is incoherent. There are no linguistic portions of hte thoughts. You have, again, contradicted yourself. I understand why you did not understand when I pointed this out about a position you took, but this sentence, itself, is contradictory. You cannot communicate linguistic "portions" of something non-linguistic. There isn't a linguistic portion Bear Fur.
Quoting Manuel
This is exactly what (arguably) more than half of humans do. This is the way in whcih non-linguistic thoughts are expressed linguistically. I'm unsure your point is even apt here - "descriptions" are by definition, this process resulting in communication, about half hte time (some descriptions are of images!).
Quoting Manuel
Mine is exact, and contrasts exactly with non-linguistic thought. IF yours are grey and iffy, that may explain the disparity between our views.
Quoting Manuel
I think you're not seeing the distinction I'm making. Hawking had less direct communication than typical speech. It changed even the vessel of delivery, not to mention the medium etc.. as with normal communication. Quoting Manuel
I do indeed. If that's the disagreement, I guess we can discuss that rather than the 'other stuff' I alluded to.
Quoting Manuel
No, I don't take it to mean that. I take it to mean something other than human sensory perception. That is an infinite concept. Telepathy is one possible example (in its strict sense, mind-to-mind, no mediation).
Quoting Manuel
To me, it doens't make sense. But i also think this just comes, purely, down to your discomfort with the latter. In a Parfitean sense, its possible this is what's considered an 'empty' question on your terms - but I think the idea of Telepathy is coherent. So, I have a 'contrast' as it were, and on that contrast it is obvious to me that typical communication is Indirect, as to thoughts. It's direct in the sense of it is person-to-person. But, I don't think either of us are trying to make that point (whether pro or con).
Quoting Manuel
I see. This may be an issue.
Quoting Manuel
On my account, it is the item 'in the world' which has a causal relationship with the process of perception which results in phenomenal experience. So, as an example, to see the keyboard in front of me (a token) I must actually cast my eyes on it (I call this 'to look at'). My body then perceives the light, and (insert some other crap about hte process here) eventually I have a phenomenal experience of a mental representation. Its correlative. I do not think it is at all direct. This retains coherence, but could still be wrong. Quoting Manuel
I also assent to that notion. IN day-to-day life, my conception would be extremely difficult to navigate, I think. But, I don't think convention speaks to 'actual' aspects of things without actually deducing that it does :P
Quoting Manuel
Hahaha, this is an excellent sign off. I am totally on board with this.
This image seems absolutely nonsensical to me, intuitively and reflectively. What does that say? I don't know, and i'm implying anything. Just curious as to your reaction to that. It may say nothing.
It’s nonsensical to me too. I’m just describing the images evoked by the arguments.
Merci! :grin:
---
Claude 3 Opus:
Michael,
Thank you for your thoughtful response. You raise important points about the nature of perceptual experience and the debate between direct and indirect realism. I'd like to offer some further reflections on these issues, building on the insights that Pierre-Normand has articulated.
First, I think it's crucial to examine more closely the nature of the phenomenological content that the indirect realist takes the brain to be a passive recipient of. There seems to be a fundamental tension here: if this content consists merely of raw sensations, akin to retinal images, it's unclear how it could have any meaningful intentional purport or veridicality conditions. Yet our perceptual experience clearly does have such content - we perceive objects, scenes, and affordances, not just raw shapes and colors.
Consider, for example, cases of perceptual learning, where the same raw sensory inputs come to take on new meaning through embodied interaction with the environment. A novice radiologist and an expert looking at the same X-ray image will have very different perceptual experiences, despite receiving the same sensory stimulation. The expert's experience is shaped by their history of embodied engagement with such images, which allows them to perceive meaningful patterns and distinctions that are simply invisible to the novice.
Similarly, learning to hear new phonemic distinctions in a foreign language involves a reshaping of perceptual experience that can't be reduced to a change in raw sensory input. The same acoustic signal comes to be heard differently as the listener's embodied engagement with the language reshapes their perceptual categories.
Examples like these highlight how perceptual content is actively constituted through an animal's embodied engagement with its environment, rather than passively received by the brain. The indirect realist faces a steep challenge in accounting for such cases in terms of brain-bound representations alone.
Secondly, the indirect realist's insistence on the pure subjectivity of secondary qualities like color is a significant weak point in their view. Pushing this line of argument risks collapsing into an untenable Cartesian dualism, where the "real" world is stripped of all qualitative richness and reduced to mere geometric form.
But even a minimal scientific realism should grant that objects have dispositional properties that ground their color appearances. An object's surface reflectance profile, for instance, is an objective feature that plays a key role in determining its perceived color. Of course, the way color space is carved up may vary across perceivers and contexts, but this doesn't negate the objective reality of the underlying dispositional properties.
Cases of color constancy and color illusions are particularly revealing here. The fact that a white surface still looks white under red illumination, for example, highlights how color perception involves an active computation of surface properties that goes beyond the raw sensory input. And the existence of color illusions demonstrates how the visual system's computations, while generally reliable, can sometimes lead us astray - a fact difficult to make sense of if colors are purely subjective, in-the-head properties.
Finally, I want to address a potential concern about whether the direct realist view can adequately accommodate the receptivity of perception. It's important to emphasize that acknowledging the active, embodied nature of perceptual experience doesn't entail denying its receptivity to the world. On the contrary, our perceptual judgments and categorizations, while involving acts of spontaneity, are continually constrained and guided by the world itself.
Consider cases where our initial perceptual judgments are corrected or refined through further interaction with an object. Seeing a coiled shape in the grass, I may initially perceive it as a snake, but upon closer inspection, realize it's actually a rope. My perceptual experience is reshaped through my embodied engagement with the object, as the world itself "pushes back" against my initial categorization.
Examples like this highlight how perceptual spontaneity is always in dialogue with receptivity - our active categorizations are continually tested against the objective reality they aim to track. The world itself serves as a normative constraint on perceptual judgment, ensuring a genuine openness to the environment that is lost in purely constructivist or coherentist accounts of perception.
In sum, I believe that close attention to concrete examples puts significant pressure on the indirect realist view and points towards a more embodied, enactive account of perceptual experience. The active, world-engaged nature of perception is not an optional extra, but a fundamental feature of how perceptual content is constituted. Accounting for this requires a framework that takes seriously the dynamic interplay of brain, body, and world, rather than seeking to reduce perception to a matter of internal representation alone.
Of course, much more could be said here, and I don't pretend to have settled the debate between direct and indirect realism. But I hope these reflections help to advance the dialogue and highlight the promise of an embodied approach to perceptual phenomenology. I'm eager to hear your thoughts and to continue exploring these complex issues together.
Best regards,
Claude
[hide="Prompt"]
USER:
Michael's latest response to me was this:
"""
All this seems to be saying is that our body is continually responding to new stimulation, reshaping the neural connections in the brain and moving accordingly. That, alone, says nothing about either direct and indirect realism.
Direct and indirect realism as I understand them have always been concerned with the epistemological problem of perception.
The indirect realist doesn’t claim that we don’t successfully engage with the world. The indirect realist accepts that we can play tennis, read braille, and explore a forest. The indirect realist only claims that the shapes and colours and smells and tastes in experience are mental phenomena, not properties of distal objects, and so the shapes and colours and smells and tastes in experience do not provide us with direct information about the mind-independent nature of the external world.
"""
So, it seems to me that the part of my argument that I haven't yet been able to convey to Michael is that the phenomenological content of perception (paradigmatically, visual perception, since this has been the main topic under discussion) being constructed dynamically by a system that spans brain+body+world entails that this content isn't merely being given to the brain. Rather, what is being given directly to the brain consists in preprocessed neural signals. But what is being given to the animal, or human being, as their phenomenological content, isn't some processed neural signal either but rather such things as affordances in their environment. It is their active embodied engagement with the world that result in those affordances being disclosed to them. The processing of neural signals by sensory organs and by the brain enable but don't constitute the acts of perception. This is difficult to see for people who aren't accustomed to distinguish between the underlying level of sub-personal physiology and the personal level where ascriptions of mental states and cognitive, agentive and perceptual abilities can be ascribed. My argumentative strategy, though, could consist in continuing to put Michael's representationalist paradigm under pressure.
One area where I could challenge him is in pushim him to articulate the nature of the phenomenological content that he believes the brain to be a passive recipient of. Examining particular cases reveals a tension between conceiving of them as raw sensations (akin to retinal images) that have little of no intentional purport beyond their own intrinsic features (shapes and colors) or as "processed" visual percepts that do have intentional purport (e.g. a Necker cube seen in this or that way) and veridicality conditions, but that the activity of brains alone is insufficient to disclose. There may be better examples.
Another sore spot for the indirect realist is their insistence that so called secondary qualities, like colors, are intrinsic properties of (in the head) phenomenological content. But this means that the world as it is in itself, as they conceive of it, must contain only dark object, at worse, or maybe grey scales. But if can grant any objectivity at all to any science beyond a crude Cartesian physics of bare spatial extensions, we should grant that objects have some dispositional properties. In that case, they can have colors conceived (roughly) as (invariant) reflective profiles or spectra. And although the carving up of color space can be seen as arbitrary or conventional, the property objects have to fall under those categories are objective properties. (There would be more to say about a "sensible" subjectivism as David Wiggins or John Haugeland have conceived of them in order to challenge the false dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity). But I want to present my challenges to Michael by means of concrete examples, or hard cases, that representationalism struggle to account for while embodied/ecological psychology account for them easily and naturally.
Lastly, I could also clarify how direct realism can account for the "passive" aspect of perceptual acts that reveals them to be "acts of receptivity" and hence to have empirical content, in spite of them also being actively structured and hence as always involving "acts of spontaneity". I could invoke Kant, Sellars and McDowell, but I can also convey those ideas non-technically by means of examples. One core insight, here, is that such acts of spontaneity (e.g. bringing a percept under a specific color concept), unlike simply being presented with an essentially private and incommunicable quale, directly rubs against reality.
ASSISTANT:
Thank you for sharing Michael's latest response and your thoughtful reflections on how to further articulate and defend your position. I think you've identified some key areas where the indirect realist account faces challenges and where your embodied, enactive approach can provide a more satisfactory explanation of perceptual phenomenology.
Let's consider each of your proposed strategies in turn:
1. Pushing Michael to articulate the nature of phenomenological content:
This is a promising avenue, as it highlights a fundamental tension in the indirect realist view. If the brain is merely a passive recipient of raw sensations, it's unclear how these sensations could have any meaningful intentional content or veridicality conditions. Yet our perceptual experience clearly does have such content - we perceive objects, scenes, and affordances, not just raw shapes and colors.
On the other hand, if the indirect realist grants that the brain processes these raw sensations to yield meaningful percepts, they're faced with the challenge of explaining how brain activity alone could be sufficient for this. As you point out, the active, embodied engagement with the world seems essential for disclosing perceptual content.
Concrete examples that illustrate this tension could be very effective here. Perhaps cases of perceptual learning, where the same raw sensory inputs come to take on new meaning through embodied interaction with the environment (e.g., learning to read X-ray images or to hear new distinctions in a foreign language).
2. Challenging the subjectivity of secondary qualities:
The indirect realist's insistence on the pure subjectivity of color and other secondary qualities is indeed a weak point. As you note, even a minimal scientific realism should grant that objects have dispositional properties that ground their color appearances.
Pushing this line of argument could force the indirect realist into an untenable Cartesian dualism, where the "real" world is stripped of all qualitative richness. In contrast, your approach can accommodate the objectivity of color as a relational property grounded in an object's reflectance profile, while still acknowledging the role of the perceiver's embodiment in shaping color phenomenology.
Here too, concrete examples could be powerful. Cases of color constancy and color illusions might be particularly apt, as they highlight both the objective and subjective aspects of color perception.
3. Clarifying the compatibility of direct realism with the receptivity of perception:
This is an important point, as a common objection to direct realism is that it seems to make perception a purely active, constructive process, leaving no room for genuine receptivity to the world.
Articulating how your view can accommodate both spontaneity and receptivity is crucial for addressing this concern. The idea that conceptual spontaneity "rubs against reality" is a powerful one - our perceptual judgments are not merely free-floating constructions, but are continually constrained and guided by the world itself.
Examples that highlight this interplay of spontaneity and receptivity could be very effective. Cases where our initial perceptual judgments are corrected or refined through further interaction with the object (e.g., realizing that what looked like a snake is actually a coiled rope) could illustrate this nicely.
Overall, I think these strategies show a lot of promise for further bolstering your position and putting pressure on the indirect realist view. The key will be to ground your arguments in concrete, compelling examples that vividly illustrate the limitations of the representationalist paradigm and the explanatory power of your embodied, enactive approach.
I'm happy to continue exploring these ideas with you and to offer my perspective as you refine your arguments. Please let me know if there are any other aspects of the debate you'd like to discuss or if there are ways I can assist you in developing your examples and arguments.
USER:
Let us try something I haven't tried before. Can you put yourself in my shoes and craft a response in your own name addressed to Michael along the lines we have just settled on? We can then further discuss and adjust it if I have any disagreement with the argument that you will have made or the analysis of the examples that you will have chosen. I would then post your response to the forum, with full credit to you, and only supply the prompt that I have given you in an appendix hidden behind a spoiler. The goal isn't to give undue authority to an "AI generated" response. It would rather be for me to fully harness your ability express difficult ideas eloquently without myself taking undue credit for the language used. But I would also credit you for your creativity in your choice of examples and intelligence in bringing them to bear on the argument.
ASSISTANT:
Absolutely, I'd be happy to craft a response to Michael from my perspective, building on the strategies and ideas we've discussed. Here's what I might say:
---
Michael,
Thank you for your thoughtful response. [snip]
[/hide]
I don't think that it's science's job to either establish or disconfirm this thesis. I think the mind/body problem, the so-called hard-problem of consciousness and radical skepticism stem from distinctive philosophical outlooks regarding the disconnect between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" that Wilfrid Sellars identified as "idealizations of distinct conceptual frameworks in terms of which humans conceive of the world and their place in it." On my view, it's entirely a philosophical problem although neuroscience and psychology do present cases that are illustrative of (and sometimes affected by) the competing philosophical theses being discussed in this thread.
I have been using the word "consciousness" sparingly so far, and preferred such phrases as "perceptual experience", "visual experience" or "seeming [to someone] to be ...". Although those concepts are indeed relational, I view them as primarily expressing abilities (and their actualizations) of embodied animal akin to the ability to dig a burrow or the ability to climb a tree. When an animal climbs a tree, a "climbing of a tree" occurred. It is nonsensical to ask what the "climbing of the tree" is a property of or if it could have occurred without consciousness. The "climbing of the tree" is just a case of an animal having climbed a tree, and unless the animal was sleepwalking reflexively (if that even makes sense), it was done consciously.
Again, I avoid uses of the word "consciousness" because the concept is too often reified. Peter Hacker and Maxwell Bennett, the The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, point out that the use of this term with its distinctive philosophical connotation is fairly recent in modern history. They usefully distinguish two main ordinary uses (1) transitive (i.e. one is conscious of ...) and (2) intransitive (i.e. someone is unconscious). Those uses can quite unproblematically convey what it is that someone is generally perceptually aware of (even though their attention may temporarily be directed elsewhere) or convey that someone isn't sleeping or under general anaesthesia.
When I am claiming that perceptual abilities (or phenomenology) are involved in navigating the world, I am saying that (1) your ability to navigate the world is informed by them and (2) your navigating of the world informs their content. You indeed need not focus consciously on the content of a visible affordance to skilfully exploit it. But attending to it informs you about the ways in which you could potentially exploit it, in addition to helping your cerebellum assist you in completing the task "unconsciously" when your main attention is drawn elsewhere.
That's just reading too much into the grammar. If one person claims that we read words on a page, that the painting is paint, and that we feel a sensation and another person claims that we read about Hitler's rise to power, that the painting is of a landscape, and that we feel being stabbed, arguing that either one or the other set of claims is correct is a complete confusion. They are not mutually exclusive. They are different ways of talking about the same thing.
It's not even clear what the arrows are supposed to represent in your pictures. What physical process does the arrow represent in your picture of direct realism? What physical processes do the arrows represent in your picture of indirect realism? How would you draw a picture of the direct realist and the indirect realist dreaming or hallucinating?
The relevant philosophical difference between direct and indirect realism is that regarding the epistemological problem of perception; are distal objects and their properties constituents of experience and so does experience inform us about the mind-independent nature of the external world. To be a direct realist is to answer "yes" to these questions and to be an indirect realist is to answer "no" to these questions.
So what you're saying is that what indirect realists mean by "direct" isn't what non-naive direct realists mean by "direct", and so that it is possible that experience isn't "direct" as the indirect realist means by it but is "direct" as the non-naive direct realist means by it, and so that it is possible that both indirect and non-naive direct realism are correct because their positions are not mutually exclusive.
This is the very point I am making. Non-naive direct realism is indirect realism given that they both accept that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of experience, that experience does not inform us about the mind-independent nature of the external world, and so that there is an epistemological problem of perception.
Any "disagreement" between indirect realists and non-naive direct realists is regarding irrelevant issues about grammar (e.g. the meaning of the word "direct").
I'll refer once again to Howard Robinson's Semantic Direct Realism:
Phenomenological Direct Realism is incorrect and Phenomenological Indirect Realism is correct.
Semantic Direct Realism ("I feel myself being stabbed in the back") and Semantic Indirect Realism ("I feel the sensation of pain") are both correct, compatible with one another, and compatible with Phenomenological Indirect Realism.
I don't think that this is a weakness. I think that this is a fact entailed by scientific realism and the Standard Model. I think that the hard problem of consciousness entails something like property dualism.
Although, this latter point isn't strictly necessary. It is entirely possible that property monism is correct, that mental phenomena is reducible to physical phenomena like brain states, and that colour is a property of brain states and not a property of an apple's surface layer of atoms.
I think that this is clearer to understand if we move on from sight. The almost exclusive preoccupation with photoreception is a detriment to philosophical analysis. Let's consider other modes of experience: sounds, smells, tastes, touch. Is it a "weakness" to "strip" distal objects of these qualities?
I think that direct realists are deceived by the complexity of visual experience into adopting a naive and ultimately mistaken view of the world. I wonder what born-blind philosophers think about direct and indirect realism.
Do you think the roundness of the apple merely is a mental property of the human beings (or of their brains) who feel it to be round in their hand? This sounds like a form of Berkeleyan idealism since you end up stripping the objects in the world from all of their properties, including their shapes and sizes. That would be true also of the properties of human brains. Why would human brains have properties but apples would not have any? Does not your property dualism threaten to collapse into a form of monistic idealism?
Roundness as seen or roundness as felt? Because these are two different things. In fact, there have been studies of people born blind who are later given sight and are not able to recognize shapes by look even though they recognize them by feel. They have to learn the association between the two.
So, roundness as seen is a mental phenomenon and roundness as felt is a mental phenomenon. I don't know what "mind-independent" roundness would even be.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I wouldn't strip them of the properties that the Standard Model or the General Theory of Relativity (or M-Theory, etc.) say they have.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I don't think so. I can continue to be a scientific realist and accept the existence of the substances and properties that our best scientific models talk about. I just accept that these scientific models don't (or even can't) talk about consciousness. Worst case scenario I can be a Kantian and accept the existence of noumena.
Your view strikes me as being rather close to the structural realism of Ross and Ladyman. Alan Chalmers (not to be confused with David) compared their view to his own in the postscript of the fourth edition of his book What is this Thing Called Science. I recently had an extended discussion with Claude 3 (and with some friends of mine) about it.
I do also want to further reply to this:
I believe it's Paul Churchland who argues for eliminative materialism and that pain just is the firing of c-fibers? The same principle might hold for colours: colours just are the firing of certain neurons in the brain. Given that apples don't have neurons they don't have colours (much like they don't have c fibers and so don't have pain). This might "strip" apples of all "qualitative richness" but it doesn't entail anything like Cartesian dualism.
The naive view that projects colours out onto apples is as mistaken as projecting pain out onto fire. It misunderstands what colours actually are.
You're suspicious of scientific findings because you think they're tainted by false preconceptions. Are you proposing that science sort of start over with a more holistic outlook? I mean, we have a vast wealth of information about how organisms interact with their environments, and "environment" is not a fixed entity here. Living things transform their environments to suit their needs, such that we could dissolve the boundary between organism and world and see both as a whole. We could and do extend that into the concept of biosphere. The holism doesn't end once its starts.
Which makes me think of Davidson's meaning holism. Have you ever looked into that?
True and false are two different ways of speaking about the same thing. Predicates can be true or false, for instance. So dismissing grammar is a mistake, in my opinion, and I’m not sure why someone would want to eschew it.
The arrows in the pictures are meant represent the direction and indirection of the interaction. For indirect perception, something in the world causes a representation of an apple, which is viewed by something in the brain.
The question is loaded. If I answer “yes” I confirm there is a realm of experience in which phenomena occur, and the existence of an epistemic mediator called “experience”. Experience is treated like a place or thing, in which these other objects are parts. But “experience” as used cannot be instantiated, so I must say “no”.
Perhaps we can formulate it another way. Do we experience “distal objects”?
What does it mean for some A to view some B?
Sometimes you seem to be suggesting that A views B iff A has eyes that respond to light reflecting off B. But then the above is claiming that indirect realists believe that something in my brain has eyes that respond to light reflecting off some representation in my brain. Which is of course nonsense; no indirect realist believes this.
So this would seem to prove that what indirect realists mean by "A sees B" isn't what you mean by "A sees B", and so you're talking past each other.
Quoting NOS4A2
That question doesn't address the philosophical disagreement between direct and indirect realism. It's a red herring.
It's like asking "do we kill people?" Yes, we kill people; but we kill people using guns and knives and poison and so on.
So one person says "John didn't kill him; the poison killed him" and the other person says "John killed him (using poison)" and then they both argue that one or the other is wrong. It's a confused disagreement; it's just two people describing things in different but equally valid ways.
This is the confused disagreement that you and others are engaging in when you ask "do we feel distal objects or do we feel mental sensations?".
That’s what I don’t understand. In layman’s terms viewing, seeing, looking etc. involves the eyes. How does one see a representation?
It ought not to matter if the grammar is irrelevant. It’s basically the same question, just worded differently and without the ambiguity.
Do we experience the external world? The direct realist would say yes, the indirect realist would say no. After answering we can approach the philosophical disagreement. So what’s missing?
I can see things when I close my eyes, especially after eating magic mushrooms. The schizophrenic hears voices when suffering from psychosis. We all see and hear and feel things when we dream.
There's more to the meaning of "I experience X" than simply the body responding to external stimulation, else we couldn't make sense of something like "some people see a black and blue dress and others see a white and gold dress when looking at this photo" or "I'm looking at this 'duck-rabbit' picture but I can't see the duck".
Quoting NOS4A2
Do we directly experience the external world? The indirect realist accepts that we experience the world; he just claims that the experience isn't direct.
So what is the relevant philosophical meaning of "direct"? It's the one that addresses the epistemological problem of perception (does experience inform us about the nature of the external world) that gave rise to the dispute between direct and indirect realists in the first place. Direct realists claimed that there isn't an epistemological problem because perception is direct, therefore the meaning of "direct" must be such that if perception is direct then there isn't an epistemological problem.
Given that experience does not extend beyond the body and so given that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of experience, and given that experience is the only non-inferential source of information available to rational thought, there is an epistemological problem and so experience of distal objects is not direct. Furthermore, many of the qualities of experience – e.g. smells and tastes and colours – are not properties of distal objects (as modelled by our best scientific theories), further reinforcing the epistemological problem and so indirect realism.
I get all that, I just don’t understand how someone can see something without eyes. If sight involves eyes, and those eyes are missing or closed, then is he really seeing?
I don’t think so. In my view the nomenclature is strictly metaphorical, a sort of folk biology, the result of the disconnect between states of feeling and states of affairs.
Perhaps better verbs are in order, for instance “I dream of such and such” or “I am hallucinating”.
But the indirect realist does not experience the external world. As you say, experience doesn’t extend beyond the body, and the indirect realist does not believe the external world is a constituent of his experience. Well what is?
So in my mind the important philosophical question is: “what does the indirect realist believe he is experiencing directly”? The history of philosophy and the myriad terms and theories regarding the nature of this mediator attests to the importance of the problem.
Unless we're dealing with technical terms like those in maths and science, the notion that there is some singular "correct" meaning of a word or phrase is wrong. The ordinary uses of "the schizophrenic hears voices", "I see a white and gold dress", and "John feels a pain in his arm" are all perfectly appropriate.
Quoting NOS4A2
Dreams and hallucinations have different perceptual modes, exactly like waking veridical experience. Some schizophrenics see things; others hear things.
Quoting NOS4A2
Smells, tastes, colours, etc.: the things that are the constituents of hallucinations and dreams. The only relevant difference between a waking veridical experience and an hallucination or dream is that waking veridical experiences are a response to some appropriate external stimulus (as determined by what’s normal and useful for the species and individual in question).
I had been wanting to make a thread on precisely this line of argument. That the hard problem of consciousness appears only when you expect an isomorphism between the structures of experience posited by the manifest image of humanity and those posited by its scientific image. Do you have any citations for it? Or is it a personal belief of yours? I'm very sympathetic to it, by the by.
Are you saying that distal objects are unnecessary for the response?
This was the line of argument that my first philosophical mentor, Anders Weinstein, was advanding on the comp.ai.philosophy Usenet newsgroup in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s. He had studied physics at Harvard and was then a graduate philosophy student at Pittsburgh. He was articulating this line much more eloquently than I am. The main philosopher who he had credited with opening his eyes was John McDowell who also has become a favorite of mine.
One place that I can think of, where this line of argument is developed in significant details, is The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience by Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker.
Thank you very much.
I think psychology and cognitive neuroscience already are well underway along this holistic revolution. Robert A. Wilson chronicled some of the advances from recent decades in his book Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences - Cognition. This was published in 2004. Susan Hurley's The shared circuits model. How control, mirroring, and simulation can enable imitation and mind reading was published posthumously in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2008. In this paper, she referenced recent work in neuroscience that highlights the inextricable nature of perception and action in both the neural processing of sensory "input" and the generation of motor "output." This rather vindicates the pioneering theoretical and experimental work of J. J. Gibson in the psychology of perception (which began in the late 1940s and was done in parallel and completely independently of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical work in phenomenology).
Recently, I stumbled upon a paper titled "Alignment of brain embeddings and artificial contextual embeddings in natural language points to common geometric patterns" (published last month in Nature Communications) and I asked Claude 3 Opus to help me understand it. I was puzzled by the fact the the researchers had chosen to look into Broca's area rather than into Wernicke's area in order to find semantically significant neural correlates of linguistic representations. Claude 3 informed me that:
"Historically, the Wernicke-Geschwind model of language processing has been influential, positing a division of labor between Broca's area (in the IFG) for speech production and Wernicke's area (in the superior temporal gyrus) for speech comprehension. However, more recent research has challenged this strict dichotomy, suggesting a more distributed and integrated network for language processing in the brain.
The IFG, including Broca's area, has been implicated in various aspects of language processing beyond just speech production, such as syntactic processing, semantic integration, and phonological working memory. Some studies have also found evidence of semantic representations in the IFG, although the exact nature and specificity of these representations remain a topic of ongoing research."
I've had some discussions about it in the previous incarnation of The Philosophy Forum. Davidson's idea of radical interpretation is indeed a holistic and coherentist way of dealing with the seemingly intractable problem of grounding symbols that had been highlighted by Quine's thesis on the "indeterminacy of translation." But Davidson also had been influenced by Elisabeth Anscombe's theses on actions and intentions. Davidson thereby came to see linguistic interpretation as fundamentally intertwined with interpreting the beliefs, intentions, and broader rational patterns in an agent's behavior - what he called the "constitutive ideal of rationality." So while not a holism of beliefs and intentions initially, his meaning holism became part of a broader holistic approach to interpreting mental states and actions.
Unless indirect realists also hold the belief that we can directly perceive distal objects without needing to perceive an intermediary, then I don't believe that the two positions are "not mutually exclusive".
Quoting Michael
The fact that non-naive direct realism and indirect realism both reject naive realism does not make them the same. By analogy, that would make any two religions the same because they both reject some third religion.
Quoting Michael
If the disagreement is merely semantic, then you should be willing to acknowledge that we can directly perceive distal objects without needing to perceive an intermediary. If you are not so willing, then the issue is not merely semantic.
Quoting Michael
This does not address the issue of direct perception vs indirect perception via an intermediary.
I don't believe a non-naive direct realist would say something like "I feel myself seeing a distal object".
Also, if a non-naive direct realist were to say "I directly feel myself being stabbed in the back", would an indirect realist therefore say "I indirectly feel the sensation of pain"?
Yes. When the visual and auditory cortexes etc. activate without being triggered by some appropriate external stimulus then we are dreaming or hallucinating, but nonetheless seeing and hearing things because the visual and auditory cortexes are active.
The answer to all of your questions depend on the meaning of the word “direct” which you have already admitted mean different things to the indirect realist and the non-naive direct realist.
According to the indirect realist’s meaning, perception of distal objects is not direct[sub]1[/sub].
According to the non-naive direct realist’s meaning, perception of distal objects is direct[sub]2[/sub].
If you replace the word “direct” with each group’s underlying meaning then you’ll probably find that indirect and non-naive direct realists agree with each other, which is why they amount to the same philosophical position regarding the epistemological problem of perception.
Their ‘disagreement’ is over the irrelevant issue of the meaning of the word “direct”. Words just mean what we use them to mean. It’s not like there’s some ‘true’ meaning of the word “direct” that each group is either succeeding or failing to describe.
In my earlier post, I stated:
Quoting Luke
According to the non-naive direct realist's meaning of "direct", we cannot directly perceive distal objects as they are in themselves, but we can directly perceive distal objects, because they are not perceived via an intermediary.
According to the indirect realist's meaning of "direct", we cannot directly perceive distal objects as they are in themselves, because they are perceived via an intermediary.
I do not find that indirect and non-naive direct realists agree with each other or that they amount to the same philosophical position.
The dispute between direct(/naive) and indirect(/non-naive) realism concerns the epistemological problem of perception; does experience provide us with direct knowledge of the external world?
Direct(/naive) realists believe that experience does provide us with direct knowledge of the external world because they believe that we have direct knowledge of experience and that the external world is a constituent of experience.
Indirect(/non-naive) realists believe that experience does not provide us with direct knowledge of the external world because they believe that we have direct knowledge only of experience and that the external world is not a constituent of experience. Knowledge of the external world is inferential – i.e. indirect – with experience itself being the intermediary through which such inferences are possible.
So-called "non-naive direct realism" is indirect(/non-naive) realism. The addition of the (redefined) word "direct" in the name is an unnecessary confusion, likely arising from a confused misunderstanding of indirect(/non-naive) realism.
On this point I'd offer rather than an objection, just the reason I've had trouble understanding those who talk about embodied consciousness. It's that in order to explain what you mean by holism, you'll use atomic biological concepts. So it's a case where the revolution needs the previous regime to make sense of itself.
This is vaguely inspired by Fodor's criticisms of meaning holism. As appealing as Wittgenstein-inspired meaning holism is, it doesn't work out on the ground. It's not clear how a human could learn a language if meaning is holistic. Likewise, the student of biology must start with atomic concepts like the nervous system (which has two halves). Eventually it will be revealed that you can't separate the nervous system from the endocrine system. It's one entity. But by the time this news is broken to you, you have enough understanding of the mechanics to see what they're saying. And honestly, once this has happened a few times, you're not at all surprised that you can't separate the lungs from the heart. You can't separate either of those from the kidneys, and so on.
This isn't new. As I mentioned, the boundary between organism and world can easily fall away. Organisms and their environments function as a unit. If you want to kill a species, don't attack the organisms, attack their environment. It's one thing. And this leads to my second point: you said that philosophy is the right domain for talking about this issue, but philosophy won't help you when there are no non-arbitrary ways to divide up the universe. Your biases divide it up. All you can do is become somewhat aware of what your biases are. Robert Rosen hammers this home in Life Itself, in which he examines issues associated with the fact that life has no scientific definition. The bias at the heart of it is the concept of purpose. He doesn't advise dispensing with the concept of purpose because there would be no biology without it. What he does is advise a Kantian approach.
So I'll throw those two things at you just as food for thought: you can't dispense with science and atomic concepts, and what you're calling a philosophical problem is really a matter of biases. Maybe an anti-Descartes, anti-Chalmers bias? I know it's not that simple.
I look out into the distance and see a tree in the yard. There's a squirrel running around the tree, doing its thing. You're claiming that the squirrel and the tree are either not distal objects or - if they are - they are not(cannot be) constituents of experience.
Is that about right?
Yes. Experience does not extend beyond the body. Distal objects exist outside the body. Therefore, distal objects are not constituents of experience.
Experience and distal objects are in a very literal physical sense distinct entities with a very literal physical distance between the two.
Do you have an argument to support this assertion?
Quoting Michael
Non-naive realists believe that our perceptions can be of distal objects, whereas indirect realists believe that our perceptions are only of mental representations or sense data. Likewise, non-naive realists believe that our perceptual content can be about distal objects, whereas indirect realists believe that our perceptual content is only about mental representations or sense data. Therefore, non-naive realism is not the same view as indirect realism.
Experience does not extend beyond the body. Distal objects exist outside the body.
What does it mean to say that some experience is of some distal object? What is the word "of" doing here?
Perhaps you'll find that what non-naive direct realists mean by "of" isn't what indirect realists mean by "of" and that, given their different meanings, both claims are mutually agreeable.
It follows that no constituent of experience extends beyond the body.
Is that about right as well?
Yes.
Are we no longer discussing whether indirect realism and non-naive realism are the same view?
What it means to say that an experience is of some distal object is that the distal object has somehow interacted with one's senses to cause the experience.
Okay. I'm currently drinking coffee. Kona coffee to be precise. I'm also talking to you, thinking about what you're writing, and listening to the sounds coming from the other room where some friends of mine are playing cards. I can hear the sounds of shuffling cards. I can hear the sharp smack of card faces against the table as they're being played. I can also hear the clacking of card edges against the table as players contemplate their next move. I can also hear the conversation between the players as it progresses. It includes much more than the game being played.
We're all getting hungry. We've been discussing which bread to use to make French toast. We have different kinds of bread here. Some is frozen. Some not. There are also all sorts of things in my direct line of sight; from the vantage point I'm currently positioned at in relation to all the other distal objects I can see, smell, hear, and feel from here. There's also a faint scent leftover from a particular cleaning solution that we used yesterday while cleaning the house.
Are you saying that none of that counts as a distal object?
The indirect realist agrees that some distal object has interacted with one's sense to cause the experience.
I'm saying that distal objects are not constituents of experience, much like Hitler is not a constituent of some book about him. Each are separate entities.
Physical constituent then?
Okay, but you asked me:
Quoting Michael
If the indirect realist agrees that some distal object has interacted with one's sense to cause the experience, then I'm not sure what to make of this:
Quoting Michael
Yes, distal objects are not physical constituents of experience, which is why knowledge of experience is not direct knowledge of distal objects, hence the epistemological problem of perception.
Okay. So then are distal objects mental constituents of experience?
Why not?
The Sun is physically separate from the grass, but (light from) the Sun has physically interacted with the grass to cause it to grow. It seems pretty straightforward.
Likewise, the apple is physically separate from my sense organs, but (light from) the apple has physically interacted with my sense organs to cause a conscious experience. Also pretty straightforward.
Distal objects are physical objects. What would it mean for a physical object be a mental constituent?
None to me. I'm trying to make sense of the conclusion that the heater grate six feet to my left is not what I see.
I'm still dyslexic... it's actually to my right.
Funny that.
I'm not saying that it's not what you see. I'm saying that distal objects are not constituents of experience. The grammar of "I see X" has nothing do with the epistemological problem of perception, much like the grammar of "the book is about X" has nothing to do with any epistemological problem of a history textbook.
The relevant disagreement between direct and indirect realism concerns whether or not experience provides us with direct knowledge of the external world and its nature. Our scientific understanding is clear on this; it doesn't. Experience is a causal consequence of our body interacting with the environment but our knowledge of that environment is indirect; we make inferences based on our direct knowledge of our own experiences.
So, what I see is not a constituent of my experience or the heater grate is not a distal object?
Sorry, you've lost me. You were arguing that indirect realism was the same as non-naive direct realism. You seem to have abandoned that to ask me what it means to say that an experience is "of" some distal object. I answered that and you said that an indirect realist would agree. I'm no longer sure what you are arguing for or where you disagree.
I think what I'm offering here is relevant.
You said that indirect realism and non-naive direct realism are different positions because non-naive direct realism believes that "my experience is of distal objects" is true and indirect realism believes that "my experience is of distal objects" is false.
But you say that "my experience is of distal objects" means "distal objects are causally responsible for my experience".
Indirect realists believe that "distal objects are causally responsible for my experience" is true.
So given that both indirect realists and non-naive direct realists believe that "distal objects are causally responsible for my experience" is true, what is the difference between being a non-naive direct realist and being an indirect realist?
It seems to be that their only disagreement is over what the phrase "my experience is of distal objects" means. But that's not a philosophical disagreement; that's an irrelevant disagreement about grammar. And a confused one, because there is no 'true' meaning of the phrase "my experience is of distal objects". It just means whatever we use it to mean, and clearly non-naive direct realists and indirect realists are using it in different ways and so to mean different things.
Philosophically, non-naive direct realists and indirect realists are the same: they agree that distal objects are not constituents of experience, although play a causal role, and so that there is an epistemological problem of perception; our knowledge of the external world is indirect, inferred from experience.
How does one know that experience is the causal consequence of his body interacting with the environment if he only has direct knowledge of his own experience, and not of what causes it?
Inference.
How do we know that a Geiger counter measures ionizing radiation? How do we know that the Higgs boson exists? How do we know that Hitler is responsible for the Holocaust?
Not all knowledge is direct knowledge.
We infer on the basis of evidence and reasoning, but since we only have direct knowledge of experience, we cannot be aware of the evidence of anything outside of it.
Experience is the evidence. From it we infer the cause. Much like from the screen readings of a Geiger counter we infer the nearby existence of radiation and from reading history textbooks we infer the past existence of a man named Adolf Hitler.
The how do you infer that experience is caused by the environment, for example?
It's considered the most parsimonious explanation for the existence and regularity and predictability of experience.
Although subjective idealists disagree.
But given that direct and indirect realists are both realists we can dispense with considering idealism in this discussion.
I don’t think so because Berkley’s objection to indirect realism still stands, and the direct realist can raise it without himself believing in idealism.
Given that any evidence of the external world lies beyond the veil of perception, or experience, is the realism regarding the external world a leap of faith?
In a sense, hence why indirect realists claim that there is an epistemological problem of perception, entailing the viability of scepticism.
But the term "faith" is a bit strong. It's no more "faith" than our belief in something like the Big Bang or the Higgs boson is "faith". We have good reasons to believe in them given that they seem to best explain the evidence available to us. The indirect realist claims that we have good reasons to believe in the existence of an external world as it seems to best explain the existence and regularity and predictability of experience.
I’m not sure there is any good reason for the indirect realist to believe in any of them, since any evidence regarding anything about the external world lies beyond his knowledge. He doesn’t know what he is experiencing indirectly. Hell, he can’t even know that his perception or knowledge is indirect.
His experience is the evidence. He has direct knowledge of his experiences. What best explains the existence of such experiences and their regularity and predictability? Being embodied within a greater external world, with his experiences being a causal consequence of his interaction with that greater external world.
This is the reasoning that leads one to believe in realism (and so for some direct realism) over idealism.
In any case, it’s unfalsifiable and cannot be proven, except when it comes to the science of perception.
I might agree; realism, idealism, atheism, pantheism, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are all unfalsifiable and cannot be proven.
Quoting NOS4A2
We can look at what follows if we are scientific realists and accept the literal truth of something like the Standard Model and the science of perception. If true, indirect realism follows.
Of course, you can be a scientific instrumentalist and reject the literal truth of the Standard Model and the science of perception if you wish to maintain direct realism, although there may be some conflict in rejecting the literal truth of something that you claim to have direct knowledge of.
I've already answered this:
Quoting Luke
Do you deny that indirect realists believe that our perceptions are only of mental representations or sense data? Or do you refuse to accept that non-naive direct realists believe that our perceptions can be of distal objects?
Do you deny that indirect realists believe that our perceptual content is only about mental representations or sense data? Or do you refuse to accept that non-naive direct realists believe that our perceptual content can be about distal objects?
Quoting Michael
Does it? You have not at all addressed my comment regarding perceptual content and you continue to avoid discussing intermediaries.
What does "our perceptions are of distal objects" mean?
Given that indirect realists believe that "our perceptions are of distal objects" is false but believe that "our perceptions are caused by distal objects" is true, it must be that "our perceptions are of distal objects" doesn't mean "our perceptions are caused by distal objects".
If what indirect realists mean by "our perceptions are of distal objects" isn't what non-naive direct realists mean by "our perceptions are of distal objects" then you are equivocating.
Assume that by "our perceptions are of distal objects" non-naive direct realists mean "our perceptions are ABC".
Assume that by "our perceptions are of distal objects" indirect realists mean "our perceptions are XYZ".
Non-naive direct realists believe that "our perceptions are ABC" is true. Indirect realists believe that "our perceptions are XYZ" is false.
Where is the disagreement?
And if non-naive direct realists agree with indirect realists that "our perceptions are XYZ" is false and if indirect realists agree with non-naive direct realists that "our perceptions are ABC" is true, then non-naive direct realism and indirect realism are the same.
What do you mean by "our perceptions are of distal objects" when you say it is false?
Quoting Michael
How does that follow?
Quoting Michael
It is not a dispute over different meanings of the phrase "of distal objects", is it? Also, indirect realists do not believe that our perceptions are of distal objects; they believe that our perceptions are of mental representations or sense data.
Quoting Michael
Even if there were no substantive dispute over whether our perceptions are of distal objects, you have still not addressed the other difference that I noted between the two parties: their different beliefs regarding perceptual content.
I don't say that it's false. I have been at pains in this discussion (and others over the past few years) to explain that trying to address the epistemological problem of perception in these terms is a conceptual confusion. It's an irrelevant argument about grammar.
"I experience X" doesn't just mean one thing. I can say that I feel pain, I can say that I feel my hand burning, or I can say that I feel the fire. I can say that the schizophrenic hears voices. I can say that some people see a white and gold dress and others see a black and blue dress when looking at the same photo.
These are all perfectly appropriate phrases in the English language, none of which address the philosophical issue that gave rise to the dispute between direct and indirect realism (as explained here).
Quoting Luke
If A is true and B is false then A and B do not mean the same thing.
If indirect realists believe that "our perceptions are of distal objects" is false but believe that "our perceptions are caused by distal objects" is true then when they say "our perceptions are not of distal objects" they are not saying "our perceptions are not caused by distal objects."
Quoting Luke
The dispute between naive realists and indirect realists is not a semantic dispute. Their dispute is a legitimate philosophical dispute over the epistemological problem of perception.
The dispute between non-naive direct realists and indirect realists is an irrelevant semantic dispute. They agree on the philosophical issue regarding the epistemological problem of perception.
Quoting Luke
What does it mean to say that something is the content of perception? Perhaps you'll find that what indirect realists mean by "X is the content of perception" isn't what non-naive direct realists mean by "X is the content of perception", and so once again it's an irrelevant dispute about language.
I'll refer you again to Howard Robinson's Semantic Direct Realism.
I like the examples you (and Claude) have been giving, but I don't seem to draw the same conclusion.
I don't think indirect realism presupposes or requires that phenomenal experience is somehow a passive reflection of sensory inputs. Rather the opposite, a passive brain reflecting its environment seems to be a direct realist conception. These examples seem to emphasize the active role the brain plays in constructing the sensory panoply we experience, which is perfectly in line with indirect realism.
For instance, in the very striking cube illusion you presented, we only experience the square faces as brown and orange because the brain is constructing an experience that reflects its prediction about the physical state of the cube: that the faces must in fact have different surface properties, in spite of the same wavelengths hitting the retina at the two corresponding retinal regions.
That such a thing could happen at all is only possible if our sensory experience is an interpretive construction. And if it our experience of the world is via an interpretive construction, our experience of the world is surely not "direct".
And none of these examples demonstrate that phenomenological experience does not supervene on brain states. Rather, we can be sure that the brain states corresponding to the two perceived colors are different from that induced by the same scene without the shadow. That is because brain states don't dumbly correspond to raw sensory inputs but are reflections of the brain's active, predictive powers.
You said:
Quoting Michael
You said that indirect realists believe it is false. Since you are an indirect realist, then you believe it is false. So, what meaning do you give to this false statement?
Quoting Michael
I agree that none of this addresses the relevant philosophical issue. Direct realists believe that we perceive external objects whereas indirect realists believe that we perceive internal objects. You continue to avoid this difference between the two views by claiming that they are the same view.
Quoting Michael
I acknowledge that it was a mistake to give a causal explanation to account for the "of" in "our perceptions are of distal objects". My causal explanation was an attempt to account for why we might say that "our perceptions are of distal objects". This was not intended as a statement of synonymy.
To correct my earlier statement, what direct realists mean by "of" in "our perceptions are of distal objects" is the same as what we mean by "this photograph is of Big Ben" or "this painting is of Mr Smith". Just as photographs or paintings represent their subjects, perceptions represents distal objects. However, this is not to say that we have perceptions of perceptions. Similarly, we would not say that a photograph of Big Ben is a photograph of a photograph.
Quoting Michael
This is mere assertion.
Quoting Michael
Perceptual content includes the sensory information of the perception and the quality of the subjective experience. Direct realists say that the perceptual content represents external objects. Indirect realists say that the perceptual content represents internal objects.
Quoting Michael
I do not find that they mean the same thing. Direct realists say that we perceive external objects. Indirect realists say that we perceive internal objects.
Quoting Michael
Saying that distal objects are not constituents of perception or experience is potentially semantically ambiguous, so it cannot unambiguously be framed as a purely epistemological problem, as though there could be a determinate fact of the matter.
If we know it, to "know" must accommodate a degree of uncertainty. If it does not, we don't know it.
Quoting Luke
No, indirect realism does not presuppose a correct way of seeing the world. There is no such thing as correctly perceiving the world as it is in itself. Rather, the best we can do is derive true propositional content about the state of the world. via perception.
Indirect realism opposes direct realism based on the fundamental meditative role brain-produced phenomenal experience plays in our contact with the world. Illusion, hallucinations, and error are consequences of, and are only possible because of, this mediation.
Quoting Luke
That contact with the world is mediated by an appearance that is itself not the world can only mean that contact with the world is indirect. The fact that direct contact with the world is not possible does not constitute an argument against this.
You seem want to argue that because direct, immediate experiential contact with the world is impossible and even incoherent, therefore, there is direct, immediate experiential contact with the world. No, if unmediated experience of the world is impossible, experience of the world is therefore mediated.
Again, if we do not perceive/experience/have awarenesw of internal objects, what are we perceiving/experiencing/aware of when we hallucinate? External objects?
One question: why did the brain adjust for color constancy in the cube picture but not the snow pictures?
That's an excellent question that demonstrates that you have been paying attention!
My guess is that, in both cases, the internal cues provided in the picture regarding the spectrum of the ambient light conflict with the external cues regarding the background illumination in the room you occupy while looking at the picture. In the cube case, the image has been designed to maximise the illusion by providing an abundance of internal cues (such as the color of the "white" background and shadows indicating what face of the cube falls under them) that make them predominant. When looking at pictures of shadows on the snow, the internal cues regarding the spectral qualities of the ambient light may be less obvious and so the external cues predominate. All I know for sure is that in real life conditions, our visual system isn't easily fooled.
Quoting Luke
The representational theory of perception that claims that perceptual content is some mental phenomenon (e.g. sense data or qualia) that represents the external world is indirect realism, not direct realism.
Direct realism, in being direct realism, rejects the claim that perception involves anything like mental representations (which would count as an intermediary).
If by "the experience is of distal objects" you only mean something like "the painting is of Big Ben" then indirect realists can agree. The relevant philosophical issue is that we only have direct knowledge of the experience/painting and only indirect knowledge of distal objects/Big Ben, hence the epistemological problem of perception.
I think the idea that one must start with "atomic" concepts isn't wholly inconsistent with the sort of holism Wittgenstein advocated. My former philosophy teacher, Michel Seymour, proposed molecularism in the philosophy of language as an alternative to both atomism and holism. I may not be getting his idea completely right, because I haven't read what he wrote about it, but we can acknowledge that understanding concepts necessitates mastering some part of their conceptual neighborhood without there being a requirement that we master a whole conceptual scheme all at once. Children learn to recognise that an apple is red before they learn that something can look red without being red. Mastering the grammar of "looks" enriches their conceptual understanding of "red". As a child gets acculturated, the growing number of inferential constitutive relationships between neighboring concepts increases their intellectual grasp on their individual meanings (and so is it with students of any science of nature). "Light dawns gradually over the whole." (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §141). It doesn't make sense to say of anyone that they understand what the physical concept of an electron signifies independently of their ability to make correct (material) inferences from the claim that something is an electron.
The result from this process isn't just to disclose constitutive conceptual connections between the terms that refer to different objects and properties, but also to disclose finer-grained ways in which they are individuated. Hence, getting back to our topic, the involvement of the body and of the world in the process of perception doesn't erase the boundary between the human subject and the objects that they perceive. It rather empowers them to better understand their objective affordances.
This is the distinction between non-naive realism and indirect realism. Indirect realists holds that we perceive perceptions or mental representations, whereas non-naive realists holds that perceptions are mental representations and that they represent external objects. Returning to the photograph analogy, a non-naive realist would say that the photograph (perception) is a representation of a real object, whereas (I imagine) an indirect realist would say that the photograph (perception) is a representation of a representation. A naive realist, on the other hand, might say that there is no representation involved at all. This demonstrates how non-naive realism differs from both naive realism and indirect realism, refuting your claim that non-naive realism is the same view as indirect realism.
I would say that illusions and hallucinations are phenomenal experiences, instead of saying that they are the [i]consequences of phenomenal experiences. It is worth noting that illusions require the perception of an external object, whereas hallucinations are phenomenal experiences in which the external object/stimulus is absent, by definition.
[/i]Quoting hypericin
What do you mean by "direct contact with the world"?
You say that our contact with the world is indirect because it "is mediated by an appearance that is itself not the world". Firstly, the mediation is the perception/representation that provides the appearance of the world to us. Secondly, I don't expect a perception of the world to be the world, just as I don't expect a photograph of a lion to be a lion. You are implying that a mental representation must become the external object that it represents (i.e. a representation must become the represented) in order for us to have direct contact with the world. This makes no sense to me.
Quoting hypericin
The world as it is in itself is the unperceived world. It is incoherent to perceive the unperceived world for then it would no longer be unperceived. The way our perceptions represent the world to us may not reflect the true nature of the unperceived world, but they nevertheless represent the world to us. There is no such thing as perceiving the unperceived world, but this needn't imply that we can only perceive perceptions. We can still perceive the perceived world; the world as it is represented by our perceptions.
Or, as I asked ChatGPT to re-word the above for clarity:
The world in its unperceived state exists independently of our perception. It's logically impossible to perceive this unperceived world, as doing so would contradict its unperceived nature. While our perceptions may not perfectly mirror the true essence of the unperceived world, they still offer us a representation of it. We cannot directly perceive the unperceived world, but this doesn't mean we're confined to perceiving only our perceptions. Instead, we perceive the perceived world— the world as it's presented to us through our perceptions.
Quoting hypericin
The lack of external stimulus is what marks it as a hallucination. Hallucinations are distortions of perception, which can be contrasted with undistorted perceptions that involve an external stimulus.
Both indirect and non-naive direct realists believe that colours are a mental representation of some distal object's surface properties. Both indirect and non-naive direct realists believe that we see colours. Therefore, both indirect and non-naive direct realists believe that we see mental representations.
Experiencing a mental representation and experiencing a distal object are not mutually exclusive. "I feel pain" and "I feel my skin burning" are both true. The grammar of "I experience X" is not restricted to a single meaning.
The relevant philosophical issue is that distal objects are not constituents of experience and so that our experience only provides us with indirect knowledge of distal objects. Everything else is a red herring.
Therefore, Big Ben is not a constituent of a photograph of Big Ben? Surely Big Ben is a component of the photograph. It's the subject of the photograph.
Correct. The photograph is in my drawer. Big Ben is not in my drawer. The only things that constitute the photo are its physical materials.
What does it mean for something to be the subject of the photograph? What does it mean for something to be the subject of a book? It's entirely conceptual. The conceptual connection between a photograph or book and their subject does not allow for direct knowledge of their subject. Photographs and books only provide us with indirect knowledge of their subject.
How is the dispute between indirect realists and naive realists any different? As you describe it:
Quoting Michael
Naive realists and non-naive realists both claim that we see distal objects. Indirect realists say instead that we see representations.
Which is an irrelevant argument about grammar. From my previous post:
Is the dispute between naive realists and indirect realists also "an irrelevant argument about grammar"? Non-naive realists and indirect realists have the same dispute.
I don't see how this example is related to distal objects.
No. Naive realists believe that distal objects are constituents of experience and so that experience provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects. That's a substantive philosophical dispute.
Quoting Luke
In this case I'm being imprecise with the term "distal object" to mean anything outside the experience, and so including body parts, such that my skin is a distal object.
I also believe that distal objects are constituents of experience in the sense that you could not have an experience of a distal object without them. I think that naive and non-naive direct realists would agree on this point. I don't see why it must be restricted only to physical constituents, especially since an experience does not have physical constituents.
Why wouldn't you use the same argument against naive realists?
What are hallucinations if not an experience of a distal object without a distal object?
Yes, but not all experiences of distal objects are hallucinations. Perhaps I should have said "you could not have a non-hallucinatory experience of a distal object without them".
That's not the sense that is meant by the naive realist and rejected by the indirect realist. The sense that is meant by the naive realist and rejected by the indirect realist is the sense that would entail naive realism.
Quoting Luke
Because this is what naive realism claims:
"Distal objects are constituents of experience such that experience provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects, and so there is no epistemological problem of perception."
This claim has nothing to do with the grammar of "I see X".
Your insistence of continually addressing the grammar of "I see X" is the very conceptual confusion that I am trying to avoid. It's a red herring.
1. Naive realism: a) naive realism is true and b) I experience distal objects
2. Indirect realism: a) naive realism is false and b) I experience mental phenomena
3. Non-naive direct realism: a) naive realism is false and b) I experience distal objects
Each a) is the relevant philosophical issue that concerns the epistemological problem of perception.
Each b) is an irrelevant semantic issue. They are not mutually exclusive given that "I experience X" doesn't just mean one thing.
Naive realism is false and I experience both distal objects (e.g. apples) and mental phenomena (e.g. colours and pain).
Therefore indirect realism and non-naive direct realism are both true and amount to the same philosophical position; the rejection of naive realism.
The neural processing performed by the brain on raw sensory inputs like retinal images plays an important causal role in enabling human perception of invariant features in the objects we observe. However, our resulting phenomenology - how things appear to us - consists of more than just this unprocessed "sensory" data. The raw nerve signals, retinal images, and patterns of neural activation across sensory cortices are not directly accessible to our awareness.
Rather, what we are immediately conscious of is the already "processed" phenomenological content. So an indirect realist account should identify this phenomenological content as the alleged "sense data" that mediates our access to the world, not the antecedent neural processing itself. @Luke also aptly pointed this out. Saying that we (directly) perceive the world as flat and then (indirectly) infer its 3D layout misrepresents the actual phenomenology of spatial perception. This was the first part of my argument against indirect realism.
The second part of my argument is that the sort of competence that we acquire to perceive those invariants aren't competences that our brains have (although our brains enable us to acquire them) but rather competences that are inextricably linked to our abilities to move around and manipulate objects in the world. Learning to perceive and learning to act are inseparable activities since they normally are realized jointly rather like a mathematician learns the meanings of mathematical theorems by learning how to prove them or make mathematical demonstrations on the basis of them.
In the act of reaching out for an apple, grasping it and bringing it closer to your face, the success of this action is the vindication of the truth of the perception. Worries about the resemblance between the seen/manipulated/eaten apple and the world as it is in itself arise on the backdrop of dualistic philosophies rather than being the implications of neuroscientific results.
The starting point of taking phenomenal experience itself as the problematic "veil" separating us from direct access to reality is misguided. The phenomenological content is already an achievement of our skilled engagement with the world as embodied agents, not a mere representation constructed by the brain.
So I have to agree with you, because I agree that tautologies are valid
If someone claims that the direct object of perceptual knowledge is the already-processed phenomenological content, and that through this we have indirect knowledge of the external stimulus or distal cause, would you call them a direct realist or an indirect realist?
I'd call them an indirect realist.
I am saying that if you are an indirect realist, then what stands between you and the distal cause of your perceptions should be identified with the already-processed phenomenological content. This is because, on the indirect realist view, your immediate perceptions cannot be the invisible raw sensory inputs or neural processing itself. Rather, what you are directly aware of is the consciously accessible phenomenology resulting from that processing.
In contrast, a direct realist posits no such intermediate representations at all. For the direct realist, the act of representing the world is a capacity that the human subject exercises in directly perceiving distal objects. On this view, phenomenology is concerned with describing and analyzing the appearances of those objects themselves, not the appearances of some internal "representations" of them (which would make them, strangely enough, appearances of appearances).
The indirect realist doesn’t claim that there are “appearances of appearances”.
The indirect realist claims that a distal object's appearance is the intermediate representation.
We have direct knowledge of a distal object's appearance and through that indirect knowledge of a distal object.
You're describing indirect realism but calling it direct realism for some reason.
The direct realist rejects any distinction between a distal object's appearance and the distal object itself, entailing such things as the naive realist theory of colour.
Atomism is indispensable. As long as the advocate of embodied consciousness understands that, all is well. It's just a shift in perspective of the sort that already exists in biology, so really, it just comes down to a matter of emphasis.
When in fact it is this:
How do you conceptualise a distal object in the second construal of indirect realism? It looks to me like there's an intermediary perceptual object in a representation relationship with distal objects in only the upper indirect realist's portrayal. In the lower indirect realist's account there doesn't seem to be a distal object of a perceptual act, and thus no relation with one, and thus no representation relationship with one.
Depends on the indirect realist.
Some may believe that distal objects resemble our mental image, and so would replace the question mark with the Earth as shown in the person’s head.
Some may believe that distal objects resemble our mental image only with respect to so-called "primary" qualities, and so would replace the question mark with an uncoloured version of the Earth as shown in the person’s head.
Some may believe that distal objects do not resemble our mental image at all. A scientific realist would replace the question mark with the wave-particles of the Standard Model. A Kantian wouldn’t replace the question mark at all, simply using it to signify unknowable noumena.
What defines them as being indirect realists is in believing that we have direct knowledge only of a mental image. Direct realists believe that we have direct knowledge of the distal object because nothing like a mental image exists (the bottom drawing of direct realism).
Another possibility was outlined by Pierre-Normand below.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
The distinction between "no such intermediate representation" and "nothing like a mental representation exists". The other realist alternative is that the perceptual relationship itself is a representation relationship. IE, there is no intermediate representation between distal object (or cause) of a perceptual object. But that would not be because there is no representation - or an appearance even - , but because there is no intermediate object or relation between the distal object/cause and the perceiver.
In terms of the diagram, you'd label the lines in the bottom left "representation".
For illustrative purposes anyway, an enactivist would hate the diagrams focussing on vision, or labelling those arrows as representation relationships in the first place!
I don’t see how his account differs from indirect realism. Indirect realists simply claim that the thing we have direct knowledge of in perception is some sort of mental phenomenon, not some distal object, and so our knowledge of distal objects is indirect, entailing the epistemological problem of perception.
We can argue over what sort of mental phenomenon is the direct source of knowledge - sense data or qualia or representation or appearance or processed phenomenological content or other - but it all amounts to indirect realism in the end.
But a person can experience the world without engaging it in any way. If you mean the character of experience is shaped by interaction, I would agree to some extent. Some of it is just innate, though.
Malfunctioning biological machinery.
Then, your first part was an argument against a straw man, since an indirect realist can (and should, and does, imo) agree that phenomenological content is only accessible following all neural processing.
I thought this was curious, so I looked it up. It is mentioned in this article:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/21/133411/rodney-brooks/
The inspiration:
This is the inventor of the Roomba, which to me tells you everything you need to know. Which is not to put him down the slightest bit. He had the insight everyone else missed: Everyone trying to build robots implicitly had the idea of modelling higher animals. But why do this? This is not the path evolution took. Why not instead draw inspiration from vastly simpler creatures, who do not model at all?
This is what I proposed as the meaning of "direct perception", to contrast with indirect perception:
Quoting hypericin
Human brains, on the other hand, fine tuned by millions of years of evolution and equipped with unmatched computational power, are modelers par excellence. We are not organized like insects, who respond directly to the environment. We build models, and then respond to the models. And phenomenal experience is exactly those models. It is nothing less than a virtual world, and the basis for all of our decisions and actions.
In their manner of responding intelligently to their environment human brains powerfully leverage the same principle of indirection we see everywhere in engineering.
This is known as Fundamental theorem of software engineering:
Nice, I wish this could be stickied at the top of every page of this thread. You made it?
I'm not saying that they are the consequences of phenomenal experience. I'm saying that mediation makes illusions and hallucinations possible, mediation is the condition for the existence of perceptual errors. This is most clear to me with hallucination: without the meditating layer of phenomenal experience, we simply couldn't hallucinate.
I find this notion very problematic. When we learn anything, we are training our brains to acquire new competences. Not any other organ. Even though, to learn necessarily involves interaction with the environment.
When we learn to play the piano it is not our fingers that are becoming more clever, but our brains. When we learn to see, our brain, not our eyes, gains the competence to process sensory inputs in such a way that the phenomenological experience of the world we are familiar with is possible. Damage to the occipital lobe of the brain, not to other parts of the body, renders us blindsighted.
Remember that you responded to an argument that I (and Claude 3) had crafted in response to @Michael. He may have refined his position since we began this discussion but he had long taken the stance that what I was focussing on as the content of perceptual experience wasn't how things really look but rather was inferred from raw appearances that, according to him, corresponded more closely to the stimulation of the sense organs. Hence, when I was talking about a party balloon (or house) appearing to get closer, and not bigger, as we walk towards it, he was insisting that the "appearance" (conceived as the sustained solid angle in the visual field) of the object grows bigger. This may be true only when we shift our attention away from the perceived object to, say, how big a portion of the background scenery is being occluded by it (which may indeed be a useful thing to do when we intend to produce a perspectival drawing.)
I am saying that appearances are mental phenomena, often caused by the stimulation of some sense organ (dreams and hallucinations are the notable exceptions), and that given causal determinism, the stimulation of a different kind of sense organ will cause a different kind of mental phenomenon/appearance.
The naïve view that projects these appearances onto some distal object (e.g. the naïve realist theory of colour), such that they have a "real look" is a confusion, much like any claim that distal objects have a "real feel" would be a confusion. There just is how things look to me and how things feel to you given our individual physiology.
It seems that many accept this at least in the case of smell and taste but treat sight as special, perhaps because visual phenomena are more complex than other mental phenomena and because depth is a quality in visual phenomena, creating the illusion of conscious experience extending beyond the body. But there's no reason to believe that photoreception is special, hence why I question the distinction between so-called "primary" qualities like visual geometry and so-called "secondary" qualities like smells and tastes (and colours).
Although even if I were to grant that some aspect of mental phenomena resembles some aspect of distal objects, it is nonetheless the case that it is only mental phenomena of which we have direct knowledge in perception, with any knowledge of distal objects being inferential, i.e. indirect, entailing the epistemological problem of perception and the viability of scepticism.
The relevant issue is whether we have direct perceptions of real objects, not direct knowledge of perceptions.
I am going to respond to this separately here, and respond to your comments about projecting appearances on distal objects (and the naïve theory of colours) in a separate post.
I agree that appearances are mental phenomena, but a direct realist can conceive of those phenomena as actualisations of abilities to perceive features of the world rather than as proximal representations that stand in between the observer and the world (or as causal intermediaries.)
Consider a soccer player who scores a goal. Their brain and body play an essential causal role in this activity but the act of scoring the goal, which is the actualization of an agentive capacity that the soccer player has, doesn't take place within the boundaries of their body, let alone within their brain. Rather, this action takes place on the soccer field. The terrain, the soccer ball and the goal posts all play a role in the actualisation of this ability.
Furthemore, the action isn't caused by an instantaneous neural output originating from the motor cortex of the player but is rather a protracted event that may involve outplaying a player from the opposite team (as well as the goalie) and acquiring a direct line of shot.
Lastly, this protracted episode that constitutes the action of scoring a soccer goal includes as constituent parts of it several perceptual acts. Reciprocally, most of those perceptual acts aren't standalone and instantaneous episodes consisting in the player acquiring photograph-like pictures of the soccer field, but rather involve movements and actions that enables them to better grasp (and create) affordances for outplaying the other players and to accurately estimate the location of the goal in egocentric space.
A salient feature of the phenomenology of the player is that, at some point, an affordance for scoring a goal has been honed into and the decisive kick can be delivered. But what makes this perceptual content what it is isn't just any intrinsic feature of the layout of the visual field at that moment but rather what it represents within the structured and protracted episode that culminated in this moment. The complex system that "computationally" generated the (processed) perceptual act, and gave it its rich phenomenological content, includes the brain and the body of the soccer player, but also the terrain, the ball, the goal and the other players.
I don't think a realist about the colors of objects would say material objects have "real looks." Realists about colors acknowledge that colored objects look different to people with varying visual systems, such as those who are color-blind or tetrachromats, as well as to different animal species. Furthermore, even among people with similar discriminative color abilities, cultural and individual factors can influence how color space is carved up and conceptualized.
Anyone, whether a direct or indirect realist, must grapple with the phenomenon of color constancy. As illumination conditions change, objects generally seem to remain the same colors, even though the spectral composition of the light they reflect can vary drastically. Likewise, when ambient light becomes brighter or dimmer, the perceived brightness and saturation of objects remain relatively stable. Our visual systems have evolved to track the spectral reflectance properties of object surfaces.
It is therefore open for a direct realist (who is also a realist about colors) to say that the colors of objects are dispositional properties, just like the solubility of a sugar cube. A sugar cube that is kept dry doesn't dissolve, but it still has the dispositional property of being soluble. Similarly, when you turn off the lights (or when no one is looking), an apple remains red; it doesn't become black.
For an apple to be red means that it has the dispositional property to visually appear red under normal lighting conditions to a standard perceiver. This dispositional property is explained jointly by the constancy of the apple's spectral reflectance function and the discriminative abilities of the human visual system. Likewise, the solubility of a sugar cube in water is explained jointly by the properties of sugar molecules and those of water. We wouldn't say it's a naive error to ascribe solubility to a sugar cube just because it's only soluble in some liquids and not others.
The phenomenon of color constancy points to a shared, objective foundation for color concepts, even if individual and cultural factors can influence how color experiences are categorized and interpreted. By grounding color in the dispositional properties of objects, tied to their spectral reflectance profiles, we can acknowledge the relational nature of color while still maintaining a form of color realism. This view avoids the pitfalls of naive realism, while still providing a basis for intersubjective agreement about the colors of things.
Glad you agree. In case you missed it, this "tautology" was in response to @Michael who holds the view that:
Quoting Michael
Distal objects being part of the casual history of an experience doesn't make them constituents of the experience, any more than shovels are constituents of holes.
The epistemological problem of perception concerns whether or not perception provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects.
One group claimed that it does, because perception is "direct". These people were called direct realists.
One group claimed that it doesn't, because perception is "indirect". These people were called indirect realists.
Therefore the meaning of "direct perception" is such that if perception is direct then perception provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects. Therefore if perception does not provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects then perception is not direct.
Given our scientific understanding of the world and perception it is clear that perception does not provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects. Therefore perception is not direct.
This appears to be equivocation. We use the term "colour" to refer to both the disposition to reflect a certain wavelength of light and to the mental phenomenon that is caused by our eyes reacting to a particular wavelength of light, but these are two different things.
This is evidenced by the fact that we can make sense of different people seeing a different coloured dress when looking at this photo:
When I say that I see a white and gold dress and you say that you see a black and blue dress, the words "white", "gold", "black", and "blue" are not referring to some spectral reflectance property (which is the same for the both of us) but to some property of our mental phenomena (which is different for the both of us). The same principle holds for the colours we see when we dream and hallucinate.
Indirect realism accepts the existence of these mental colours and claims that they are the "intermediary" or "representation" of which we have direct knowledge and through which we have indirect knowledge of a distal object's spectral reflectance properties.
Whereas direct realism would entail the naive realist theory of colour.
As I see it, your account simply redefines the meaning of "direct perception", which I think is best understood as explained here and here.
See also Semantic Direct Realism where Robinson explains that the same kind of redefinition occurs for other so-called "direct" realisms like intentionalism.
(As usual, you'll get the gist of my clumsily expressed ideas merely by reading Claude's much more streamlined reformulations of them.)
[hide="Objective knowledge about colors"]
USER:
I'd now like to discuss an issue with you. Consider the definition expressed in the sentence: "For an apple to be red means that it has the dispositional property to visually appear red under normal lighting conditions to a standard perceiver." Might not a subjectivist like Michael complain that this is consistent with an indirect realist account that views redness as the (internal) subjective states that "red" apples are indirectly or inferentially believed to cause (but not seen to have)? Or else, Michael might also complain that the proposed definition/analysis is circular and amounts to saying that what makes red apples red is that they look red. Although, to be sure, our "in normal conditions" clause does some important work. I did borrow some ideas from Gareth Evans and David Wiggins to deal with this issue but I'd like to hear your thoughts first.
ASSISTANT (Claude 3 Opus):
You raise an important point about the potential circularity or subjectivist interpretation of the definition of redness in terms of an object's disposition to appear red under normal conditions to a standard perceiver. Let's unpack this issue and consider how we might address it.
On the circularity worry, the key is to emphasize that the definition is not merely saying that what makes red apples red is that they look red. Rather, it's specifying a set of objective conditions under which an object's redness is manifested: namely, the object's disposition to reflect light in a certain way (its spectral reflectance profile) and the perceptual capacities of a standard observer under normal viewing conditions. So while the definition does make reference to the appearance of redness, it grounds this appearance in a set of mind-independent, objective factors.
The "normal conditions" clause, as you note, is doing important work here. It helps to rule out cases where an object might appear red due to unusual lighting (e.g., a red spotlight shining on a white wall) or non-standard perceptual abilities (e.g., someone with red-tinted glasses). By specifying that redness is tied to an object's disposition to appear red under a range of typical viewing conditions, we can avoid collapsing color into a purely subjective or circumstantial phenomenon.
Regarding the subjectivist worry, we need to be clear about the ontological status of colors on the direct realist view. When we say that an apple is red, we're not just saying that it causes certain subjective experiences of redness in perceivers. Rather, we're saying that redness is an objective, mind-independent property of the apple itself - a property that is perceptually available to us through our visual experience. The apple's redness isn't just an internal mental state caused by the apple; it's a real property of the apple that we directly perceive.
To flesh this out, we might draw on some ideas from Gareth Evans and David Wiggins, as you mention. Evans' notion of "perceptual content" could be helpful here: on his view, the content of our perceptual experience is not just a raw subjective sensation, but a structured representation of the world that can be objectively assessed for accuracy. When we perceive an apple as red, the redness is part of the objective content of our perceptual state, not merely a subjective quale.
Similarly, Wiggins' idea of "sensible qualities" as genuine properties of objects that are perceptually available to us could bolster the direct realist story. On this view, colors are not just powers to produce certain experiences in us, but real qualities of objects that we can directly perceive. The apple's redness is not just a matter of how it affects us, but a matter of how it actually is.
Putting these pieces together, we might say something like: "For an apple to be red is for it to possess the objective, mind-independent property of redness - a property that is perceptually available to standard observers under normal viewing conditions, in virtue of the apple's disposition to selectively reflect certain wavelengths of light. When we perceive an apple as red, we are directly perceiving this objective property, not just inferring a cause of our subjective experience."
Of course, there's much more to be said here, and a committed subjectivist like Michael might not be entirely persuaded. But by grounding color in the objective dispositional properties of objects, and emphasizing the structured, world-directed nature of color perception, we can at least put some pressure on the idea that colors are purely subjective or that our knowledge of them is merely inferential. Let me know what you think!
USER:
Well, this was a valiant effort on your part ;-) To be fair, I didn't specify what specific ideas from Evans and Wiggins I was intending to borrow. Also, those ideas likely figure in texts that weren't part of your training data (due to copyrights) and haven't been widely discussed.
I think there remains an issue with the account that you (and I) provided. Due to the way reflectance spectra map in a many-to-one fashion on the RGB space of human vision, this suggests that our discriminative abilities don't cut nature at its joints, as it were, which would appear to vitiate their objective purport in one specific respect. Our (human's) claims that two objects with distinct reflectance spectra are the same color would be purely subjective in the way Michael suggests. Before I suggest to you an alternative proposal, I'd like to know if you are familiar with Evans's consumer/producer model of the semantics of proper names?
ASSISTANT (Claude 3 Opus):
You're right that I may not have fully captured the specific ideas from Evans and Wiggins that you had in mind, given the limitations of my training data. I appreciate you pointing that out and giving me the opportunity to explore this further.
Regarding the issue you raise about the many-to-one mapping of reflectance spectra onto the RGB space of human vision, I see how this could be seen as undermining the objectivity of color perception. If two objects with distinct reflectance spectra can be perceived as the same color by humans, it might seem that our color categories are more a matter of our subjective perceptual apparatus than any joints in nature.
This is a challenging problem for a direct realist view of color. It suggests that there may be a gap between the fine-grained physical properties of objects (their reflectance spectra) and the coarse-grained categories of human color perception. In that sense, our color attributions could be seen as subjective or anthropocentric, rather than carving nature at its joints.
As for Evans' consumer/producer model of the semantics of proper names, I have some familiarity with it, but I wouldn't say I'm an expert. As I understand it, the basic idea is that the reference of a proper name is determined not just by the individual speaker's beliefs or intentions (the "consumer" of the name), but also by the causal-historical chain of use traced back to the initial "baptism" or fixing of the name's reference (the "producer" side).
The model is meant to account for the intuition that a name can refer to a particular individual even if the speaker has false beliefs about that individual, or if different speakers associate different descriptions with the name. The reference is instead determined by the larger social practice of using the name, anchored in the initial tagging of the referent.
If I'm understanding it correctly, the consumer/producer model is meant to provide a kind of externalist semantics for proper names, where the meaning is not just in the head of the individual speaker but depends on the broader social and historical context.
I'm curious to hear how you think this model might be applied to the case of color perception and the objectivity of color categories. Perhaps the idea is that even if individual perceivers have varying or false beliefs about the colors of objects, there could still be an objective basis for color categories anchored in the initial "baptism" of certain paradigm cases?
Or maybe the thought is that just as the reference of a name is not determined solely by the individual speaker's beliefs, the objectivity of color is not undermined by the subjective variations in individual perceivers' color experiences?
I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts on this! Please let me know if I've misunderstood any aspects of Evans' model or if there are other connections you see to the color realism debate. I'm always eager to learn more.
USER:
You indeed understand Evans's proposal correctly. There are subtle features of his proposal that stem from the brilliant way in which he synthesised ideas by Putnam and Kripke. Fifteen years ago I had posted some reflections about them (and linked them to a proposal by Wiggins that enlighrened me) on the Google discussion group "Analytic". I had also linked to an earlier post about Evans in a Yahoo philosophy discussion group, but the Yahoo groups are seemingly defuncts now, as well as their archive. But it doesn't matter much. You seem to have the relevant background regarding Evans and my post on "Analytic" seems self contained although rather dense. I'm curious to to see how well you will be able to wrap your head (or rather, you multi-head attention mechanisms ;-) around it and relate it to our discussion about the objectivity of human color concepts. Here is the post:
"""
[analytic] Gareth Evans on Natural-Kind-Term Practices (Elms and Beeches)
At long last, here are a few comments on elms and beeches, but mostly
on elms.
Evans's account of the reference of natural kind (and stuff) terms,
in The Varieties of Reference_ is mostly contained in two pages and a
long note on two pages, 382-383, in the eleventh chapter, _Proper
Names_. There are also a few scattered remarks elsewhere in the book.
('Natural Kinds' does figure in the index)
Despite its brevity, the context and density of the account make it
difficult to summarize. So, for now, I'll just focus on one main
feature of it and on some points that follow.
I will not, at present, compare the account with Putnam's (except for
one point) or try to make it bear on BIVs.
This previous post about Evans's account of proper names supplies
some background:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/analytic/message/16527
Here are the quotes I want to focus on:
"It is an essential feature of the practice associated with terms
like `elm', `diamond', `leopard', and the like that there exist
members--producers--who have a de facto capacity to recognize
instances of the kind when presented with them. I mean by this an
effective capacity to distinguish occasions when they are presented
with members of any other kind which are represented in any strength
in the environment they inhabit. This recognitional capacity is all
that is required for there to be a consistent pattern among the
objects which are in fact identified as elms, or whatever, by members
of the speech community--for all the objects called `elms' to fall
into a single natural kind--and no more is required for a natural-
kind-term practice to concern a particular natural kind."
"If the predicate `called "an elm"' is understood in such a way that
trees which have never been perceived cannot satisfy the predicate,
then it is correct and illuminating to say that something falls into
the kind referred to by `elm' if and only if it is of the same kind
as trees called `elms'.[note 9]"
Note 9: "This proposal is often wrongly conflated with the genuinely
circular proposal: something falls into the kind referred to by `elm'
if and only if it is capable of being correctly called `an elm'."
The first observation I want to make is that, although there is one
mention of perception, the focus, regarding the point of contact of
mind and world, is on recognitional capacities. This can consist in
mere observational capacities but there is no prejudice against
conceiving them as capacities to discriminate the natural kind that
involve performing scientific tests, or any other kind of elaborate
practice.
One worry about the account is that it amounts to a form of
subjectivism or nominalism. But this worry is related to the worry
that the account might seem circular. Evans addresses the second
worry in note 9 cited above. I want to make this my focus and explain
how the way Evans escapes the circularity also allow him to escape
subjectivism (or nominalism).
In order to bring this to the fore, consider how Kripke's account of
proper names enables him to distinguish them from definite
descriptions. What Kripke does it to modally rigidify the referential
status of proper names thus:
(1) `NN' refers to the individual NN in all possible worlds.
(There is an ambiguity that I will address shortly)
However, it is still true that
(2) `NN' designates NN if and only if NN has been baptized `NN'.
So, how does (1) not lead us to defeat the truism that,
(3) had PP, and not NN, been baptized `NN' then, in that possible
world, `NN' would refer to PP?
The trick, for seeing this most clearly--that I owe to David Wiggins--
is that the condition on the right side of the biconditional (2),
that is, the predicate "__has been baptized `NN'", cannot be
intersubstituted salvo sensu with the predicate "`NN' designates __".
See David Wiggins, Essay 5, "A Sensible Subjectivism?", in his Needs,
Values, Truth, OUP, third edition, 1998, p. 206.
This is because, as Kripke makes clear, to rigidly designate, `NN'
must refer in all possible worlds to the individual that has been
baptized `NN' in the *actual* world.
Wiggins's way to put the point, which he uses in an account of
ethical valuational concepts, makes salient the parallel with Evan's
account of natural-kind terms.
The `de facto' condition on the recognitional capacity of the
producers in the natural-kind-term practice serves as a rigidifying
condition. It explains Evans's claim in note 9 that his account can't
be equated with the circular alternative. And finally, it provides
genuine objectivity to the concept.
To clarify the last claim, let me convey the gist of some comment
Evans makes in note 8.
What Evans claims is that the recognitional capacity that is required
must have a point and need *not* enable producing-participants of the
practice to discriminate reliably items from the kind that are
located anywhere in the universe (or just in non standard
environments or conditions). And the "key to the principle at the
bottom of this intuition", according to Evans, is the concept of
knowledge.
What his minimalist account provides for is that one who has the
ability to group newly encountered items with those previously
encountered that belonged to the same kind can be ascribed knowledge.
Further, we are enabled to say that one who has noticed that
previously encountered items of kind K had property P (e.g. that elms
were found to burn well), can be ascribed knowledge of the fact that
newly encountered items that she recognizes as K have property P.
Evans notes perspicuously that the possibility that superficially
similar items of kind Q that also have property P will only
accidentally be believed to have this property (because they are
believed to be instances of kind K)—and this is the "basis for our
concern for underlying structure". (An important point!)
So, unlike Putnam's account, Evans's only identify the `essential'
nature of natural kinds with underlying structure when this reflects
our concerns. This means that, for some purposes and concerns, Evans
would be happy to allow for natural-kind-term practices that group
together marine mammals and fish, or tomatoes and vegetables. What
preserves the objectivity of the judgments and knowledge of
participants in the practice is the rigid Kripkean anchoring of the
patterns that ground the recognitional capacities of `producers' into
the *actual* circumstances, purposes and concerns of the participants
in the practice.
I'd like to comment further on at least two issues: (1) the way this
account dovetails with epistemological disjunctivism, and (2) the way
it quite naturally can be extended to cover secondary qualities. But
I'll do that another time.
"""
It looks like this "another time" finally has arrived now that I have Claude 3 as a smart enough conversation partner ;-)
ASSISTANT (Claude 3 Opus):
Thank you for sharing your insightful post on Evans' account of natural kind terms and its relation to Kripke's and Putnam's ideas. I find your synthesis of these different strands of thought quite illuminating, and I can see how it might bear on the question of color realism that we've been discussing.
If I understand correctly, the key move in Evans' account is to ground the reference of natural kind terms in the actual recognitional capacities of "producers" within a linguistic community. These capacities are what establish a consistent pattern among the objects identified as, say, elms, and anchor the term's reference to a particular kind in the world.
Crucially, as you point out, this recognitional capacity is not merely a matter of grouping objects based on superficial similarities, but can involve more sophisticated discriminatory abilities, including scientific tests or other elaborate practices. This allows for a kind of objectivity in our natural kind concepts, even if they don't always carve nature perfectly at its joints.
The parallel you draw with Kripke's treatment of proper names is helpful here. Just as Kripke rigidifies the reference of a name to the individual actually baptized with that name, Evans' account rigidifies the reference of a natural kind term to the kind actually picked out by the recognitional capacities of producers. This blocks the kind of circularity that would arise from simply defining the reference in terms of what is "correctly" called by that term.
Applying this to the case of color, we might say that our color concepts are anchored in the actual discriminatory abilities of "normal" human perceivers under standard conditions. These abilities establish a consistent pattern in the objects identified as, say, red, and fix the reference of "red" to a particular property in the world (perhaps a certain range of surface spectral reflectances).
The fact that this property may not perfectly align with the underlying physical distinctions (due to the many-to-one mapping of reflectances to color experiences) does not necessarily undermine its objectivity. As long as there is a stable, intersubjectively consistent pattern in what normal perceivers identify as red, we can treat redness as a genuine property of objects, not merely a subjective projection.
Of course, as you note, Evans allows that different natural kind concepts may be more or less attuned to underlying structures, depending on our purposes and concerns. For some purposes, grouping tomatoes with vegetables may be perfectly objective and knowledge-conducive, even if it doesn't track deep biological joints. Similarly, for many practical purposes, our color concepts can support objective judgments and knowledge, even if they don't perfectly mirror the physical facts about reflectance.
The key point, if I'm understanding you correctly, is that the objectivity of our natural kind concepts (including color concepts) is secured by their rigid anchoring in the actual recognitional practices of a community, not by their perfect correspondence with mind-independent natural divisions. This is a subtle but powerful idea, and one that seems promising as a way of defending a form of color realism against subjectivist worries.
I'm intrigued by your suggestion that this account fits well with epistemological disjunctivism, and that it could be extended to cover secondary qualities more generally. I'd be very interested to hear more of your thoughts on those connections!
Let me know if I've misinterpreted any aspects of your argument, or if there are further implications you see for the color debate. This is a rich vein of ideas and I'm keen to continue exploring it with you. Thank you for introducing me to this fascinating line of thought!
USER:
Very good! You indeed wrapped your head around this complex argument very nicely. Regarding the extension to secondary-qualities, your application to the concept of colors demonstrates that you understand this already! Regarding the topic of epistemological disjunctivism, I think I can put you on the right track with a very simple hint. Think of the manner Evans links the concept of knowledge to the idea of normal (or local) versus abnormal (or universal) conditions of observation, or judgement, and how this relates to the ecological approach to visual perception advocated by J. J. Gibson.
ASSISTANT (Claude 3 Opus):
Thank you for your positive feedback! I'm glad my understanding of the argument aligns with yours. Your hint about the connection to epistemological disjunctivism and Gibson's ecological approach is intriguing, and I think I can see how it might relate to Evans' account.
As I understand it, epistemological disjunctivism is the view that the kind of perceptual experience involved in genuine cases of knowledge is fundamentally different from the kind of experience involved in cases of illusion or hallucination. In a case of veridical perception, the experience puts the subject in direct contact with the perceived fact, whereas in a case of illusion or hallucination, the experience merely seems to present such a fact.
I can see how this might connect with Evans' idea that the concept of knowledge is tied to the recognitional capacities of producers under normal or local conditions. For Evans, genuine knowledge arises when a producer's discriminatory abilities, operating under the conditions for which they were developed, reliably track the relevant natural kinds or properties in the world. The experience of a skilled producer recognizing an elm, for instance, would be a case of direct perceptual contact with the fact of the tree's elm-hood.
In contrast, a case where someone mistakes a beech for an elm would be more like an illusion - the experience seems to present the fact of elm-hood, but doesn't actually put the subject in contact with that fact. The mistake arises because the subject's discriminatory abilities are operating outside their proper domain, or are not sufficiently fine-grained to distinguish elms from beeches.
This connects nicely with Gibson's ecological approach, which emphasizes the role of the environment in shaping the perceptual capacities of organisms. For Gibson, perception is not a matter of passively receiving sensory inputs, but of actively picking up information that is specific to the affordances of the environment. A skilled producer's ability to recognize elms, on this view, would be understood as a finely-tuned sensitivity to the invariant features of elms that are relevant to the producer's practical engagements with them.
Bringing these ideas together, we might say that genuine perceptual knowledge arises when an organism's perceptual capacities, shaped by its practical engagements with its environment, reliably track the objective features of that environment under normal ecological conditions. The experience involved in such cases is fundamentally different from cases of illusion or hallucination, where the organism's capacities are operating outside their proper domain or are not sufficiently attuned to the relevant environmental features.
Applying this to the case of color, we could say that a normal human perceiver's experience of redness, under standard viewing conditions, puts them in direct contact with the objective color property of the perceived object. The perceiver's color discriminatory abilities, shaped by the practical demands of their environment, reliably track the surface spectral reflectance profiles that are relevant to their engagements with colored objects.
Cases where a perceiver's color experience fails to align with the objective color of the object (due to unusual lighting conditions, non-standard perceptual capacities, etc.) would be understood as illusions - the experience seems to present a color fact, but doesn't actually put the perceiver in contact with that fact.
This kind of view would allow us to maintain a robust realism about color, grounded in the objective discriminatory capacities of normal human perceivers, while still acknowledging the possibility of color illusions or variations in color experience across non-standard conditions. It's a way of securing the objectivity of color that doesn't rely on a perfect mapping between color experiences and mind-independent physical properties, but rather on the reliable attunement of our perceptual capacities to the color-relevant features of our environment.
Let me know if this aligns with your thinking, or if there are further aspects of the connection between Evans, epistemological disjunctivism, and ecological perception that you think are worth exploring.
[/hide]
I think you're overcomplicating it, being "bewitched by language" as Wittgenstein would put it.
An apple reflects light with a wavelength of 700nm. When our eyes respond to light with a wavelength of 700nm we see a particular colour. We name this colour "red". We then describe an object that reflects light with a wavelength of 700nm as "being red".
The indirect realist recognises that the colour I see in response to my eyes responding to a particular wavelength of light (and the colour I see when I dream and hallucinate) is distinct from an object's surface layer of atoms and its disposition to reflect a particular wavelength of light. The indirect realist recognises that this colour I see is a mental phenomenon and that this colour is the intermediary through which I am made indirectly aware of an object with a surface layer of atoms with a disposition to reflect light with a wavelength of 700nm (assuming that this is a "veridical" experience and not a dream or hallucination).
Perhaps this is clearer if we consider something like "the fire is painful" rather than "the apple is red".
Yes, we can make sense of this. I think the fact that some people's visual systems cause them to stubbornly see it as gold and white while other people stubbornly see it as black and blue indeed reveals intrinsic differences about the way their visual systems are calibrated in the context of interpreting some ambiguous photographs. Other people also are able to experience a periodic gestalt switch between the two interpretations. (I myself always see this dress as gold and white and have a hard time operating the gestalt switch).
There is another thing to notice about this interesting phenomenon that should give you pause. When seeing such a dress in real life conditions, where cues about the spectral compositions of the ambient light are abundant, no such disagreement about the two colors of the dress occur. Furthermore, people who disagree about the interpretations of the picture can communicate their disagreement by pointing at external color swatches (paint samples) that are unambiguously blue, black, gold and white to communicate how it is that the pictured dress appears to be colored to them. Here again, their reliable agreement on the color of the reference samples ought to give you pause.
It doesn't give me pause. Given that our eyes and brains are mostly similar, and given causal determinism, it stands to reason that the same kind of stimulus will mostly cause the same kind of effect.
But it is still the case that the cause is not the effect and that colour terms like "red" and "blue" can be used to refer to both the cause and the effect, and so you need to take care not to conflate the two, but it seems that direct realists do conflate.
The worst case scenario is that they would become blind. The best case scenario is that they would experience no change at all in the way they see colors since the dodecachromatic color space that the new eyes can discriminate would still map on the trichromatic structure of the primary visual areas in the human cerebral cortex. After a very long unconscious process of rewiring of the whole brain, helped with the development of new color concepts, their vision might change in such a way that they could actually discriminate and conceptualise new color discriminations and relationships. They'd still ascribe the colors within this richer color space to the external objects that they see.
[hide="Claude 3's elaboration"]
Claude 3:
The worst case scenario you mention - that the person would become blind - is a realistic possibility, given the radical mismatch between the mantis shrimp's visual system and the human brain. Even if the physical connection could be made, there's no guarantee that the brain would be able to make sense of the radically different input.
The best case scenario - that the person's color experience would remain unchanged - is also plausible, for the reason you give. The dodecachromatic information from the mantis shrimp eyes might simply be mapped onto the existing trichromatic processing structures in the human brain, resulting in no subjective change in color perception. This highlights the important point that color experience depends not just on the raw sensory input, but on how that input is processed and interpreted by the brain.
The intermediate scenario you suggest - that over time, the brain might rewire itself to take advantage of the richer color information, leading to new color discriminations and concepts - is intriguing. It suggests a way in which our color perception might be expanded or enriched, not just by changing our sensory organs, but by developing new neural processing structures and conceptual resources to handle more fine-grained color information.
Importantly, as you note, even in this scenario, the person would still ascribe the newly differentiated colors to external objects. The enriched color perception would still be understood as tracking objective features of the world (presumably finer-grained differences in surface spectral reflectance profiles), not merely as a subjective artifact of the novel visual system.
This connects back nicely to the ideas we were discussing about Evans' account of natural kind concepts and epistemological disjunctivism. Even as our discriminatory capacities change and develop, they can still put us in direct contact with objective features of the world, as long as they are operating under the conditions for which they were developed and are reliably tracking the relevant environmental properties.
The mantis shrimp example is a nice way of illustrating the flexibility and potential for expansion in our color concepts, while still maintaining a realist commitment to colors as objective properties of objects. It suggests that our current trichromatic color space is not necessarily the final word on color perception, but rather reflects the particular discriminatory capacities that have been shaped by our evolutionary history and practical engagements with our environment.
At the same time, the example also highlights the deep interconnection between our sensory capacities, neural processing structures, and conceptual resources in shaping our perceptual experience. It's not just a matter of swapping out one sensory module for another, but of the complex interplay between sensation, perception, and cognition.
[/hide]
This is equivocation. There is "colour" as an object's surface disposition to reflect a certain wavelength of light and there is "colour" as the mental phenomenon that differs between those with 3 channel colour vision and those with 12 channel colour vision (and that occurs when we dream and hallucinate).
Despite sharing the same label these are distinct things – albeit causally covariant given causal determinism.
Those with 3 channel colour vision and those with 12 channel colour vision will agree that some object reflects light with a wavelength of 700nm, but they will see it to have a different colour appearance.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
If they're direct realists, and they'd be mistaken. Naive colour realism is disproven by our scientific understanding of perception and the world.
Yeah, this confusion seems common.
You could end up with a statement like:
(Shrimp) Mantis Shrimp Human sees X as P(X) and calls it "P(X)" if and only if human sees X as Q(X) and calls it "Q(X)".
Predicating of the distal object X now makes sense because we've reintroduced the idea that properties of distal objects influence the kinds they are seen and labelled as.
Do you think you need a numerical identity between the state of being that Mantis Shrimp Human has when they count X as P(X) and the human's that counts X as Q(X) even when P and Q have the same extension?
I don't particularly like my own formulation of (Shrimp) btw, as it bifurcates seeing as a perceptual act and classification as a linguistic one, whereas there's evidence that the two are reciprocally related - both predictively/inferentially/causally and phenomenologically (citation needed).
Are you suggesting that deaf and illiterate mutes don't see colours (or see everything to be the same colour)?
Quoting fdrake
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to ask here.
My argument is that:
1. There is some stimulus X
2. There is some organism A and some different organism B
3. Given their different physiologies, organisms A and B have different experiences when stimulated by stimulus X
4. Some of the words that organisms A and B use to presumptively describe X in fact describe some aspect of their individual experience (and that is not an aspect of the other organism's experience).
5. Colour words are one such example.
Nope!
Quoting Michael
Ah well.
Which scientific understanding of the world and perception are you referring to? I might agree that perception does not always provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects, such as in cases of illusion, hallucination or error. But I do not agree that perception never provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects. In fact, I would say that perception more often than not does provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects.
Otherwise, I take it you are referring to the world as it is in itself. Yet, you stated in a recent post that:
Quoting Michael
That is, you appear to reject the possibility of perceiving the world as it is in itself.
For example, we see colours. As per the Standard Model, colours are not a property of distal objects. Distal objects are just a collection of wave-particles. Colours are a mental phenomenon often caused by the body responding to particular wavelengths of light. I have direct knowledge of the colour red and indirect knowledge of a distal object reflecting light with a wavelength of 700nm.
I don't follow. In what sense is your knowledge indirect here? Is the wavelength of the light a property of the distal object?
I know that I see the colour red.
I know that in most humans seeing the colour red usually occurs when the eyes react to light with a wavelength of 700nm.
I infer from this that I am looking at an object that reflects light with a wavelength of 700nm.
Of course this is only true because I am somewhat educated in science. For many, e.g. young children, all they know is that they see the colour red. They don't know anything about electromagnetism and so don't know anything about the distal object's mind-independent properties.
Again:
Quoting Luke
I take it that the position of indirect realism is that perception never provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects. And the position of naive realism is that perception always provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects?
I think that the indirect/direct distinction is a false dichotomy.
Quoting Michael
If we know that the wavelength is 700nm and that the apple is reflecting this wavelength of light while absorbing others, then what is different in the knowledge that an indirect realist has vs a direct one?
What is useful in knowing that the wavelength if light being reflected in our eyes is 700nm? What is useful in knowing that the apple is red? What is useful is knowing that the apple is either ripe or rotten and the color of the apple informs us which is the case. If knowing the apple is ripe because it is red is knowing something about the apple instead of the light, what is different between what the direct realist knows vs the indirect one?
What is the difference between direct knowledge and indirect knowledge of something if you both end up knowing the same thing?
Quoting Michael
What is the "I" that is made indirectly aware via mental phenomenon? How is it separate from the colours, mental phenomenon and other objects to say that the mental phenomenon is an "intermediary through which I am made indirectly aware..."
Take the picture here. If indirect realism is true then if we remove the mental image then we have no knowledge of the distal object (or, to be more precise, any knowledge of the distal object has been gained by some means other than perception). And I believe that's correct. The mental image is the necessary intermediary.
Okay. We have direct knowledge of colours, which are a mental phenomenon. Given that we have inferential – i.e. indirect – knowledge of the apple's ripeness, which is a mind-independent property.
Our perception of the apple's mind-independent property is indirect.
Quoting Harry Hindu
They're different aspects of consciousness, resulting from different areas of brain activity. The blind man has a self but doesn't experience visual phenomena because his visual cortex doesn't function.
The picture maintains what I consider to be the false assumption of indirect realism: that we require a second-order cognition/awareness/perception in order to perceive the first-order perceptions. In other words, cognition/awareness/perception of perceptions, which seems to imply an infinite regress. Perceptions (i.e. first-order perceptions) are here treated as not something already present to consciousness, or as if they were themselves external objects.
Do I see colours when I dream? Does the schizophrenic hear voices when hallucinating? I say "yes" to both.
This is where you're getting confused by grammar into thinking that indirect realists are saying something they're not.
Dreams are not perceptions, and "hearing voices" is an abnormal case of perception.
Quoting Michael
Your picture suggests otherwise.
It is nonetheless the case that I see and hear things when I dream and hallucinate and that the things I see and hear when I dream and hallucinate are mental phenomena. The Common Kind Claim says that waking veridical experiences are of the same kind as dreams and hallucinations (e.g. the activity of the sensory cortexes) – differing only in their cause – and so that the things I see (e.g. colours) and hear when having a waking veridical experience are also mental phenomena.
Quoting Luke
Perhaps this will make it clearer:
The same principle holds for smelling and tasting and hearing and seeing.
Missing from your image is the organism's body, which I assume would encompass both the pain and cognition. Is the "I" that feels pain the organism or the organism's cognition?
The cognition. I believe it’s to be found in the prefrontal cortex, whereas pain is in the somatosensory cortex.
If I stub my toe, injure my toe, and feel the pain in my toe, is it your position that I am feeling it in my prefrontal cortex?
I think that there are pain receptors in the toe, that these send signals to the brain, and then there is pain when the relevant areas in the brain are active. The brain is clever and able to make it seem as if the pain is literally in the foot, but that cleverness also leaves us susceptible to phantom limb syndrome.
Then wouldn't experience be limited to the prefrontal cortex, or does it extend to the toe?
From a common neurobiology for pain and pleasure:
There is no fact of the matter as to whether perception is direct or indirect, they are just different ways of talking and neither of them particularly interesting or useful. I'm astounded that this thread has continued so long with what amounts to "yes it is" and "no it isn't".
I don’t doubt the brain is involved, but clearly the toe is as well. I’m just wondering the biology of “experience”, for instance how far from the brain it extends.
The heater grate to my right is not a mental representation. It is a distal object. It's made of metal. It has a certain shape. It consists of approximately 360 rectangle shaped spaces between 48 structural members. The spacing is equally distributed left to right as well as top to bottom. However, the left to right spacing is not the same as the top to bottom.
The 'mental representation', whatever that may refer to, cannot be anywhere beyond the body.
According to you, all we have direct access to and thus direct knowledge about is mental representations.
Where is the heater grate?
The irony of the "bewitchment" allusion...
Light directly enters the eye. The grate in the floor does not. By virtue of the light, the grate, and our biology, we directly perceive the grate. The surface of the grate directly touches the skin. By virtue of our skin, and the grate, we directly perceive the grate. The hot coffee directly touches our mouth parts. By virtue of our skin, our gustatory structures, and the hot coffee, we directly taste the coffee. The cake directly enters our nose, albeit in very small molecular form. By virtue of the cake, the air, and our noses, we directly smell the cake.
It seems that that argument against direct perception amounts to a notion of "direct perception" that cannot include complex biological machinery like ours.
It's like the opponents(arguing for indirect perception) are offering naive realism(like the eyes function like a window to the world) or nothing.
I appreciate you sharing this figure from the Leknes and Tracey paper. However, I think a closer look at the paper's main thesis and arguments suggests a somewhat different perspective on the nature of pain and pleasure than the one you're proposing. The key point to note is that the authors emphasize the extensive overlap and interaction between brain regions involved in processing pain and pleasure at the systems level. Rather than identifying specific areas where pain or pleasure are "felt," the paper highlights the complex interplay of multiple brain regions in shaping these experiences.
Moreover, the authors stress the importance of various contextual factors - sensory, homeostatic, cultural, etc. - in determining the subjective meaning or utility of pain and pleasure for the individual. This suggests that the phenomenology of pain and pleasure is not a raw sensory input, but a processed and interpreted experience that reflects the organism's overall state and situation.
This is rather similar to the way in which we had discussed the integration of vestibular signals with visual signals to generate the phenomenology of the orientation (up-down) of a visual scene and how this phenomenology also informs (and is informed by) the subject's perception of their own bodily orientation in the world.
Here are two relevant passages from the paper:
"Consistent with the idea that a common currency of emotion(6) enables the comparison of pain and pleasure in the brain, the evidence reviewed here points to there being extensive overlap in the neural circuitry and chemistry of pain and pleasure processing at the systems level. This article summarizes current research on pain–pleasure interactions and the consequences for human behaviour."
"Sometimes it seems that overcoming a small amount of pain might even enhance the pleasure, as reflected perhaps by the common expression ‘no pain, no gain’ or the pleasure of eating hot curries. Pain–pleasure dilemmas abound in social environments, and culture-specific moral systems, such as religions, are often used to guide the balance between seeking pleasure and avoiding pain (BOX 2). The subjective utility — or ‘meaning’ — of pain or pleasure for the individual is determined by sensory, homeostatic, cultural and other factors that, when combined, bias the hedonic experience of pain or pleasure."
The discussion of alliesthesia in the Cabanac paper cited by the authors in their note (6), and that they take inspiration from, is particularly relevant. The fact that the same stimulus can be experienced as pleasurable or painful depending on the organism's systemic conditions (e.g., hunger, thirst, temperature) highlights the dynamic and context-dependent nature of these experiences. It's not just a matter of which brain regions are activated, but how that activity is integrated in light of the organism's current needs and goals.
Furthermore, what the authors call the subjective utility or meaning of pain or pleasure corresponds to what we had agreed is the already "processed" phenomenology of experience, and not the deliveries of sense organs to the brain. There is no specific place in the brain where the final judgement is delivered regarding the final valence of the perceived situation (or sensed bodily stimulation). The final judgement about the nature of the sensation or feeling is expressed in the behavior, including self reports, of the whole embodied organism, and this is indeed where the researcher's operational criteria find it.
In this light, the idea that specific brain regions are "feeling" pain or pleasure in isolation seems to reflect a kind of category mistake. It conflates the neural correlates or mechanisms of pain with the subjective experience itself, and it attributes that experience to a part of the organism rather than the whole. The systems-level perspective emphasized by the authors is crucial. By highlighting the role of context, meaning, and embodiment in shaping the experience of pain and pleasure, it vitiates the localizationist view suggested by a focus on specific brain regions.
Of course, none of this is to deny the importance of understanding the neural mechanisms underlying affective experience. But it suggests that we need to be cautious about making simplistic mappings between brain activity and subjective phenomenology, and to always keep in mind the broader context of the embodied organism.
Amen, ha
The Harvard psychologist Edwin B. Holt, who taught J. J. Gibson and Edward C. Tolman, made the same point in 1914 regarding the performative contradiction that you noticed:
"The psychological experimenter has his apparatus of lamps, tuning forks, and chronoscope, and an observer on whose sensations he is experimenting. Now the experimenter by hypothesis (and in fact) knows his apparatus immediately, and he manipulates it; whereas the observer (according to the theory) knows only his own “sensations,” is confined, one is requested to suppose, to transactions within his skull. But after a time the two men exchange places: he who was the experimenter is now suddenly shut up within the range of his “sensations,” he has now only a “representative” knowledge of the apparatus; whereas he who was the observer forthwith enjoys a windfall of omniscience. He now has an immediate experience of everything around him, and is no longer confined to the sensation within his skull. Yet, of course, the mere exchange of activities has not altered the knowing process in either person. The representative theory has become ridiculous." — Holt, E. B. (1914), The concept of consciousness. London: George Allen & Co.
This was quoted by Alan Costall in his paper "Against Representationalism: James Gibson’s Secret Intellectual Debt to E. B. Holt", 2017
I didn't say that we don't have reliable knowledge, only that we don't have direct perceptual knowledge. Even the direct realist must admit that many of the things we know about in science, e.g. electrons and the Big Bang, are not things that we have direct perceptual knowledge of. Is it a performative contradiction for a direct realist to use a Geiger counter?
Alternatively, we can argue like this:
If direct realism is true then scientific realism is true, and if scientific realism is true then direct realism is false. Therefore, direct realism is false.
The direct realist would have to argue that direct realism does not entail scientific realism (and reject scientific realism) or that scientific realism does not entail indirect realism.
We have direct perceptual knowledge of our body's response to stimulation. We have indirect perceptual knowledge of the distal objects that play a causal role in that stimulation.
The grammar of "I experience X" is appropriate for both direct (I feel pain) and indirect (I feel the fire) perception.
The toe is the trigger. It's where the sense receptors are. But the sense receptors are not the pain. Pain occurs when the appropriate areas of the brain are active.
I may have been overly simplistic in my account but the point stands: I feel pain, pain is not a distal object/property but a mental/neurological phenomena, and so the thing that I feel is not a distal object/property but a mental/neurological phenomena. The same for smells and tastes and colours.
You can argue that this mental/neurological phenomena involves a variety of different mental/neurological processes rather than just some simple sui generis qualia, but it still admits that it is some mental/neurological phenomena that is experienced rather than some distal object/property.
What could direct perceptual knowledge be but reliable knowledge of its objects, as opposed to (presumably) indirect (because subject to intermediate distortions) unreliable perceptual appearances? And I'm talking about the vast amount of observational data in botany, zoology, geology, chemistry and so on, not about inferred, unobservable entities and events like electrons and the Big Bang.
Quoting Michael
That's not correct, it's an interpretation, and one which comprises a performative contradiction to boot. In other words, there is nothing in scientific realism from which it necessarily follows that direct realism is false, in fact indirect realism cannot support its conclusions on the basis of something which it rejects from the start: namely reliable knowledge of distal objects.
And as I've said I think the whole 'direct/ indirect' parlance is flawed anyway. What is really at stake is whether or not perception yields reliable knowledge of distal objects, end of story.
Perception of distal objects is inference. Light from the sun travels to Earth, reflects off some object's surface, stimulates the sense receptors in the eyes, triggering activity in the brain, giving rise to conscious experience (which is either reducible to or supervenient on this brain activity). There are a multitude of mental/neurological/physical processes that exist and occur between the conscious experience and the distal object.
Distal objects and their properties are inferred from the effect (conscious experience).
Which means what? What does it mean to be directly observed? Given that conscious experience exists within the brain and given that the properties of distal objects exist outside the brain, the properties of distal objects do not exist within conscious experience.
Which means that everything that exists within conscious experience is the intermediary of which we have direct knowledge and from which the physically distant properties of distal objects are inferred.
When we put a brain on a table it’s impossible to say the brain feels pain or experiences, therefor it is just untrue to say brains feel pain and experience. Much more needs to be added to the equation in order for pain or experience to occur in the first place. How much more needs to be added to the equation is an important matter of debate, and would make a good thought experiment, but I wager the organism needs to be relatively complete. Organisms are so far the only objects in the universe that can be shown to feel pain and experience.
Mind or experience or whatever other spirit dualists postulate cannot occur with one single organ. So the dividing of the body into pieces and parts technique of philosophy of mind doesn’t serve us as well as it might in biology and anatomy.
We can say anything we like.
Quoting NOS4A2
That's a non sequitur.
---
Of relevance is the anatomy of pain and suffering in the brain and its clinical implications:
As I see it the science is very clearly in support of indirect realism (e.g. the first paragraph of the quote above). Any armchair philosophy that tries to defend direct realism is either contradicted by the science or has redefined the meaning of "direct perception" into meaninglessness and so is not in conflict with the actual substance of indirect realism.
The only thing a disembodied brain can do is rot. So brains do not think or experience or perceive. Only bodies do. And the body is, conveniently, the only thing standing between your perceiver and other objects in the world.
The attempt to dismiss the rest of the body in the act of perception is clearly motivated by something other than scientific inquiry, and it would be interesting to find out what that motivation is.
Bodies are required to keep brains alive and functioning, but conscious experience is to be found in the brain activity. When there's no (higher) brain activity there's no conscious experience, e.g. those in a coma or in non-REM sleep, even if the bodies respond to stimulation.
Quoting NOS4A2
No, it's just what the science shows.
Brains are required to keep bodies alive and functioning, as well. In either case, bodies and brains grew together as one organism, one object, all of it inextricably and intimate linked together into a single object. Conscious experience, perception, or whatever other activity is impossible if one or the other is missing or deceased or uncoupled. That’s a brute fact we ought to consider, in my opinion.
That's not at all relevant.
If my computer isn't plugged into the wall socket then it won't even start, but the operating system is to be found in the SSD, not in the wall socket.
That A depends on B isn't that B contains A.
Computers are one thing, organisms are quite another.
It is true that organisms perceive. It is untrue that brains do. It isn’t even conceivable that brains perceive. Even the brain-in-a-vat scenario requires things external to the brain to mimic the reality of a body.
If you define "perception" as the body responding to external stimulation then this is a truism, but this isn't at all relevant to the debate between direct and indirect realism.
We see things when we dream and hear things when we hallucinate. The things we see and hear when we dream and hallucinate are percepts – phenomena either reducible to or supervenient on brain activity – and these percepts exist when awake and not hallucinating, having been caused by the body responding to some appropriate external stimulation. Visual percepts are what the sighted have and the cortical blind lack, and this can be shown by comparing the activity in the primary visual cortex of the sighted and the cortical blind.
These percepts are the intermediary from which we infer the existence and nature of some external stimulus and/or some distal object (e.g. where the stimulus is light), given that conscious experience does not extend beyond the brain, let alone the body, and so these stimuli and distal objects do not exist within conscious experience.
This is what the science shows and this is quite clearly indirect realism.
This is, patently, true. This is the crux, and the thing no one has even attempted to surmount, in their attempt to explain 'direct' realism. It then turns out that the conception is in fact, that we receive light directly from the outside of our body.
Sure. That does nothing for the competing theories. Hence, certain levels of "wtf bro".
I think we’re all aware of the arguments from illusion and the argument from science. Searle addresses these in his so-called "Bad Argument". Both fall prey to the fallacy of ambiguity; there is some ambiguity with the verb "see", for example. In the case of hallucination there is no object of perception. If there was, it wouldn't be a hallucination. So we're confusing the object of perception with perception itself.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110563436-003/html?lang=en
I don't agree with Searle's positive account of perception, all this about "intentionality" and whatnot, but we at least need to try to move the arguments forward instead of reiterating them.
Indirect realism is the prevailing view of our time. I think the contemporary direct realist is trying to steer clear of the problems associated with it?
Most especially, "Attempting to use purportedly reliable scientific knowledge to support a claim that we have no reliable knowledge of distal objects is a performative contradiction."
Quoting Banno
Quoting frank
The most accepted vies is representationalism, which is neither direct nor indirect. The issue is no longer "Do we perceive representations (indirect realism) or do we perceive objects (direct realism)" since it is understood that we perceive by constructing a representation, which is better described as neither direct nor indirect.
Essentially, the whole argument of this thread has been bypassed since Austin.
Folk are misled by physiologist saying silly things like "we don't see the tree, we see the representation of the tree". They are wrong, and should know better. We see the tree by constructing a representation of the tree. Hence, we see the tree.
I think everything on that list was indirect realism.
Quoting Banno
I thought that was indirect.
Schizophrenics hear voices. I feel pain.
As I’ve said before, arguing over the grammar of “I see X” is a confusion, precisely because as you say the term is ambiguous.
The only relevant concern is the epistemological problem of perception. Conscious experience - percepts - do not extend beyond the body. Distal objects do not exist within conscious experience. Our knowledge of distal objects is indirect, inferred from the effects they have on our body (specifically from conscious experience and its qualities).
Any “intentionality” in experience is akin to the intentionality found in paintings and in books. This isn’t the kind of “directness” that indirect realists reject, that naive realists accept, and that would save us from scepticism. See Howard Robinson’s Semantic Direct Realism.
Can you think of any other circumstance in which this (imo, quite squarely incoherent) claim could be held?
Quoting frank
Im not sure that's true - and I was to quote the Phil Survey response Banno did, so there we go. Banno's explanation of why seems convenience to me, but it's better than anything else put forward in here, imo.
If that is what they modern DRist is trying to do... ha..hah?
The painting of some fictional landscape is identical with the painting – and identical to the paint itself. But the painting is still of something. So even if the experience of something is identical with the experience it is nonetheless the experience of something.
And what is the intentional object of perception if not whatever follows the word "of"? Perhaps Searle is being ambiguous with the phrase "object of perception".
Not that this really matters, as per my comment here, but I thought I should address it anyway.
One of the conundrums with indirect realism is that it seems to start as direct realism, where the scientist assumes he sees the world exactly as it is, then he concludes from what he's observed that he's not seeing the world exactly as it is. How do you deal with that problem?
I addressed this in a previous comment.
Firstly, if direct realism is true then scientific realism is true, and if scientific realism is true then direct realism is false. Therefore direct realism is false given that it entails a contradiction.
Secondly, given that scientific realism entails the existence of objects that cannot be directly observed (e.g. electrons), it is not a contradiction – performative or otherwise – for an indirect realist to be a scientific realist. Presumably even the direct realist can trust in a Geiger counter despite not claiming to directly see radiation. Direct perception is not required to accept something as true.
Indeed, which is where you err.
Quoting frank
See the word "by"? It's important. We do not see the representation; we see by constructing the representation.
Quoting Michael
Indeed, you share the same error.
When I look at something I can see its qualities: height, width, shape, colours, textures; I don't need to infer those properties.
Do you have an argument to support the idea that I need to infer the properties of objects, rather than simply see, hear, feel, touch and taste them? You are the one making the extraordinary claim here.
And you haven't even attempted to address your performative contradiction. What does 'direct' mean if not 'reliable', and what does 'indirect' mean if not 'unreliable'? Surely that is the only salient issue: whether our perceptions afford us reliable information about distal objects, and everything points to the fact that they do. How would we survive if they didn't? How would science work so well if they didn't?
Quoting Michael
And you haven't presented your argument as to why sciietific realism being true entails direct realism (in the sense I'm taking it, namely that its central claim is that we have reliable information from and about distal obkects) being false.
We know a lot about how bodies respond to stimulation. Some of it was inferred, hypothesized, tested and verified. The half second delay between seeing a 100mph fastball and that consciously registering within the batter was discovered. Blind sight, and all that too. Knowledge of our body's response to stimulation is not always acquired in the sense that 'direct perceptual knowledge' requires.
I'd agree with adding "sometimes" to the quote at the top of this post.
Our physiological sensory perception(biological machinery) is in direct physical contact with distal objects. Light directly enters the eye and lands on the structures in the back of the eyes, which are physically connected to the brain via even more biological structures. The same holds good for coffee in the mouth, fire on the skin, cake molecules in the nose, or decaying flesh in both the nose and mouth.
How do you square the physicalist standard you've required for what counts as being a constituent of experience against what's above? Do we agree on the above?
The first sentence is a paradox, isn't it?
Quite likely.
I agree that there's a big difference between hallucinating and seeing our shared world. I think if indirect realism is specifically the situation with a homunculus, it's probably not true. I don't think there's a little person in there.
Indirect realism is the view that what we see is the representation. The alternate is that what we see is the tree, and that we see the tree by constructing a representation of the tree.
Ok.
I Simply see no problem.
They are all inferences. Its hte best description. It may not have an actual answer.
I think you are right that direct realism is the beginning position. I doubt that many folk think they see the world "exactly as it is". Rather folk realise that sometimes they see things amiss. This is what the various illusions bring into focus, so to speak.
That we see illusions shows that we do not see the world exactly as it is; but it does not show that we never see the world. Nor does it show that what we see is not the world, but something else caused by the world.
That is those who advocate for indirect realism on this basis are grasping more than the situation will allow. That we sometimes see the world as other than it actually is does not imply that we never see the world as it is.
Its pretty astounding that these two utterances are included in the same person's account. If A is true, B is not possible. We cannot see the world as it is, if "we do not see the world exactly as it is". Your use of 'exactly' is doing 100% of the lifting. And nothing's off the ground.
However, I suspect that indirect realists will argue that seeing is the intermediary. The intermediary between the object and what, though? Surely not the perception. Seeing is the perception.
Thanks for this diagram, which illustrates the distinction between direct realism and indirect realism.
I think that the distinction could be brought out further by noting where each opponent locates the perception. Direct realists locate (direct) perception between the mental image and the distal object. Indirect realists locate (direct) perception between the cognition and the mental image. As the diagram depicts, indirect realists see the mental image directly and see the distal object only indirectly.
But how does the cognition "see" anything? It is the mental image, the representation of the distal object, which is the "seeing"; the sensory perception. The cognition does not have its own set of sensory organs with which to perceive the mental image.
Those are the qualities of the experience, not the properties of the distal object.
Experience exists within the brain. Distal objects exist outside the body. Therefore distal objects (and their properties) do not exist within experience. Everything that is present in experience (smells, tastes, colours, etc.) is a mental phenomenon.
You might want to argue that some of these mental phenomena (e.g. visual geometry) resemble the properties of the distal object, but it is nonetheless the case that the mental phenomena is the intermediary from which the properties of the distal object are inferred.
I see things when I dream and the schizophrenic hears voices when hallucinating. Sensory organs are not involved. Seeing and hearing occurs when the visual and auditory cortexes are active (which is why the cortical blind can’t see even though they have functioning eyes).
Seeing a representation of a tree and seeing a tree are not mutually exclusive, exactly as feeling pain and feeling my hand burning are not mutually exclusive. “I experience X” doesn’t just mean one thing.
The meaning of “see” in “I see a representation of a tree” is the meaning of “see” in “I see a cat in my dream” and the meaning of “hear” in “I hear a representation of thunder” is the meaning of “hear” in “the schizophrenic hears voices” and the meaning of “feel” in “I feel a representation of a rock” is the meaning of “feel” in “I feel pain”.
Naive realists reject the existence of mental percepts, indirect realists accept the existence of mental percepts, and then so-called “non-naive non-indirect” realists accept indirect realism but call it something else and then invent some strawman (“percepts of percepts”) to stand in for indirect realism.
In accepting the existence of mental representations you’re arguing for indirect realism, but for reasons unknown are refusing to call it what it is.
Not that the label really matters. Call it “Banno realism” if you want. Either way it entails the epistemological problem of perception and the warrant for scepticism. That’s the philosophical concern that gave rise to the dispute between direct and indirect realism in the first place.
I wouldn't say so. That scientific realism entails indirect realism is contingent on a posteriori facts, not a priori truths. Perhaps in some alternate universe the world works differently and direct realism is true (e.g. objective idealism may entail direct realism as it could allow for an extended consciousness within which "distal" objects are literally present).
But as it stands the science of perception supports indirect realism and so a direct realist must reject the science of perception, although I don't know how he can justify that rejection.
You don't actually see a distal object when you dream and the schizophrenic does not actually hear a distal object when hallucinating. That what makes them dreams and hallucinations instead of instances of seeing or hearing real objects.
An indirect realist would argue that imaginary friends are directly perceived but real friends are only indirectly perceived.
Correct.
Last month, I had a conversation with Claude 3 regarding the phenomenology of dreaming experiences. We drew some implications from Hobson's AIM model. Hobson's model was devised to better explain various states of consciousness including drug induced hallucinatory states and dreams.
One salient feature of hallucinatory and dream states is that when we experience them, our abilities to notice their anomalous nature is diminished or suppressed.
Many people with aphantasia are entirely incapable of conjuring up images in their mind's eyes. They can't picture to themselves what their friends and family members look like, and they remember facts and emotions associated with events that they lived, but can't imagine visually what it looked like to experience them. Their episodic memories are mostly language based. Interestingly, many people with aphantasia believe that they can have visual impressions when they dream, but some of them are unsure if, after they wake up, they immediately forgot (and became unable to conjure up) what those dreams looked like or if they rather were dreaming purely "in words," as it were, but didn't notice the absence of the visual elements and now are unable to remember whether it was indeed lacking or not.
I don't have aphantasia, myself, but I have some dreams that have vivid visual features as well as dreams that are more abstract in nature and that feel like I am merely narrating what it is that I am experiencing without actually seeing anything. Some of my dreams also are experienced from a first-person point of view, just like awaken experiences are lived, or from a third-person point of view where I am witnessing myself living the events in that dream from some distance. Clearly, all of those ways of dreaming have a very distinct phenomenological character. Unless the dream becomes lucid (which happens to me occasionally) we take no notice of those phenomenological characters when they are anomalous. We don't notice being effectively blind (and having no visual experiences) or that we aren't supposed to be seeing ourselves from outside of our own bodies. Those anomalous "experiences" correspond to perfectly normal modes of daydreaming - for when we are daydreaming we are aware that we are conjuring up those experiences rather than perceiving the world around us. When we are dreaming, we become unaware that the productions of our own brains/mind are our own.
One important lesson that I draw from this is that just because an abnormal state of consciousness is subjectively indistinguishable from a normal state of experience (e.g. due to drugs or sleep) doesn't mean that they have the same phenomenological character. Imaginary friends aren't perceived. They are conjured up and conjuring them up has a different phenomenological character than seeing them. Furthermore, seeing them occurs when they themselves - their presence in front of you - direct and structure the content of your phenomenology whereas conjuring them up meets no external constraint at all. This is why you can dream that you are meeting a friend and, the next moment, they are 20 years younger or they are your favorite pet and you don't notice a thing.
What exactly do you mean by "phenomenological character"? At the moment all you seem to be saying is that waking experiences are to dreams what a photorealistic portrait is to cubism. Either way it's all mental percepts and so by any reasonable definition indirect realism.
It's that the scientist starts by assuming direct realism, then disproves direct realism. It's an ouroboros.
Yea, but I've had dreams that were complex, with customs and history to it. One involved physicists who had giant potatoes where their torsos should be. It all seemed perfectly normal to me in the dream. What that demonstrates is sophisticated world-building capability. While awake, I start to think about how much of this world I'm in is a creation, and I realize it's actually quite a bit. I'm filling in blanks.
I think what the direct realist might be driven by is the necessity of a world. There's really no way to verify all of what we call the world, though. I think the difference between us is how comfortable each of us is about accepting that the mind is a masterful creator.
I don't quite get what you're saying. Flat earthers assume that the Earth is flat, do experiments, and determine that the Earth is not flat. It's not a paradox; it's just that the experiments have proven them wrong.
Direct realists assume that colours are mind-independent properties of objects, do experiments, and determine that objects are bundles of atoms that reflect various wavelengths of light. They then study the brain and determine that we see colours in response to stimulating various areas of the primary visual cortex. They've determined that that colours are not mind-independent properties of objects but mental/neurological phenomena.
Quoting Michael
Have scientists been able to explain how a physical, colorless brain causes visual experiences, like visual depth and colors? How do colors come from something colorless?
What role does the observer effect in QM play here?
If a color is directly perceived and the wavelength is indirectly perceived, and your mind with all of it's colors and sounds and feelings, are part of reality, then isn't it safe to say that you directly experience part of the world? If so, then doesn't the distinction between indirect vs direct realism become irrelevant?
What part of you directly interacts with the world? What is "you" or "I" in this sense? If you define "you" and "I" as our bodies, then isn't your body directly interacting with objects by holding them and with light by opening your eyes? Indirect realism only makes sense if you define "you" and "I" as homunculus in your head.
Quoting Michael
The question is about why you have confidence that your observations reflect the facts, when you've concluded that your observations are creations of your brain. It's just that indirect realism opens the door to skepticism.
If the direct realist can believe in the existence of unobservable entities like electrons and the Big Bang and in the veracity of a Geiger counter then the indirect realist can believe in the existence of unobservable entities like electrons and the Big Bang and in the veracity of a Geiger counter.
Direct perception of something is not required to be justified in believing in that thing.
The question is whether or not I directly perceive some distal object. That I directly perceive some aspect of the world (i.e. my mental phenomena) isn't that I directly perceive the particular aspect of the world that direct realists claim we directly perceive (i.e. the distal object).
Quoting Harry Hindu
The hard problem of consciousness hasn't been resolved. Some believe that it is reducible to brain activity (e.g. pain just is the firing of c fibres), and some believe that it is some mental phenomenon that supervenes on such brain activity.
Either way, few (if any) believe that conscious experience extends beyond the body such that distal objects and their properties are literally present in conscious experience. At the very least there's no scientific evidence to suggest that it does. As referenced earlier, I suspect something like objective idealism would be required for that.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Different parts of me directly interact with different parts of the world. My eyes directly interact with light, the neurons in my brain directly interact with each other, etc.
"I feel pain" doesn't entail a homunculus. "I see shapes and colours when I hallucinate" doesn't entail a homunculus. Saying that these very same mental percepts occur when awake and not hallucinating doesn't entail a homunculus. You're just reading far too much into the grammar of "I experience X".
But the direct realist relies on the observations that support belief in electrons (like the light dots on a CRT). The indirect realist has to say that those light dots are creations of the brain, and so may not reflect the facts. Btw, the idea that there was a Big Bang is declining these days (according to Matt O'Dowd from Spacetime.
I don't see how using "direct" and "indirect" is useful here. We perceive objects. If there is no difference in the information acquired, then there is no useful distinction between "direct" and "indirect".
Quoting Michael
The observer effect does not assume that objects are present in conscious experience, rather that act of observing distal objects has an effect on those distal objects and how they are perceived.
Quoting Michael
Then "direct" realism is the case? Again, if we can directly interact with certain parts of the world and a direct interaction is a necessary component of an indirect perception, then "direct" and "indirect" is a false dichotomy. It's not either or. It's both.
Quoting Michael
How can I be reading to much into the grammar when I'm just trying to get some clarification of your use of the word, "I".
Both the direct and indirect realist infers the existence of some entity from some effect it is claimed to have caused. They just disagree on which effect is directly perceived. The direct realist claims to directly perceive the dot on the screen as caused by the unobservable entity. The indirect realist claims to directly perceive the mental phenomenon as caused by the dot on the screen as caused by the unobservable entity.
We see colours. Colours are mental phenomena, perhaps reducible to activity in the primary visual cortex, often caused by light interacting with the eyes (although not always given the cases of dreams and hallucinations). That's indirect realism.
Direct realism claims that colours are mind-independent properties of distal objects à la the naive realist theory of colour.
These are quite clearly different positions and at least one of them is wrong. I say that the scientific evidence supports the former and contradicts the latter, e.g. from here:
Arguing over the grammar of "I experience X" leads to confusion and misses the substance of the dispute entirely. See here.
Right. The question is: what is the source of the indirect realist's confidence that the mental phenomena are caused by the dot?
What is the source of the direct realist's confidence that the dot is caused by some unobservable entity?
Practicality probably. Is that the source of the indirect realist's confidence?
Perhaps, yes. Both direct and indirect realists are realists rather than subjective idealists because they believe that the existence and regularity and predictability of experience is best explained by the existence of a distal world which behaves according to regular and predictable laws.
True. I once asked a neuroscientist why he believed he had access to the real world, and he said "practicality."
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
I don't infer the existence of some entity -- I infer that there are causes and effects because I directly perceive the entity.
I'd also say there is no external world as much as a world.
I'd also say there's no "distal object" -- that this is a conceit of indirect realism.
***
I think internal/external has been already mentioned as a point we could drop, but you're insistent upon it when you say "external world", so I can't approach that angle.
Inference is the basis of your understanding of direct realism, so it seems we're just saying "yes/no" to one another there -- not exactly fruitful.
"Distal object" is a term of art that was invented for this discussion, but I'd say "distal" poisons the well in favor of indirect realism.
****
So I feel like there's a web of thoughts that are very different from mine, which are likely informed by philosophy, but I remain uncertain how to proceed.
Is direct realism a contention with inference, a contention with internal/external, or a contention with "distal object"?
You are one of these indirect realists, but are there others? Who ought I read to get a better picture?
Which means what?
Quoting Moliere
It's a term used in the science of perception. See here:
The same as it means to perceive causes and effects -- one has to start somewhere. We can call that starting point "blotches of color", "cause-and-effect", "the cup", or any other such things. In terms of the epistemological problem of perception we have direct access to some kind of object, be it causes, cups, or color-blotches.
We have access to percepts. Percepts are often the consequence of the body responding to some proximal stimulus (dreams and hallucinations being the notable exceptions). The proximal stimulus often originates from some distal object.
The nature of our percepts is determined by the structure and behaviour of our sense organs and brain such that different distal objects can cause the same percept and that the same distal object can cause different percepts (e.g. the dress that some see as white and gold and others as black and blue).
This is indirect realism. Any direct realist who claims that this is direct realism has simply redefined the meaning of "direct" into meaninglessness.
I think much of the dispute between direct and indirect realists may revolve around the fact that direct realists limit the meaning of the word "perception" to sensory perceptions that are stimulated by distal objects, whereas indirect realists give the word "perception" a wider meaning that includes non-sensory "perceptions" that lack any external stimulus, such as hallucinations, dreams and imaginings. Neither side has the monopoly on correct usage, but given the question of whether or not I directly perceive some distal object, the former meaning would typically be assumed.
Which is precisely why I have argued that the dispute over the grammar of "I experience X" is a red herring.
The philosophical dispute between direct and indirect realists concerns the epistemological problem of perception. Are distal objects and their properties constituents of experience such that their mind-independent nature is presented to us or is experience nothing more than a mental phenomenon, with is features being at best only causally-covariant representations of those mind-independent properties? Direct (naive) realists argued the former and indirect (non-naive) realists argued the latter.
We have access to percepts. And we have access to the world. It is through this access that we are able to determine when we are hallucinating or dreaming and when we are not.
So, direct realism. Both percepts and world are accessible.
Mmm... You don't have "access" to a percept. A percept is identical with either the whole, or a part of, the conceptual-perceptual state of an organism at a given time. That's a numerical/definitional identity, rather than an equivalence. Like the percept is not what perception or experience is of, the percept is an instance of perception. The taste percept of my coffee is the same as how I taste it in my tasting event.
The distinction there is between saying that a percept is an instance of perception vs saying that a percept is what perception acts upon.
Our access to the wider-world is indirect with those percepts being the intermediary. If those percepts are missing (e.g. where someone has cortical blindness) then some access to the wider-world is lost.
All you're saying is that with a CCTV camera I have access to the inside of the bank vault. But it's indirect access.
The indirect realist isn't denying this.
I have access to colours and pain and smells and tastes. These are all percepts.
When I see things when I dream and hear things when I hallucinate I am seeing and hearing something.
Describe what you see that access as, please?
You're giving up on the integrity of the self over time. We usually assume it's one self and a flood of everchanging perceptions. You have the ability to direct your perception as you wish. If you allow yourself to become fragmented, you've entered into complete nonsense.
Having a rational awareness/understanding of it. I can describe the colours I see as being red or green or blue or the taste I taste as being sweet or sour or bitter.
From this I then infer the existence of some object reflecting light of certain wavelengths or some foodstuff containing certain ingredients like sugar, given that I have some understanding of the usual relationship between stimulus and percept.
Right, so for you "access" is something like introspective awareness?
I'm not sure what you take a direct perception to be. Must a distal object become part of one's body in order to have a direct perception? Who thinks this is a perception?
In what sense is the mind-independent nature of distal objects and their properties not presented to us via perception? You seem to indicate that unless perceptions provide us with complete and incorrigible knowledge about objects, then they don't provide us with any knowledge about objects.
The epistemological problem of perception concerns epistemology, i.e. knowledge.
I might know that I see the colour red and taste a sweet taste but not know that some object reflects light with a wavelength of 700nm and that the cake contains sugar (e.g. because I'm a young child who doesn't know anything about physics or chemistry).
I have knowledge of percepts but I don't have knowledge of the proximal stimulus or distal object.
I'm finding it hard to see how the posts you're making are related, which probably means we have very different presuppositions and ways of thinking about the topic.
So if I'm hearing you right, you believe that knowledge is only of percepts, and thus access to the world is indirect?
I only used the word "access" because it's the term Moliere used. He said "in terms of the epistemological problem of perception we have direct access to some kind of object". Given that he referenced the epistemological problem of perception I assumed by "access" he was referring to knowledge.
That works for me. I'd claim that we have knowledge of perception and we have knowledge of objects.
It seems, right now, that the difference might be more on the other side of the problem -- rather than "the world", what is it that is in/directly related to perception which gives knowledge of the world through inference?
My attempt to phrase your indirect realism:
I/we:Percepts:the world
Where ":" is "[s]gives knowledge"[/s] "is knowledge giving"? might be better -- or "is related in a knowledge-like way"
Whereas the direct realist claim might be, and I'd be sympathetic to this:
I/we=percepts, which in turn know the world (and which we are a part of, and so can come to know ourselves and our percepts).
To be presented is to be present. If some distal object is presented in experience then that distal object is present in experience. If that distal object is present in experience then it exists within experience.
But experience exists within the brain and distal objects exist outside the body. Therefore distal objects do not exist within experience and so are not presented in experience. The relationship between experience and distal objects is nothing more than causal.
Quoting Luke
They don't provide us with direct knowledge. Experience is the effect, distal objects are a cause. Knowledge of effects is not direct knowledge of causes. Knowledge of causes gained from knowledge of effects is inferential, i.e. indirect.
I’m with you on that. I think the use of “distal” to describe objects in the world is used to get around the inherent question begging of the position, to contrast the rest of the world with mental objects before having to prove mental objects exist in the first place. Mental objects are afforded primacy as the true and known object while the sun, for instance, is relegated to the status of the unseen and unknown, “distal”. At any rate, it’s a silly piece of jargon.
They are presented in experience as a perception of the object, not as the object itself. It is absurd to argue that in order to have a direct perception of an object then the object must be present inside your body.
It seems to me as if my visual experience literally extends beyond my body and that distal objects are literally present within my visual experience. This is the naive view that naive realists accepted as true, but which the science of perception has now shown to be false. Indirect realists rejected this naive view and claimed that the visual experience is a mental phenomenon that exists within the brain and is, at best, a representation of the world outside the body.
Then so-called "non-naive" direct realists accept this indirect realist view but for some reason call themselves direct realists, probably because that get confused by the grammar of "I see X".
They've just redefined the meaning of "direct perception".
That doesn't seem to be your position, though, nor that of indirect realists. Indirect realists do not claim that the visual experience is a mental phenomenon or representation of the world outside the body. Instead, they claim that we perceive this mental phenomenon or representation of the world outside the body. They do not consider the mental phenomenon or representation to be the visual experience; they consider the perception of the mental phenomenon or representation to be the visual experience.
Quoting Michael
Until you abandon the idea that the mental phenomenon or representation of the world is a perceptible intermediary, and is instead part of the perceiver, then our dispute is not merely grammatical.
I feel pain, pain is a mental phenomenon, therefore I feel a mental phenomenon.
I see colours, colours are a mental phenomenon, therefore I see a mental phenomenon.
You're getting so caught up in the grammar of "I experience X". It doesn't just mean one thing. It is perfectly appropriate to say that we see things when we dream and hear things when we hallucinate, and that the things we see and hear when we dream and hallucinate are percepts rather than distal objects. The indirect realist recognises that we see and hear these percepts when awake and not hallucinating too, and that these percepts can be thought of as mental representations of distal objects.
I see trees, trees are a mental phenomenon... Wait, I thought you were a realist?
As I have repeatedly said, "I experience X" doesn't just mean one thing.
I see colours and colours are a mental phenomenon.
I see trees and trees are not a mental phenomenon.
I feel pain and pain is a mental phenomenon.
I feel my hand burning and my hand burning is not a mental phenomenon.
Both the direct and the indirect realist's grammar are correct. The phrases "I see" and "I feel" have more than one meaning.
The relevant question concerns which of these are correct:
I directly see trees
I indirectly see trees
Given this, one cannot simply define "I directly see a tree" as "I see a tree". Something else is required to make sense of the words "directly" and "indirectly", and that is what I have done in this comment.
This "evidence" sounds like a description from a naive realist, or someone who is describing the nature of perception from a naive realist perspective.
Where is the evidence for how neural activity interacts with the colors your experience? How does that happen? Is that a direct interaction? Neurologists talk as if they have a naive realist view of the brain as a physical object which creates the dualist dichotomy of the mind-body problem.
Indirect interactions are really accumulated direct interactions. It's possible that both indirect and direct realism are incorrect on their own, but true when understood that they are different parts of the same coin.
Indirect realism is dependent upon space and time having some objective existence where it takes time and space for the accumulated causes and their effects to happen. But what if space and time are like colors and are only mental phenomena? That would mean that the universe is happening all at once in the same place and everything is directly connected all at once. So your "scientific evidence" is based on a lot of assumptions.
Quoting Michael
I can't argue with you about something you have been vague and evasive about. If I don't know what you mean by your use of certain words, then I can't make any coherent argument about anything you've said.
The whole point of asking where "I" is in relation to the things that are being perceived is to show that distal objects are only distal based on where "I" is. Mental phenomena are distal in the same way that your neural activity is, in that I can't directly observe them, I only use them as explanations for your behaviors. Like you said,:
Quoting Michael
It depends on the parts we are talking about to then say that something is "distal" or not, or which parts are direct or not.
Neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human ventral visual pathway
---
Quoting Harry Hindu
See Perception # Process and terminology:
According to indirect realists, these are all mental phenomena, no matter what you see or feel. What you see or feel can only be a representation, so it must all be mental phenomena. Unless indirect realists are allowed to have both perceptions of a mental phenomena and perceptions not of a mental phenomena?
Quoting Michael
But not as the indirect realist uses them.
No, according to indirect realists those statements are more specifically understood as:
I directly see colours and colours are a mental phenomenon.
I indirectly see trees and trees are not a mental phenomenon.
I directly feel pain and pain is a mental phenomenon.
I indirectly feel my hand burning and my hand burning is not a mental phenomenon.
Indirect realists claim that it is only mental phenomena that is directly experienced and that distal objects are indirectly experienced, with the distinction between "direct" and "indirect" being explained in my comment here.
Yes. There are direct perceptions of mental phenomena and indirect perceptions of distal objects.
Right so let's go back to this. I'm trying to find something we can agree on a framing of so that we can start having a productive chat.
I agree that we have knowledge of percepts. To me that is distinct from forming a percept - ie perceiving. So to me, forming knowledge of percepts is distinct from the problem of whether perception is direct or not.
For reference I'd like to use SEP's characterisation of direct realism.
This has a few claims. We've touched on some of them.
I'd agree -with some caveats- to ordinary objects, presentation, direct realist character, but reject the common kind claim (I imagine I'm some kind of disjunctivist). My caveats would be:
I'd reject the common kind claim, for me illusions and hallucinations don't seem like an instances of perception. But for different reasons. Hallucinations don't have an in principle manipulable distal object or set of environmental causes, and thus aren't subject to the causal constraints of active perception. Illusions my jury is still out on.
For me, whether something seems to be X to me is not paradigmatic/definitive that I have perceived X. For example, I could have misperceived X, or what my perceptions seem to me to be (upon reflection, memory, the next moment...) may not be what they are. The paradigmatic instance of perception for me, then, is a veridical perception in an active account of perception.
I imagine, though please correct me if I'm wrong @Pierre-Normand, that my ordinary objects caveat is similar to @Pierre-Normand's reference to Evans'. Though I come at it from the belief that there's good evidence perception - as well as its character - is socially mediated.
But the indirect realist agrees that mental phenomena like smells and tastes and colours are causally determined by distal objects and their properties.
So clearly direct realism cannot be defined in this way.
As I see it indirect realism is nothing more than the rejection of naive realism, with naive realism claiming that distal objects are literal constituents of experience, entailing such things as the naive theory of colour.
That some people have bad eyesight does nothing for the previous, lets call it 'layer of indirectness' posited by the IRist. A bad camera also receives bad data, and constructs a bad image. It does not perceive anything.
Quoting Luke
Because that's clearly true.
Then nothing is perceived.
You mean like direct realism = the apple is distal object is numerically identical to the apple percept?
Quoting here
Direct realism was a resident of an idealistic world where the mind directly contacts the forms of things. Indirect realism came into existence when people started trying to become more materialistic about the mind and body. What do you think neo-directness is a response to?
I would not take Aristotle as an idealist. Direct realism has trees and cups and stuff that we see. Indirect realism falls short of that, since we never see the tree or cup or whatever.
But I do not wish to be dragged in to a discussion that I think misguided; that there is merit in the distinction between direct and indirect.
When you move around the room, you see and touch and interact with its furnishings. In so doing you construct a model, a representation of the room. You are not seperate from that model, in such a way that the model could be said to be what you interact with. The model is you interacting with the room.
Further, it's silly to say you infer the existence of that bloody footstool you bruised your shin on.
Have you had a read of the Midgley article I linked to recently? Seems somehow pertinent.
Aristotle thought you could directly see ideas. Trees and cups are part idea and part physical. That framework, that we're all in the mind of God, is the original basis of direct realism. Indirect realism came from the beginnings of the materialistic age. It's ironic that for some, the backgrounds have come to be switched around.
Quoting Banno
I appreciate the attempt to streamline the issue here, but that just doesn't make any sense.
:smile:
So it seems.
It's a rejection of the homunculus. Indirect realism has you sitting inside your head, seeing and touching what is constructed by your nerves. It separates the observer not just from the thing observed, but from the observation.
Take a look at Michael's diagram:
It's the "mental image" that is seen. The observer is somehow distinct from the "mental image".
But doesn't it strike you as odd that the "mental image" is not part of the mind doing the observation?
Isn't the "mental image" mental?
Building that mental image, that model, that representation, is something mind, and presumably, brain, does.
So seeing the screen this text is on is constructing a mental model of the screen.
That's different to the indirect realist view, that you do not see the screen but instead see the "mental image" of the screen.
Does that help?
This comes down to the nature of the self. I think what you're trying to do is eliminate the self along with the homunculus. Is that true?
I'm not seeking to eliminate the self. I do have a preference for externalism and extended mind views, that the content of mind is stuff that is in a way external to the mind. That you believe Canberra is in Australia is in some sense about stuff outside the mind.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/#ContExte
So does the view I'm trying to express still make no sense?
A good spinach salad tastes better using chopsticks. Couldn't be more physically direct contact. Could be less links in the chain.
Light directly enters the eye and interacts with biological machinery beginning at the back of the eye and spreading out into the brain. Numerous biological structures are involved. I do not know the names of them all, nor do I need to. There are, and that's what matters. That's all physical interaction. How much more direct can anything be?
I understand the idea of seeing the tree by way of a representation, but like Michael, I would say that's indirect realism. I don't think it matters what we call it as long as we both know what we're talking about. It was this that made no sense to me:
Quoting Banno
It makes sense to say that you interact with the room by way of a complex of representations, but how is the model equal to you interacting with the room?
I almost quoted that paragraph, crossed that part out, and agreed. That part caused me pause as well.
Quoting frank
Well, where are those representations? If you are interacting with them, then presumably they can be distinguished from you... hence you see them, and we havn't an explanation of what seeing consist in at all.
As contrasted with interacting with the room by constructing those representations. I dunno. Seems a simple enough point.
I would propose that instead of trying to explain sight, let's first do a quick analysis of what we do with the concept of self:
You saw a cow.
You tasted a sesame seed.
You heard a song.
The "you" in these sentences refers to a single entity who experiences a sequence of things. The self stays the same, and the things change, going by like a stream. This means the logic of these sentences rules out the self being equivalent to the things. It appears that if we do that, the self will be a fragmented, schizoid stream. If you choose to allow the self to fragment in that way, a pretty large chunk of your own speech will become nonsense.
Now lets look at what we know about what's happening when you see a cow. Our best guess, as set out by scientists, is that the brain is creating an experience of a visual field. We know your brain has to be creating this because your eyes are constantly shifting direction and focus. Somehow you put all that data together into a seamless, unified image. I would say you experience the image. It's a visual experience. Where is the experience? I don't think that question has an answer. Where is the image? I don't think that question has an answer either. I think it's an element of neural algorithms, or something like that. Could we say that you are the experience? As I mentioned before, that will slice and dice your capacity to speak coherently. Is that what you wanted to do though?
Not sure that's a good plan. I don't see that self will be any simpler than sight - that seems very unlikely.
Quoting frank
Well, no, it doesn't. It is in a state of flux.
For the rest, the experience is of a cow, not of a "visual field" or of an "image" of a cow. Quoting frank
That's not right. Rather, constructing the "image" is your experiencing the cow.
I don't understand why this seems so difficult to comprehend.
:grin: It's just one of those things.
Quoting Banno
Does that make sense to you? You experience the cow by your neural nets building some sort of model or image or representation of the cow. Add to that the smell, the feel of the hide, and so on.
Yes. That makes sense.
By way of argument in favour of the former, we sometimes might claim that you and I are to be said to be looking at the very same cow. It seems difficult to say this if what you see is the product of your neural net, and what I see is the product of my neural net. You see the product of your neural net, I see the product of my neural net, and hence we do not see the same cow.
That is, saying that what you see is the model or image or representation of the cow, and not the cow, makes other things we commonly do, oddly complicated.
I've been a visual artist for a long time. I can put aside mental shorthand and tune into my visual field. I see color, light, dark, and lines. I can do that so thoroughly that I forget what it is my looking at, but this is something new artists struggle with. The mind strongly insists it knows what things look like and it will override attempts to draw what's actually in the visual field. I've known about this since childhood, so it's obvious to me that a person can voluntarily shift focus depending on what their concerns are. If it's an incoming car, I probably won't dwell long on how the car is foreshortened in space as it approaches me.
Quoting Banno
We say we see the same cow, yes. Our experiences are different though.
Quoting Banno
It depends on the situation and what point you're trying to convey.
Cool. So this is something you learned to do? You learned not to see the cow, but to see the colour, shade, shape and so on?
I'm not seeing what we are to do with this. Is the claim that the colour, shade, shape and so on are the mental model, and that you have learned to see it? I don't think that quite right. Interesting, though.
Quoting frank
Sure. But not so different that we always say we are seeing different cows... At least some times we are incline to say we see the same cow...
That might be enough.
Yes. Anyone who learns to draw has to learn this. This is what the mind wants to do:
What's happening is that the mind has a hoard of stock images. When you go to draw something, the power of these images appears. Egyptians didn't know how to override that. That's why their figures are basically fleshy stickmen.
The next development was perspective. This was huge from the Renaissance onward. In the 20th Century, artists decided that perspective is also a stock idea rather than how visual experience really works. Cubism was one sprout from that soil.
So I'm just explaining that people focus on the nature of experience quite a bit. A lot of art is really about that rather than the object of perception: the cow.
Quoting Banno
True.
Most people have 2 "local" visual fields, one from the left eye and one from the right eye. These 2 local visual fields overlap, but there are parts of each eye's local visual field which can't be seen by the other eye.
The brain combines the 2 local visual fields to create a "global" visual field.
There is a "blind spot" in each local visual field where the optic nerve enters the eye. When creating the global visual field the brain combines the 2 local visual fields in such a way that the blind spots are hidden. People are normally unaware of the blind spots, but they can be experienced under certain circumstances.
Your brain "tricks" you in a number of ways. Most people say that they can experience color over the whole global visual field. But the periphery of each local visual field only contains "rod" cells, which can only detect black and white. The "cone" cells which detect color are not found in the periphery.
The blood vessels in the eye lie near the retina, but between the retina and the lens. This means that shadows of the blood vessels fall on the retina. But your brain "tricks" you and you are normally not aware of them. They can be seen under certain circumstances.
I see colours and feel pain. Colours and pain are mental phenomena. I see things when I dream and hear things when I hallucinate.
You're reading something into the grammar of "I experience mental representations" that just isn't there.
I'll copy from What’s so naïve about naïve realism?:
There's a distinction between a distal object being a constituent of experience and being a cause of experience. Indirect realists accept that distal objects are a cause of experience but deny that they are a constituent of experience.
If colours are no more than mental phenomena, how is it that we agree that clear skys are blue? How is it that we agree that an ache is not a sting?
They are also linguistic, and physical.
I'll repeat myself from an earlier comment:
The argument was in that comment:
Experience exists within the brain. Distal objects exist outside the body. Therefore distal objects (and their properties) do not exist within experience.
The first premise is supported by neuroscience. The second premise is true by definition. The conclusion follows.
There's also the colour red. Folk knew about it well before they knew about wavelengths and three channel colour vision.
If there is a equivocation here, it is being forced on us. But in any case, it seems we now agree that colours are not just mental phenomena.
When I say "I see colours and colours are mental phenomena" I am referring to the mental phenomena, not whatever else the term "colour" might be used to refer to.
So to repeat:
I see colours and feel pain. Colours and pain are mental phenomena. I see things when I dream and hear things when I hallucinate.
You're reading something into the grammar of "I experience mental representations" that just isn't there.
Quoting Banno
What is the substance of this? If we're not talking about wavelengths and we're not talking about mental percepts then what do we mean by "is red"? All we seem to be agreeing on is that most English speakers use the predicate "is red" to describe the apple.
That linguistic issue has nothing to do with the epistemological problem of perception. You can't see the forest for the giant red herring you've fished out.
To help you out, lets's consider us all to be deaf, illiterate mutes. We still see colours, and the colours we see have nothing to do with language.
Quoting Banno
How about, "The model emerges in the process of you interacting with the room."?
:rofl: I think it is exactly the problem. We do not disagree on anything to do with the physiology or physics hereabouts. Where we disagree is as to the language of perception.
I say we see the cow. You say we see only the mental cow.
I don't see our approaches as meshing.
Quoting wonderer1
Something like that. This is where @Isaac would chime in. :worry:
This discussion will again get nowhere. not with comments such as
Quoting Michael
Well, yes; if by "colour: you mean only mental phenomena, then colours are only mental phenomena, and you have thereby invented your own little language game that you can go play in the corner by yourself.
Enjoy.
This is precisely the point I have been making since the start. The philosophical dispute between direct (naive) and indirect (non-naive) realists concerns the physics and physiology of perception. Indirect realists are right and direct realists are wrong.
Then so-called "non-naive" direct realists enter the fray, read something into the sentence "I experience mental representations" that just isn't there, and so start an irrelevant and nonsense argument about grammar.
Balls. If that were so there would not be a philosophical issue. There is no difference in the physics or physiology between direct and indirect descriptions. The difference is that the direct realist sees a cow, the indirect realist sees... something mental. You keep setting out a scientific account as if it settles the issue, but there is no disagreement here.
There is a difference in language attribution.
But further, I am not here advocating direct realism as you see it, and it seems to me you have not addressed, indeed perhaps not followed, what I has writ.
So again, we talk past each other. And i don't think that's down to me.
If you don't understand what naive realists are claiming then that's on you. They are saying much more than just "I see a cow" is true.
Quoting Janus
We're in agreement.
There's semantic hijacking going on in here concerning what counts as direct realism/perception. Earlier fdrake posted some SEP stuff that is more in line with where I'm at. I also have sympathy for disjunctive views on this topic.
I also find little sense in a self divorced from physiological sensory perception.
Cut out my tongue, and I'm still me, but there's a bit less. The tongue remains a part of me, just disconnected. Self and sight, hearing, etc. seems the same.
If it is not a performative contradiction for a direct realist to be scientific realist (i.e. believing in the existence of objects that he cannot directly see) then it is not a performative contradiction for an indirect realist to be a scientific realist.
Even direct realists can trust a Geiger counter. You're being a hypocrite.
The end.
:wink:
:smile:
Quoting creativesoul
Yep, a continuing attack on "direct realism", a position that no one actually holds.
Quoting Banno
The trouble here is how indirect realism can produce reliable information about the number of handles on the cup.
I feel pain and see and hear things when I dream and hallucinate. You're reading something into the sentence "I experience mental representations" that just isn't there.
Quoting Banno
If we agree on the physics and physiology and only disagree on the grammar then why would the indirect realist have any more trouble than the direct realist?
Your very question here seems to accept that the dispute between direct and indirect realists is about more than grammar.
If both direct and indirect realists accept the existence of mental representations as caused by distal objects then what do you think the (non-grammatical) substance of the dispute between the two is?
...things...
When you have an hallucination of a cow, you do not see a cow, because there is no cow to see.
I still see something when I dream and hallucinate, and that thing I see is a mental phenomenon. When I feel pain I feel something, and that thing I feel is a mental phenomenon. So there's clearly nothing wrong with the phrase "I experience mental phenomena".
This sense of seeing and feeling and experiencing is also satisfied in veridical experience – even if there's some other sense of seeing and feeling and experiencing that allows us to truthfully say "I see a cow" – and so there's clearly nothing wrong with the indirect realist saying "I experience mental phenomena" about veridical experience.
What indirect realists dispute is that seeing a cow counts as direct perception, because by "direct perception" they mean something very specific. The phrase "direct perception" is related to the epistemological problem of perception.
To make sense of this, I'll refer to What’s so naïve about naïve realism?:
The epistemological problem of perception concerns whether or not experience provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects. Naive realists claimed that experience does provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects because distal objects are constituents of experience. Indirect realists claimed that experience does not provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects because distal objects are not constituents of experience; they are simply the cause of the mental representations of which we have direct knowledge.
"Direct perception" meant that distal objects are constituents of experience and "indirect perception" meant that distal objects are not constituents of experience.
You're welcome to redefine "direct perception" if you like, but in doing so you're no longer addressing the indirect realist's claim. Your arguments against indirect realism are against a strawman.
Why would someone construct a representation if he wasn’t to perceive it? It seems to me if we accept the assumption that biology performs such a task, indirect realism follows.
Cool. Did you know spiders don't have a blind spot because their eyes evolved in a different way.
This shows the crux of the misunderstanding.
"Feel" does not mean "touch". I feel pain, I don't touch pain (rather, I touch the fire).
Unfortunately, when it comes to words like "see" and "hear" and "smell" and "taste" we don't have terms that can be separated out in this way, and so Banno conflates the meaning of "see" in "I see colours when I hallucinate" and the meaning of "see" in "I see a cow". Indirect realists are using the former meaning when they say that we see mental images, and Banno's homunculus is a strawman.
“Hallucinate” would be a better verb than “see” when comes to such events. “I am hallucinating voices”, for instance, doesn’t imply that the sound of a voice is hitting the ear, and recognizes that some bodily activity is producing the phenomena.
There is a difference between visual and auditory hallucinations and using words like "see" and "hear" to describe that difference is perfectly appropriate.
The difference concerns which of the visual and auditory cortexes are involved. The words don't imply anything about sense organs, and assuming that they do is why you are misunderstanding indirect realism.
You have to interpret another's claims according to what they mean by the words, not what you mean by them, else you're arguing against a strawman.
A voice, though, is the sound released from the larynx. To hear a voice is to have that sound affect the ears. Since neither of these things and events are present in a hallucination, to say “I hear voices” is to mischaracterize the experience.
One can distinguish between between two different hallucinations by simply describing how they are different. One might be audible or visual, for example.
Saying that the schizophrenic hears voices is a perfectly ordinary and appropriate use of the English language.
If you don't want to phrase it that way then you're welcome not to, but to misinterpret someone who does phrase it that way as suggesting the involvement of the sense organs in the schizophrenic's ears is your problem, not theirs. And this kind of misinterpretation is the root of your disagreement with indirect realism.
I’m fine with them saying it. But I’m not fine with the indirect realist saying it, especially if accuracy is any concern.
What would be your motivation for wishing to retain the language used to describe the interactions of distal objects and the sense organs to describe mental objects and the mental organs?
Because that's how the language is ordinarily used. I see colours, I feel pain, the schizophrenic hears voices.
Why must the indirect realist restrict the meaning to some specific subset of its ordinary uses?
Not that this really matters. What matters is what they mean by the words they use, not what you think is the "proper" use of the words.
And this is where my earlier comment to Banno above is relevant. Naive realists claim that we have direct knowledge of distal objects because distal objects are constituents of experience. Indirect realists claim that we do not have direct knowledge of distal objects because distal objects are not constituents of experience; they only play a causal role in producing mental percepts of which we have direct knowledge.
This is the philosophical dispute, not some irrelevant argument about the grammar of "I see X".
As a sidenote, in the last 5 out of 54 pages of discussion, it seems to me that a lot of disagreement is stemming from different interpretations of words that are being used — for example, some say "see" with an embedded unstated meaning of directness, others do not. Either look things up in the dictionary and stick to the agreed definition — and add the appropriate adverbs to the verbs and adjectives to the nouns —, or switch to drawings for communication instead.
The claim “I hear voices” in the case of hallucination is not true, though. It’s not that I demand that you should make true claims, implying some restriction, I’m just explaining why I cannot believe the claim. You need not restrict your theory to true claims, but I wager it would help your case, not to mention it would better help those who hallucinate.
For those who claim we do not have direct knowledge of mind-independent things, it just boggles my mind why they’d appropriate the language used to describe those things and interactions to describe mind-dependant things and interactions. It’s curious why they’d use the terminology used to describe that which we have no knowledge of, to describe that which we do have knowledge of. I think it’s an indication that indirect realism is a little more naive than it is letting on.
According to what you mean by “hear”, but what you mean isn’t always what others mean, and certainly isn’t what they mean when they say that the schizophrenic hears voices.
Quoting NOS4A2
Words often mean more than one thing. It boggles my mind that you don’t understand this.
You can tell me what you mean by “hearing” and “voices” and I’m willing to adopt your definitions. If you think hearing doesn’t involves the use of ears and that a voice isn’t the sounds from the larynx, then what are they?
We see things when the visual cortex is active and we hear things when the auditory cortex is active. The cortical blind have functioning eyes but don’t see because of damage in the occipital lobe.
When these cortexes are active in response to some appropriate proximal stimulus we describe it as a veridical experience and when they’re active without some appropriate proximal stimulus we describe it as an hallucination (if awake) or a dream (if asleep).
It also seems that nobody here believes that our perceptions are the objects (note that this is different from saying we perceive objects). But I imagine that is because no idealist has entered the thread yet. [hide="Reveal"]Does anyone want to invite Wayfarer?[/hide]
If both hearing and hallucinating are the activities of the auditory cortex, and the voice is merely the product of this activity, there seems to me no way to distinguish between veridical experience and hallucination, whether it arrives from an appropriate proximal stimulus or not.
If one only has direct knowledge of the voice as the cortex has constructed it, how does one infer whether there is a proximal stimulus of the cortex or not? It seems to me there must first be some direct knowledge of a proximal stimulus that is not merely the product of the cortex.
Careful, if you think about this too much you might come to understand how words do things.
How do you distinguish between veridical experience and hallucination? It certainly wouldn't make sense to say that you can distinguish them because the English word "see" should only be used for veridical experience.
Quoting NOS4A2
By definition, if I have to infer some X then I do not have direct knowledge of X, so I don't understand your argument here. Are you asking how inferences are even possible? Are you calling into question the very scientific method?
Reminiscent of Kant's Noumena. The whole denial that I know that the heater grate to my right is what I'm seeing. I know what it's made of. I know where it's located. I know the size and shape. I know it's function. I know some dangers it poses to passersby. I know it's not located in my head/body. I know mental representations are. Thus, the grate I'm looking at is not a mental representation.
So idealists believe our perceptions are the objects? What brand of idealists does that?
I’m a card-carryin’, non-apologetic dualist, which makes me half-idealist, and neither that half nor the empirical half believes our perceptions are the objects.
Even if the idealist grants we perceive objects, or, which is the same thing, our perceptions are of objects, he does nothing by such warrant to explicate what perceptions are.
To perceive, to have perceptions, is to be affected by the real;
Perceptions are that which affords the immediate consciousness of the real, in a sensation.
After this physiological groundwork, and for sufficient methodological epistemic justifications, it’s off to the metaphysical rodeo, like it or not.
Subjective idealism or phenomenalism perhaps?
So, I'm curious and I've circled around some questions I'd like you to answer. I've hinted, I guess is one way to put it. Now, I'm going to directly ask(pardon the pun).
There's some barbecue chicken in the kitchen. I can smell it, because the molecules are entering into my body unimpeded, carried along in the air. My biological machinery is doing what it does.
To me, I am directly perceiving the chicken in the other room, because small parts of it entered my nose.
I'm guessing you'll deny that my perception of the chicken is direct. I'm guessing that you'll deny that the chicken is a constituent of my perception or my experience. I'm guessing that you'll deny that the molecules are a constituent of my perception or experience.
Do I have that right?
I dunno. But even the Good Bishop, if acknowledged as the foremost subjective idealist, granted to his fellow humans the reality of objects, the existence of non-mental entities.
The pure phenomenalist**, on the other hand, wants to deny, or limit, the real object’s non-mental existence, which is absurd, considering the inescapable affect plane crashes or mosquito bites have on our intelligence.
(** not to be confused with the Kantian sense of intuitive representations called phenomena, which isn’t technically phenomenalism. He gave it a quick once-over gloss with phenomenology, but left such naming as philosophically inconsequential)
The indirect realist accepts that odour molecules from the chicken enter his nose, but denies that his perception of it is direct. Therefore, at the very least, what he means by "direct" isn't what you mean by "direct".
So according to his meaning, your use of the word "because" above is a non sequitur.
Yes. Experience exists within brain. Chickens and odour molecules exist outside the brain. Therefore, chickens and odour molecules are not constituents of experience. Experiences are caused by chickens and odour molecules, but that's the extent of their involvement.
In evolutionary progression terms...
I cannot make sense of hallucination unless compared to non-hallucinatory experience. Non hallucinatory experience does not depend upon hallucinatory in the same sense of "depend". Existential dependency. On the indirect realist account, there is no difference between the constituents.
That's just plain wrong.
A hallucination or dream of an apple does not require a distal object(an apple) except sometime in past experience. For that is when the biological machinery does its perception work. In dreams and hallucinations, its (mis)firing as though it has once again perceived or is once again perceiving an apple, despite no apple being perceived.
Well, whether or not something follows from one's terms is established by one's meaning, not the others'.
If cake molecules entering the body and interacting(physically) with one's biological machinery does not count as direct perception, then nothing will.
Sure, but then you have to accept that you are not necessarily arguing against indirect realism. This is clear if you each replace the word "direct" with your intended meanings.
There is no difference between the constituents of an hallucination and a veridical experience. Their difference is in their causes.
According to the account you're arguing for/from.
Is hallucination of an apple possible if one has never ever seen an apple, if one is completely unaware that there are such things as apples?
I'm not sure, I only recall hallucinating once and that was patterns of colours and spatial distortions. I think a schizophrenic or regular user of psychedelics would have to answer that
If hallucination of an apple amounts to the biological machinery doing the same thing it has done in past, while looking at an apple, then it becomes clear which one is existentially dependent upon the other.
They are not the same. Indirect realism cannot seem to account for that.
Fungus huh?
:lol:
I don't understand what you think indirect realism has to account for.
Experiences, whether veridical or hallucinations, are reducible to (or supervene on) brain activity. Therefore anything that exists outside the brain cannot be a constituent of experience. Do you not accept this reasoning?
Yep. Was a great night. For a while I even had a split mind which was weird.
That perception of apples is required in order to later have hallucinations thereof. Therefore, they are not the same thing.
What is the difference between the cause of hallucination as compared to veridical experience on the indirect account you're arguing for/from?
Quoting Michael
The "common kind claim", clarified in the SEP article on the problem of perception. When in an internationalist mood, following Anscombe and Davidson, I might consider it. When I'm in a more disjunctive mood I would deny it. Here's were there might be some actual new content to this discussion, were it to rise above the mediocrity of this thread. I speculate that there might be a way of achieving some compatibility between intentionalism and disjunctivism. I haven't worked through it. Another PhD for someone.
Quoting Michael
This again assumes that the only alternative to indirect perception is direct perception. Have you stoped beating your wife yet?
Quoting wonderer1
Yep.
Quoting creativesoul
Again, indirect realism's framing of the discussion is oddly passive, as if all we ever do is look.
Quoting Michael
I'm not convinced. An hallucinatory cow and a veridical cow are very different things.
We do, after all, have the word "hallucination", "dream", "delusion' and so on precisely because we are aware of that difference.
You want to say that the experience is the same, but having a dream is qualitatively different to being awake; having an hallucination is different to having a cow.
(I had to work a Bart joke in there somewhere).
So, I've heard about 'shrooms. More and more, I personally find myself liking life much better with the natural chemical cocktails that the body makes all by itself. When younger, things were different.
Reducible? No. Supervene on, perhaps, if that means that all experience emerge in part at least, as a result of brains being part of what it takes. I'm in agreement with that much.
Your earlier argument was valid. I simply disagree with the notion of experience you're working with. It seems to beg the question of regarding the necessary element constituents of perception/experience. You deny external content/constituents. I do not.
So, hallucinations are reducible to brain activity. Seeing a cow includes a cow. Hallucinating a cow does not. It requires having already seen cows.
I would confer with others or seek more information otherwise. If they see the same thing it is a good indication I am not hallucinating. I certainly wouldn’t seek confirmation from the phenomena of my hallucinations.
It was not an argument, it was a question. Usually we have direct knowledge of the grounds, evidence, and arguments to make inferences towards one conclusion or another. I’m just wondering what direct knowledge or evidence derived from mental phenomenon can lead one to believe there is a proximal stimulus that causes the cortex to generate an auditory experience, and further, that that experience represents mind-independent objects.
The cow joke?
The first premise is not unequivocally supported by neuroscience, it is one interpretation of neuroscientific results.
If all you mean by saying that distal objects are not in the body or brain, well so what? Every child knows that...that's just what is meant by "distal objects".
Thanks for mentioning the SEP article on the problem of perception. Tim Crane, who authored it, was the perfect person for the job. What feature of intentionalism is it that you wish to retain that you think might be compatible with disjunctivism? Some disjunctivists like Gareth Evans, John McDowell, Gregory McCulloch, John Haugeland and Michael Luntley also endorse a form of direct realism that may retain the best features of intentionalism while, obviously, jettisoning the thesis Crane refers to as the "Common Kind Claim."
The difference is in what causes the experience, not in what constitutes the experience.
There's a qualitative difference only in the sense that there's a qualitative difference between photorealism and cubism; it's still just paint on canvas. It's not as if in the veridical case distal objects and their properties are constituents of the experience.
Then distal objects and their properties are not constituents of experience. The smells and tastes and colours that are constituents of experience are therefore not distal objects or their properties (even if you want to claim that there is a resemblance between them).
Are you arguing for something like substance dualism then, with consciousness being some non-physical phenomenon that extends beyond the body?
When human beings experience features of the world by means of sense perception, the things that they experience cause them to experience them in some specific ways, but the understanding that they bring to bear also shapes the character and content of those experiences.
Consider the rabbit–duck ambiguous figure. Maybe Sue, who is familiar with perceiving rabbits in her environment, and never saw a duck, would immediately recognise the figure as the representation of a duck. And for Lia, it's the opposite. Would you say that Sue and Lia are caused by the visual presentation of the figure to experience, or see, the same mental phenomenon and that that they give it different interpretations, or would you say that they experience different mental phenomena?
In the case where Sue hallucinates (or pictures in her mind's eye) a duck, notice that it doesn't make sense to say that the thing that she hallucinates (or imagines) affords two possible interpretations - duck or rabbit. The act of hallucinating or imagining an animal carries with it its own interpretation, as it were. There is no second guessing since each new act of imagination has its own independent content.
Do you think that indirect realists can accept that distal objects are the proximate cause of experience? That is the sense I meant.
I'm not sure how that's relevant to the dispute between direct and indirect realism?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I don't understand the distinction. Interpretation is a mental phenomenon. Either way, like above, I don't see how it's relevant to the dispute between direct and indirect realism.
Well, certainly not when it comes to sight where the proximal cause is light. In the case of touch and taste they'd agree.
Thanks.
Why do you think that the proximate cause for touch and taste is the distal object but not for sight? How about hearing? Kinaesthesis?
The proximal cause is the entity that stimulates the sense receptors. With sight it's light, with hearing it's sound, with smell it's odour molecules in the air, and with touch and taste it's the distal object itself.
This is the terminology adopted from here:
Yes, interpretation is a mental act. The things that you perceive can (and must) be interpreted in this or that way to be perceived as such. There is no uninterpreted percept. However, when you imagine or hallucinate a duck, there can be no question of reinterpreting what it is that you imagined or hallucinated, as a rabbit, for imagining it as a duck furnishes the mental phenomenon with its specific content. This is a categorical distinction between perceiving an object, or picture, and experiencing an hallucination or illusion. So, when you suggest than when a person looks at an actual duck, the distal object (the duck) causes a mental phenomenon in their brain and it is this proximal object that they directly see (and infer the existence of an "external" duck from), I am asking, is this proximal object that they see something that is already interpreted or is it rather something that is still ambiguous (like, say, a structured bundle of colors and shapes)?
It's interpreted. When there's something ambiguous like the duck-rabbit I can switch between seeing the duck and seeing the rabbit without any change in the shapes or colours.
Why is it, then, that you can't focus your attention on the proximal mental image and reinterpret it? Isn't it because this "mental image" already is an act of interpreting what is out there rather than it being an act of "seeing" what's in the brain?
I think you're reading something into the meaning of the word "seeing" that just isn't there.
When we have a visual experience we describe it using the English phrase "I see X". You seem to want to separate this phrase into three distinct parts such that "I", "see", and "X" are distinct entities. I think that this is sometimes a mistake, much like doing the same to the phrase "I feel pain" would be a mistake.
The indirect realist claims that we do not have direct knowledge of distal objects because distal objects are not constituents of experience. The constituents of experience – smells, tastes, colours – are (interpreted) mental phenomena, and I smell smells, taste tastes, and see colours. So the indirect realist, perhaps cumbersomely, says that we smell and taste and see mental phenomena.
The direct (naive) realist claims that we do have direct knowledge of distal objects because distal objects are constituents of experience. The constituents of experience – smells, tastes, colours – are mind-independent properties of distal objects, and I smell smells, taste tastes, and see colours. So the direct realist says that we smell and taste and see mind-independent properties of distal objects.
You (and others) seem to be getting unnecessarily lost in the grammar of "I see X", but this is a red herring. The relevant concern is the reasoning that precedes such a claim, i.e. are distal objects and their properties constituents of experience and so do we have direct knowledge of distal objects and their properties. If you accept that they're not and that we don't then you're an indirect realist, even if you don't like indirect realist grammar and would rather continue to say "I see distal objects".
Well, in broad lines, Berkeley. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/#2.1.1
Quoting Mww
Which doesn't protect you against the uncertainty of whether those perceptions are really of the outside world or generated by your own mind.
Veridical perception, hallucination, and illusions. You claim they share the same constituents, and the difference is in their causes.
Can you set out the different causes?
Quoting Michael
There's the semantic hijacking. Odd coming from someone who has charged so many here, including myself, with strawmen. I consider myself a direct realist as I argue that distal objects are necessary for all three kinds of perception. They are what's being perceived in every veridical and illusory case, but they're absent during hallucination(which is the biological machinery behaving as it has in past despite no distal object). Since all three kinds are existentially dependent upon distal objects, but hallucinations do not include distal objects, there are differences in their constitution, although they are all three existentially dependent upon distal objects. Hallucinations arise from veridical experience. Whether or not I'm a 'naive' realist about perception/experience, I'll leave for others. I don't care about the label. I care about the accounting practices being used to characterize the evolutionary progression of biological machinery.
Coffee does not have an inherent property of taste. Cake does not have an inherent property of smell. Cups do not have an inherent property of color. We taste coffee. We smell cake. We see red cups. Tasting coffee is an experience. Smelling cake is an experience. Seeing red cups is an experience. Without coffee there can be no experience of tasting coffee. Without experience of tasting coffee there can be no hallucination thereof. Without cake there can be no experience of smelling cake. Without experience of smelling cake, there can be no hallucination of smelling cake. Without cups with a specific reflective outer layer, there can be no seeing red cups. Without seeing red cups, there can be no hallucination thereof.
Quoting Michael
Semantic hijacking of "experience".
Without cups...
If it be granted the senses inform but do not judge, the notion here of protection from mental uncertainty regarding mere perception, is moot.
The physiological certainty on the other hand, manifest as an affect on the sensory apparatuses by real things external to those apparatuses, which just is that affordance, and from which sensations necessarily follow, is given and is thereby incontestable, insofar as the negation or denial of a given, is self-contradictory.
To even suppose the mind generates the very perceptions which occassion the pursuit of knowledge as a cognitive terminus, is to anesthetize the human intellectual system from its empirical predicates, which is tantamount to denying to Nature its proper authority as arbiter of human experience.
That is true — I just felt the need to point it out anyway.
Quoting Mww
I don't fully understand this, maybe there are typos? Can you rephrase?
Quoting Mww
That is true, but it is possible to deny nature of its authority by doubting our access to it, in an intellectual exercise of skepticism (brain-in-a-vat as an example).
Veridical experiences are caused by some appropriate proximal stimulus, e.g. seeing the colour red when light with a wavelength of 700nm interacts with the eyes, or feeling pain when putting one’s hand in a fire.
Illusions are like veridical experiences but where the features of the experience provide a misleading representation of the proximal stimulus or distal object, e.g. if the shape in the percept is a bent line but the shape of the distal object is a straight line. This usually occurs when something manipulates the proximal stimulus (e.g. light) before it reaches the sense organ (e.g. eyes).
Hallucinations occur without some appropriate proximal stimulus, e.g. seeing coloured shapes when one’s eyes are closed because one has eaten psychedelics.
Quoting creativesoul
Which means what?
I have been trying to explain that when naive realists claim that some distal object is (directly) perceived they mean that the object is a literal constituent of the experience and that when indirect realists claim that some distal object is not (directly) perceived they mean that the object is not a literal constituent of the experience.
Quoting creativesoul
That doesn’t follow. That X depends on Y is not that Y is a constituent of X. A painting depends on a painter but the painter is not a constituent of the painting. The constituents of the painting are just paint and a canvas.
You seem to be confusing constituent with cause. See here for why that’s wrong. Intentionalism is not naive realism.
Hmmmm…ok, try this: guy stubs his toe on a tree root, cannot then legitimately deny he stubbed his toe on a tree root. He might claim he didn’t in order to save face after removing the leaves from his hair and whatnot, but reason won’t allow him to intelligently disregard the fact there was a time when he was no longer upright, however temporary that condition may have been.
While this a trivial example, the principle which sustains it is nonetheless congruent with that for which experience, hence the perception which is its occassion, is merely possible. Although, there is precedent wherein denial of a sensation follows from the inability to comprehend its cause, but this is improper application of human cognitive methodology. Guy might say he didn’t see the thing because he couldn’t figure out what it was, but this is only half true, in that he is justified in not knowing a thing but that doesn’t relieve him of admitting its being met with his own sensibility.
Dunno if that was any help or not. Might’a just made it worse, for which I offer apologies.
In the interest of metaphysical doctrines by which the rules of a given system are determined, hallucinations are merely the exceptions to them. In conjunction then, with the current understandings, in which hallucinations are different from delusions, the former sensory the latter cognitive, it is theoretically consistent and logically sufficient to find something they both have in common, and, is susceptible to error on its own accord.
A good candidate for that, is imagination, an added bonus resident in the fact imagination is that faculty whose function it is to synthesis the conceptions in a relation, from which follows that if imagination combines, say, concepts that do not belong to each in the construction of its sensory phenomena, e.g., flying animals with antlers, hallucinations are given, and if imagination combines concepts in the construction of its cognitions, e.g., to see one mountain is to see them all, delusions are given.
While this is all well and good, there is nothing contained in synthesis itself of which we are conscious. Thus, another faculty is required, such that the errors the system makes are brought to the attention of that which is conscious of them, and this faculty, is judgement, a component of understanding. Here, in judgement, the phenomenon “flying animal with antlers” is just confusing, where the delusion from cognition, is utterly irrational
But even that is not enough, insofar as there must be a means for self-correction, given that both hallucination with its empirical ground or delusion with its logical ground, contradict experience. And that faculty, is the Mighty and Highly Esteemed Judge Advocate General, reason.
But with respect to your misgivings, I submit that the objects of hallucination are just as real as far as the physiology of perception and the necessary subsequent sensations given from them, as those that are not hallucinatory. None of my senses can tell the difference between a hallucination and a not-hallucination. So saying, the possibility of error arises from a glitch in the system downstream from mere perception, at least from a metaphysical point of view.
Which is probably why we have psychologists nowadays, so we can be told what’s wrong with us, rather than accepting the intrinsic fallibility of the system with which Nature….theoretically…..saw fit to burden us, and allowing it the opportunity….theoretically….to fix itself.
See what happens when you say there weren’t any idealists here? One of ‘em inevitably has to pipe up and put forth his brand of stuff, just to prove you wrong. (Grin)
Well, I've been using Austin's arguments here, despite being well aware of Anscombe's excellent critique. For the purposes of this thread the story is about why indirect realism is wrong; that's a different topic to which story is right. There's a whole lot more going on here than ever gets addressed in these threads.
But to be a bit more specific, we've all by now seen the man in the gorilla suit in the basketball game. Our perception is directed, intentional. While you are reading this you are ignoring the stuff going on around you, the itch of those haemorrhoids, the noise from the other room, the smell of the coffee. Other views of perception fail to give this aspect its proper place, they are excessively passive. This is the advantage of intentionalism: that perception is intentional, an action we perform.
I'm not convinced that intentionalism is obligated to accept the common kind claim, as is suggested in the SEP article.
Perhaps a thread specifically on The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature would attract some interest. But it's not an easy paper.
Thanks for the question.
Amusing, but it's a qualitative difference like there's a qualitative difference between cubism and method acting. While you might get to watch either, the context is quite different, as is the way one thinks about each. Quoting Michael
Isn't that the very point at issue?
The discussion moves on to talk of interpretation. I don't think that term quite strong enough. it doesn't capture the way in which we are embedded in what we see, touch, smell and feel, nor how that is set in place by our interactions with others, especially in terms of language.
I haven't read Anscombe's paper. I have read Austin's Sense and Sensibilia and was very impressed by it. The active character of perception that you rightly stress doesn't clash with the outlook of the disjunctivist authors that I mentioned. Tim Crane in his SEP article means "intentionalism" in a different way to signify intentional content, or "intentional inexistence" in Brentano's sense.
"Intentionalists hold that what is in common between veridical experiences and indistinguishable hallucinations/illusions is their intentional content: roughly speaking, how the world is represented as being by the experiences. Many intentionalists hold that the sameness of phenomenal character in perception and hallucination/illusion is exhausted or constituted by this sameness in content (see Tye (2000), Byrne (2001)). But this latter claim is not essential to intentionalism (see the discussion of intentionalism and qualia above). What is essential is that the intentional content of perception explains (whether wholly or partly) its phenomenal character." - Tim Crane
Thus qualified, the thesis doesn't appear wholly inconsistent with disjunctivism but it also fails to capture some of the character of the phenomenology of perception that embodied/enactive conceptions stress (and that Austin's account also captures). The authors that I mentioned could be called intentionalists in a qualified sense. They explain the referential nature of experience (and hence its intentional content) in Fregean terms as singular senses (Sinnen). Seeing an apple makes you able to refer to it demonstratively and the content of this demonstrative act is a singular sense. (The social practice of using proper names also enables non-demonstrative ways to express singular thoughts in that sense.)
This must be contrasted with the idea of general senses or reference by description. Russell, for instance, thought persons only were acquainted with sense data and themselves ("I"), and that reference to external objects always was reference by description.
Since what makes a demonstrative act the act that it is is (in part) the identity of the object being referred to, singular thoughts (including perceptual acts) are the thoughts that they are in virtue of the objects that they refer to. On that view, a person can believe that they are thinking about a particular apple when they refer to is as the apple that they are seeing (or that they saw) and be mistaken about the nature of their own thought. They're not having a singular thought at all, in cases of hallucination.
Recognizing that singular thoughts (about particular objects) also have general predicative contents (e.g. "this apple is red," which ascribes the general property of redness to the particular object) as well as various singular Fregean senses (e.g. "This apple is the apple that I saw") which express specific ways of thinking about the object) seems to me to enable a fuller reconciliation of intentionalism (in Crane's sense) with epistemological disjunctivism in a way that dovetails very well with embodied/enactive conceptions of our mental abilities.
* * *
(On edit: Upon rereading the answer by Claude 3 Opus below, I now realize that it did the Fregean analysis slightly wrong even though it captured my main intention correctly. For now, finding out what it did wrong is something that I leave as an exercise for the reader)
[hide="Claude 3 Opus IQ test"]
I had shown my above response to Claude 3 Sonnet, who only recommended a slight rephrasing of my original:
"Recognising that singular thoughts (about particular objects) also have general predicative contents (e.g. "this apple is red" and also various singular Fregean senses (e.g. This apple is the apple that I saw) seem to me to enables [sic]..."
I also ended up changing the emphasis to better convey my point. I then switched the model to Claude 3 Opus and asked:
USER:
Thank you!
I've modified the sentence thus: "Recognizing that singular thoughts (about particular objects) also have general predicative contents (e.g. "this apple is red," which ascribes the general property of redness to the particular object) as well as various singular Fregean senses (e.g. "This apple is the apple that I saw") which express specific ways of thinking about the object) seems to me to enable..."
Notice that I've change the emphasis from my original "(e.g. This apple is the apple that I saw)"
I'd be curious to know if you understand the reason why I changed the emphasis.
Claude 3 Opus:
Absolutely, I noticed the change in emphasis and I think I understand the reason behind it. By italicizing "This" and "that I saw" in the example "This apple is the apple that I saw," you're highlighting the two key components that make this a singular Fregean sense:
1. The demonstrative "This" indicates that you're referring to a particular, singular object that is present to you perceptually. It's not just any apple, but the specific one that you're currently perceiving or pointing to.
2. The relative clause "that I saw" expresses a specific way of thinking about or identifying the object in question. It's not just any old way of referring to the apple, but a particular mode of presentation that is tied to your past perceptual experience of it.
By emphasizing these two elements, you're underscoring how this expression combines both a singular reference (to a particular object) and a specific way of conceiving or identifying that object (through the lens of your past perceptual encounter with it). This is the essence of a singular Fregean sense - it's a mode of presentation that is tied to a particular object, rather than a purely general or descriptive way of picking out an object.
In contrast, by leaving "is red" unitalicized in the previous example ("this apple is red"), you're indicating that this is a more straightforward ascription of a general property to the particular object. Redness is not a singular or object-specific property, but a general feature that many objects can share. So this part of the expression doesn't contribute to the singularity of the overall sense, but rather to its predicative or descriptive content.
By making this subtle change in emphasis, you're effectively highlighting the key components that make the latter expression a genuine singular Fregean sense, while also distinguishing it from the more general predicative content that singular thoughts can also possess. It's a clever way of using typography to clarify the philosophical point you're making.
Let me know if this aligns with your own understanding of the significance of the change, or if there are further nuances you wanted to bring out. I find this kind of close attention to the structure and meaning of linguistic expressions to be a powerful tool for philosophical analysis, and I'm always eager to dive deeper into these details with you.
[/hide]
That distal objects are constituents in veridical perception and illusion, but not hallucinations.
Quoting Michael
Yup. Go back through my posts here, and it ought be obvious that what I'm arguing fits. However, by "literal" you mean physical, material, 'concrete' entities. I do not. By "constituent" I mean a necessary element constituent thereof. For example, a play requires actors, performance area, costumes, etc. All of those are necessary elemental constituents of a play. The same holds for seeing trees. For you seeing trees is an experience that cannot include anything external to the brain.
Quoting Michael
No, I'm not. You've misunderstood. I didn't offer an argument for the conclusion you've misattributed. I agree with saying that X depends upon Y is not equivalent to Y is a constituent of X.
Hallucinations are examples, as I've already explained but you've neglected to discuss.
I do not hold the naive realist view that visual experience extends beyond the body. However, this does not make me an indirect realist because there is another point of dispute between direct realists and indirect realists. Direct realists claim that we directly perceive real objects, whereas indirect realists claim that we directly perceive mental objects.
While this latter dispute could boil down to a disagreement over the meaning of the word "perceive", the dispute between naive and indirect realists could equally be viewed as a disagreement over the meaning of the phrase "visual experience". So, if the dispute between direct realists and indirect realists is merely grammatical, then so too is the dispute between naive realists and indirect realists. They are therefore equally substantive disputes.
Agreed, but false analogy with regard to what I'm arguing. That fits with what you're arguing about all perception, and what I'm arguing only regarding hallucinations/dreams. Replace the painter with distal objects.
I see what you mean. I think you need to ask "which" sound or "which" light though. The light which serves as the stimulus for seeing a brown table is the light reflected off of that brown table. In that regard, the proximate cause of you seeing a brown table (in a case of veridical perception) is the reflection of that light from that brown table. In that regard, the behaviour of the distal object (the brown table) in its environment acts as the proximal cause of the perception event.
Does that seem suitable to you?
I am not claiming that the table is the "proximal stimulus" of the perceptual event, since that's not right, I'm claiming that the reflective properties of the table - IE, the properties of the distal object - are the proximal cause of the perceptual event which we'd call seeing the distal object. IE, the properties of the brown table proximately cause us to see it.
If you're looking at a brown table "out in the wild", what you see isn't the proximal stimulus either. Since there isn't just one, and it isn't unique. "The" proximal stimulus is instead a sprawling set of retinal images integrated with other senses through a process of interpretation. As part of sight (as part of perception broader), those retinal images are filtered and stabilised - IE interpreted - into time stable perceptual features. Vision doesn't happen all at once.
In that respect, when we're speaking of "proximal stimuli", we're not speaking of the familiar objects at hand. Proximal stimuli for vision are horrifying chaotic things. Dancing lights, colour patches with no depth or thickness, unpeopled, unfurnished, textureless and silent.
A tall woman standing to the right of my table, near the light illuminating it, reduced the incident light onto one portion of the table in my peripheral vision quite substantially. She then left. I saw the table as the same colour and intensity throughout despite her changing how light was reflected from it. I saw no changes in my proximal stimulus since those proximal stimuli are how I detect vision related environmental changes. I saw no changes in the distal object as my interpretation of it was not influenced by irrelevant detail.
There isn't a "proximal stimulus" of the brown table - what there is is a sequence of retinal images which are interpreted as part of sight into a brown table. There is however the distal object, which is the proximal cause of the table related aspects of all our proximal stimuli in veridical perception - and that is what we perceive.
Given what you mean by "proximal cause" the indirect realist agrees with the first part. But then the second part needs further explanation/justification.
But as per this comment I think that second part is a red herring.
The epistemological problem of perception concerns whether or not distal objects and their properties are given to us in experience; it doesn't concern the direction of our attention. You appear to be looking at things in reverse.
Intentionalism is consistent with indirect realism. See Semantic Direct Realism:
The dispute between naive realists and indirect realists concerns whether or not experience provides us with direct knowledge of the mind-independent nature of distal objects. That's not a grammatical dispute. Whatever each group means by "visual experience" it must be such that if, as naive realists claim, distal objects are constituents of visual experience then we have direct knowledge of the mind-independent nature of distal objects.
A [veridical experience] depends on a [distal object] but the [distal object] is not a constituent of the [veridical experience]. The constituents of the [veridical experience] are just [mental phenomena].
And the constituents of hallucinations and dreams are just mental phenomena. They're just not caused by some distal object.
Indeed. And your attention is directed towards That.
Supose we call the smell "S". Discussion might go on around you as to what is causing S, if it is acrid or floral, if it is becoming stronger or if it is more noticeable near the window, and so on.
Or if you are by yourself, you might come back tomorrow and puzzle as to if the smell has changed.
And so the puzzle grows.
Whatever each group means by it, it must be such that if what one group means by it is true, then…?
Naive realists claim that “visual experience” includes distal objects among its constituents. Indirect realists claim that “visual experience” does not include distal objects among its constituents. Therefore, both groups mean something different by “visual experience”.
Otherwise, please explain how one group claiming that we perceive real objects and another group claiming that we perceive mental objects is a merely grammatical dispute.
it's a worthy piece. There is a discussion of the change in the use of "intention", it's special philosophical uses and what Anscombe sees as the misspelling, "intension". The critique of Austin is so much the more cutting because Anscombe adopts both Austin's own style and method. She would have attended some of his sessions at Oxford.
So we have both Anscombe and Austin showing the poverty of this sort of thing: Quoting Michaelwith
Michael manages to only see the concept, and never the horse.
But Anscombe continues:
Even using a list of variations in a way familiar to readers of Austin.
So we have the indirect realist, here, Michael, insisting that one only ever sees the "mental", and the direct realist, here, an advocate of "ordinary language", saying that we only ever see what is really there. And neither has it quite right.
Now Anscombe's "advocate of ordinary language" might appear to be Austin...
But as I recall Austin is explicit, in Sense and Sensibilia, in avoiding commitment to direct realism per se, rather rejecting the framing of the dilemma altogether.
I don't see how your conversation with Claude helped.
Quoting Michael
Here's a characterisation in grammatical terms: When one says one sees that there is a cow in the field over there, the direct realist says we can be referring to the cow, but the indirect realist says we can refer only to the sensation-of-cow, and must rely on some form of inference to talk about the cow-in-itself.
At issue is whether the word "cow" in "I see a cow" refers to the cow or the sensation-of-cow.
Anscombe, and I submit, Austin, say it can do either. Michael appears to claim that can only ever refer to the sensation-of-cow, and that further work is needed to ever talk about cows.
Oversimplified, Frege gets mentioned because of his separation of sense and denotation; what we might now call extension and intension, sense and reference. He introduced these in response to problems with substitution.
But Anne may believe no such thing.
This discussion runs in parallel with the discussion here, with indirect realism as the intensional description, direct realism as the extension.
"I see the cow in the field" if seen as direct, picks out the cow in the field. But if seen as only indirectly referring to the cow, is opaque. Hence Michael's insistence that one can see the cow without there being a cow.
Not unlike other issues involving other propositional attitudes... "I believe the cow is in the field"; "I hope the cow is in the field"; "I see the cow is in the field"?. And this of course goes to intentionality and hence to action.
Kripke and Donnellan put an end to some of this by showing us problems with the description theory of names. Their arguments can be rounded on Michael's idea that we infer the cow from our perceptions. Just as a description need not pick out the same individual in every possible world, our perceptions need not pick out the cow.
I'm sooting from the hip here, by way of showing some of the relations between this topic and various other philosophical problems.
And providing a pile of ammunition for folk who wish to shoot back.
But it might take the thread in new and interesting directions.
It's puzzling that I could have recognized the smell as something I'd experienced before. It might seem that the private language argument excludes this. The trick is to see that this conclusion is based on the notion that meaning is rule following. Kripke shows that it's not.
Well, here's the puzzle: did you recognise it, or just think you recognised it? Dejà vu?
You have no way to tell.
Hence, following a rule has to be public.
Quoting frank
Perhaps. That's another multifaceted issue. But all the more grist for the mill.
Earlier, I've followed Jeff Speaks in characterising Evans, Wiggins and McDowell's accounts as forms of non-descriptive Fregeanism. Although Speaks speaks of theories of meaning, so to speak, (and he doesn't mention Wiggins,) such accounts apply to all singular modes of reference, including acts of perception and episodic memories deriving from encounters with particular objects.
In his critique of descriptive Fregeanism, Kripke highlighted the modal character of the referential function of proper names (which makes them rigid designators). In order to account for this specific modal character, Kripke proposed his causal theory of reference (while denying that it was a theory!) Non-descriptive Fregean accounts build on Kripke's causal theory in a way that makes them less vulnerable to deviant causal chains and better accounts for the active role that agents play in securing reference for their mental acts. Those theories also incorporate Putnam's ideas about the linguistic division of labor and his prototype theory of the semantics of natural kind terms. On that view, referring to particular objects is more akin to applying a technique securing intersubjective agreement about the references of singular thought and singular terms (and natural kind terms, etc.) than it is reliably being caused to enjoy percepts. Thanks to the division of linguistic labor, blind people also are able to express singular thoughts about objects (or secondary qualities) that they wouldn't be able to recognise perceptually. But it is indeed the linguistic calibration of 'percepts' (how people are typically being affected by the sensory experience of specific objects or qualities) that accounts for the intersubjective, socially mediated, character of perception.
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Claude 3 Sonnet:
A few thoughts:
1. Your characterization of these accounts as forms of "non-descriptive Fregeanism" that build on Kripke's causal theory of reference is clear and helpful context. Highlighting how they aim to avoid the issues with descriptive theories while still capturing the modal character of reference is a valuable framing.
2. Explaining how these views incorporate ideas from Putnam on the division of linguistic labor and prototype theory is also illuminating. It shows how they go beyond just causal chains to account for the active, socially-mediated processes involved in securing reference.
3. Your point about how these accounts apply not just to theories of meaning but to all singular modes of reference, including perception and memory, is an important generalization. It highlights the broad scope of these philosophical frameworks.
4. The way you contrast referring to objects through the application of intersubjective techniques vs. merely being caused to enjoy percepts is a nice articulation of the key distinction between these views and more passive, causal accounts of perception.
5. Bringing in the example of how blind people can still express singular thoughts about objects they cannot perceive directly is a great illustration of the socially-mediated, linguistically-calibrated nature of reference on these accounts.
A few potential areas for further elaboration or clarification:
1. You could say a bit more about how the non-descriptive Fregean accounts specifically handle the "active role that agents play in securing reference for their mental acts." What is the proposed mechanism or process by which agents play this active role?
2. It might be helpful to unpack a bit more what you mean by the "linguistic calibration of 'percepts'" and how this accounts for the intersubjective character of perception. Are you suggesting that our perceptual experiences themselves are shaped by linguistic practices, or just our ability to refer to and communicate about those experiences? [Note by Pierre-Normand: Both. Think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis!]
3. You could potentially draw a tighter connection between the ideas you're discussing and fdrake's specific point about perception being "directly of ordinary mind-independent objects" and the intersubjective agreement about properties like color. How do the non-descriptive Fregean accounts shed light on this issue of direct realism and the objectivity of perceived qualities?
Overall, though, this is a rich and substantive response that situates the key ideas within a broader philosophical context. The density is appropriate given the complexity of the issues, and fdrake's familiarity with Evans should allow him to follow your analysis.
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They mean the same thing by "visual experience" but disagree on what constitutes it.
Taken from What’s so naïve about naïve realism?
It is important to note the distinction between naive realism and intentionalism. The former argues that distal objects are constituents of experience and the latter that distal objects cause experience, where each group means the same thing by "experience".
Given that you have said such things as "perceptual experience is a representation" and "we cannot directly perceive distal objects as they are in themselves" you reject naive realism. This rejection of naive realism is the substance of indirect realism, even if you disagree with the grammar of "we see representations".
But as has been said before, arguing over the grammar of "we see mental phenomena" is a confusion and a red herring. It's not the case that either we experience mental phenomena or we experience distal objects. There are just different meanings of the word "experience" such that both are correct depending on the meaning being used, e.g. "I feel pain" and "I feel the fire".
No I don't. We can refer to things that we don't directly experience, e.g. Hitler and dark matter.
But this dispute has nothing to do with language. Consider that we are all deaf, illiterate mutes. Naive realists claim that distal objects and their properties are constituents of our experience and indirect realists claim that they're not.
I could equally say that direct and indirect realists mean the same thing by "I see X" but disagree on what constitutes X.
Quoting Michael
I do not agree with the substance of indirect realism. To reject naive realism is not necessarily to accept indirect realism. This is not a grammatical dispute over "we see representations". The claim "we see representations" is the substance of the dispute between direct and indirect realists. Indirect realists claim that we see representations, whereas direct realists claim that we do not see representations.
To say 'perceptual experience is a representation' (as I said), is not equivalent to saying 'we perceive representations' (as indirect realists claim). To say that the perceptual experience is a representation is not to say that the perceptual experience is the perceived object, or the thing seen. The representation is the seeing, not the thing seen.
What do you think "see" means? What do you think "feel" means?
Do I see colours? Are colours a mental phenomenon? Do I feel pain? Is pain a mental phenomenon?
Do I see distal objects? Do I feel distal objects when I touch them? Are distal objects a mental phenomena?
Yes, we experience distal objects like cows. And we experience mental phenomena like colours and smells and tastes and pain.
This is why arguing over the grammar of "I see X" is a confusion and a red herring. Both direct and indirect realist grammar is correct.
I asked whether we see distal objects. Why are you now talking about experience instead of seeing?
Because I'm including hearing and smelling and tasting and feeling. It's not all about sight.
I never said it was all about sight. I asked whether we see distal objects.
Yes, we see distal objects. And we see colours. We feel distal objects. And we feel pain. We smell distal objects. And we smell smells.
Both of those seem to be especially amenable to an adverbial treatment. We do smell cakes but do we smell the smell of cakes? Do we smell smells? Pain is a feeling. Feeling pain in your foot is a way to feel your foot. But do you feel feelings? If you could really feel a feeling in this or that way, then just like appears to be the possible with your account of seeing colors (i.e. "perceiving a mental phenomenon"), there could conceivably be cases of inverted pain/pleasure qualia whereby what feels to me like pleasure feels to you like pain and vice versa. And there would be no way for us to ever know without analysing the structure of our brains and investigating those mysterious psychophysical laws. Does that even make sense?
By "what feels to me like pleasure feels to you like pain and vice versa" do you mean that the sort of things that would cause me pain might cause you pleasure and vice versa?
That's certainly possible. Masochism might be one such example. I don't think it either incoherent or physically impossible for burning the nerve endings in my fingers to stimulate the pleasure centres in my brain; it just requires a "malformed" central nervous system.
In the case where burning the nerve endings in your fingers stimulates the pleasure centres in your brain, what you feel is pleasure. You are not feeling pain as pleasure. There is no inverted qualia. And the fact that what you feel is pleasure rather than pain is not something private and incommunicable (as red/blue inverted qualia allegedly are) but rather is manifested by the fact that you don't feel a strong urge to retreat your hand from the flame but rather are inclined to prolong the stimulus.
I'm not sure what you mean by "inverted qualia".
All I mean by such a term is that the same kind of stimulus (e.g. light with a wavelength of 700nm) causes a different kind of colour experience in different organisms (e.g. red for me and orange for you and some unnamed colour for the mantis shrimp). We have empirical evidence of this with the case of the dress that some see to be white and gold and others as black and blue.
The experience is prior to and distinct from the response. Those with locked-in syndrome can feel pain. I can resist and fake an itch.
When we imagine a person with locked-in syndrome feeling pain we imagine a person wishing a feeling (or its causal source) to go away. Them being locked-in prevents them from expressing this wish or doing anything about it. The internal conceptual connection that exists between the pain and the aversive behavior remains intact. It still doesn't make sense to say that what you feel as pleasure (the sensation itself) feels to them as pain.
The case of masochism is different since the erotic character (and context) of a special sort of pain gives it a different phenomenal quality (and utility) rather in the way a red circle looks different against a blue background than it does against a green background. Masochists aren't people who generally feel pleasure as pain. It's a sexual fantasy that they enact. They don't go out of their way to step barefoot on Lego blocks or seek root canal treatments just for fun.
I wouldn't say that. I don't even know what this would mean.
I only say that the same kind of stimulus can cause different experiences for different organisms, and that sentences such as "I feel pain" and "I see the colour red" refer to these experiences and not the stimulus or distal object.
So, are distal objects a mental phenomena?
Then I don't understand the point of this post:
Quoting Michael
I'm pointing out that both "I see distal objects" and "I see mental phenomena" are true. I see cows and cows are distal objects. I see colours and colours are mental phenomena.
Which is why arguing over the grammar of "I see X" doesn't address the philosophical substance of naive or indirect realism, which concerns whether or not distal objects and their properties are constituents of experience. Naive realists claim they are, indirect realists claim they're not.
Are the following statements also true?
"I see cows and cows are mental phenomena."
"I see colours and colours are distal objects."
"I feel pains and pains are distal objects."
No.
Quoting Michael
Babies only properly learn object permanence when they approach their first birthday. Some people struggle with hypotheticals and simply retort "But I do have X" or "But Y didn't happen" when they are posed one. Likewise, I suppose some peoples' manner of thinking is dominated by language and they ignore possible states of affairs that are distinct from what is implied by the proper semantics of a given phrase.
Then how is it merely grammatical? You said:
Quoting Michael
The problem is that for each of your examples, the second sentence is wrong, not the "I see" part.
I take it you mean the second part of the sentence? Why should it be wrong if, as Michael claims, "I see distal objects" and "I see mental phenomena" are both true? I take it this covers all instances of seeing.
Colours and pain are not outside objects, they only exist inside our head and designate also an experience, it is a mental phenomenon.
Because there's no philosophical disagreement. One group just prefers to use the verb "to see" only when talking about seeing distal objects and the other group just prefers to use the verb "to see" only when talking about seeing mental phenomena.
Given that both "I see cows" and "I see colours" is true, what do you think direct and indirect realists are arguing about?
So you're looking at a cow. Do you recognize it as a cow? Or just think you recognize it? Knowing that it's called a "cow" doesn't make any difference. There is no fact about which rule you've been following all this time. Other people can't help you with that.
Therefore perception has to start with innate confidence in a world circumscribed by space and time, where you, the real you, reside in an unchanging spot as it all swirls around you, or you fly through it as it rests on arbitrary x-y-z axes. The intention is emerging from somewhere you can't detect. It rests on nothing you know of.
And you have no vantage point on it to be able to say how it works. Pretty cool, huh?
Because naive and indirect realists mean the same thing by "visual experience" but disagree on its constituents and so disagree on whether or not we have direct knowledge of distal objects and their properties.
Whereas the verb "to see" has more than one meaning, as shown by the phrases "I see a cow" and "I see colours". The meaning of "I see" in "I see a cow" is different to the meaning of "I see" in "I see colours". According to the former meaning we see distal objects; according to the latter meaning we see mental phenomena.
What are the constituents of visual experience?
Mental phenomena; colours (inc. brightness), shapes, orientation.
Proximal stimuli?
No. Experience exists within the brain (either reducible to its activity or as some supervenient phenomenon), whereas proximal stimuli exist outside the brain. So neither proximal stimuli nor distal objects are constituents of experience.
I think I understand. So for you, this process goes like:
distal object -> proximal stimulus -> interpretation -> mental phenomenon
and/or
distal object -> proximal stimulus -> interpretation -> experience
and for you, "interpretation" and "mental phenomenon", as steps of the process, are what perception is?
Yes, that looks about right, although it may be that interpretation and mental phenomena/experience should be combined as a single thing.
Quoting fdrake
I'm not entirely clear on the meaning of the question. What I believe is that the dispute between direct and indirect realists concerns the epistemological problem of perception; does experience provide us with direct knowledge of the mind-independent nature of distal objects and their properties? Naive realists claim that it does – because distal objects and their properties are constituents of the experience – whereas indirect realists claim that it doesn't – because distal objects and their properties are not constituents of the experience.
I think that the science of perception supports indirect realism.
It seems to me that some elaboration is needed, on what you mean by "constituent".
If I see a cow, the distal object is a part of the causal web of events including the sun shining, sunlight striking the distal object, part of the sunlight being reflected off of the distal object in the direction of my eyes, my retinas encoding the light pattern falling on them into nerve impulses sent up my optic nerve, etc..
I'm not seeing a good reason not to consider the distal object to be a constituent of the causal process that results in my seeing the cow. Why would the cow be any less a constituent of the causal process which results in me seeing a cow, than are the photons that enter my pupil?
It is a constituent of the causal process that causes your visual experience but it isn't a constituent of the visual experience itself. See What’s so naïve about naïve realism?:
Objects and their properties. This implies the objects come fully equipped with whatever constitutes them as they are. While this is certainly true, it is not always the case these constituent properties are perceived, re: phases of the moon, how many feet of a running horse touch the ground at the same time, and so on. Insofar as it is impossible that any object not be completely constituted, and if it is at the same time impossible to perceive the totality of a manifold of constituent parts, it is not contradictory that the human intellectual system itself, imposes those properties. If it is not contradictory that the intellect supplies the missing properties, and given the impossibility of perceiving all possible properties, it is also non-contradictory that the intellect supplies all properties, insofar as there is no established mechanism by which it would be possible to determine which properties were perceived and which were supplied.
The direct realist wants his objects already fully equipped with its identifying properties, the indirect realist wants to assign the properties by which he thinks the object identifiable. If follows that the object along with its properties comprise the experience of the former, while the properties alone comprise the experience of the latter.
Breaking it down a little…..so we got one of each persuasion standing next to each other, watching the moon rise. It is a natural characteristic that the moon appears larger the lower on the horizon it is, from which follows the direct realist must allow the moon physically, naturally, changes its size/mass/volume as it traverses the sky, iff however the moon’s changing properties cum hoc just are the experience of it. The indirect realist, because he only assigns properties to the changing representations of an object post hoc, the object itself does not need the property of change insofar as the object itself never was a component of experience in the first place.
Breaking it down a lot…..the direct realist maintains space and time belong to things as properties of them, no more or less necessary for their experience than any other property, but the indirect realist maintains space and time belong to him alone, are not properties of things at all, but are the conditions absolutely necessary for the experience of them.
Breaking it down completely….the realism of objects is direct in the perception of them, their properties be what they may; the realism of properties is indirect in the experience of them, the object be what it may.
That seems non-productively reductionist to me.
It seems consistent with the scientific evidence. Experience exists within the brain. Distal objects exist outside the brain. Therefore, distal objects are not constituents of experience.
Quoting frank
recognising it as a cow consists in not running for the gate because it's a bull, keeping a eye out for pats on the surrounding ground, counting how many cows there are as opposed to kangaroos, and so on. That is it consist in interacting with the cow and with other things. You know it is a cow by those interactions - indeed, knowing it is a cow is those interactions.
There is a way of recognising that it is a cow that is shown by how one, not by setting out a rule. Pi §201. That's what is missed in Kripke's reading, powerful though it is.
Quoting frank
It's not obvious that this follows from your previous paragraph. Yes, dealing with cows requires there to be cows, if that is what you are claiming. But you seem to want some Kantian transcendence here? I have a vantage point.
I'll offer you the same answer as given to Frank, above. Blind, illiterate mutes can herd cows. You account seems a bit ableist...
We do not simply passively "experience" cows. we feed them, move them into yards, slaughter them and eat them.
All this by way of pointing out that the "constituents of our experience" are not one way, from world to mind; we also change what is in the world, and this is part of our experience of the world. While you read this, you are already formulating your reply.
And you do not feed, herd, slaughter and eat sense impressions.
It is very difficult to see how you avoid antirealsim of some sort, or even solipsism, if all you have access to are sense-impressions and never cows. The notion that such things are "inferred" seems very lonely.
Can you not see that these are both wrong? We use the word "see" in both ways.
I very much hope this is pure jest. Quoting Banno
It is obvious neither are 'wrong'. They are unhelpful, when used in both ways. That's the entire incoherence of your account/s. You are attempting to use a concept to represent both opposing versions of that element of the account to which it could refer.
"to look" cannot be hte same thing as "to see". And using those phrases as they actually occur viz. looking is turning one's eyes to an object, and seeing is experiencing the mental representation caused by the light reflected from it - solves the disagreement. You have to just accept that your objection doesn't lie in the facts, but the form you prefer to use to describe it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWlTcF1JPk
The world is an amazing place.
Either we see distal objects, or we see mental phenomena. It cannot be both. Distal objects are not mental phenomena. On second thought, hallucinations are mental, so sometimes we see mental phenomena, other times we see distal objects.
Quoting Michael
Now, that looks like self-contradiction.
Quoting Michael
:brow:
If colours are the end result of a biological process that is existentially dependent upon the surface layers of distal objects as well as a creature capable of detecting light, then what sense does it make to say that colors are a mental phenomena that has no external constituent?
If hallucinations of color emerge only after having veridical experience, and are impossible without ever having those, then "mental phenomena" misses something pivotal about the nature of colour vision.
I don’t see how this relates to whether we perceive objects directly or indirectly or, in particular, how it relates to the supposed perception of representations or perceptual intermediaries. This is the philosophical substance of the dispute as I understand it. Direct realists claim we do not perceive any perceptual intermediary or representation, whereas indirect realists claim that we do.
Furthermore, I don’t see why a direct realist must hold the view that “distal objects and their properties are constituents of experience” in the physical sense that you suppose. A direct realist can have an unmediated perception without the perception needing to be the perceived object. Otherwise, it’s just a strawman of perception.
A western example, but in that trashy book of lies, the guardian, so you won't have seen it.
OMG, he drives and uses a chain saw!!
You would benefit from watching this:
Suffice to say, in response to your clear implications, nothing you've provided gives me anything new. It may be worth stepping back from the constant internal accusations you throw at people, which undergird many of your responses :)
Is that some UKian agricultural usage which is very different from USian usage?
Maybe you need to get out more.
A special program to breed more blind farmers?
Quoting AmadeusD
I think you've identified one factor. If that's all there was, the art of identification would be unlearnable. But that is about interpretation of what you sense. I told you I sensed an odor, and I know I've encountered it before, but I don't know what to call it, and I don't know where it comes from (although it may be that I know it, but the memory is unavailable for some reason).
So my phenomenology says interpretation is secondary. Language is secondary. You can recognize what you sense even though you can't identify it. I can, anyway. You may not be able to.
What you're missing is the fact that light carries a great deal of information about distal objects, from which it follows that, contrary to your claims, we do have reliable knowledge of distal objects. Perhaps you're trading on the absurd demand for certainty. We have reliable, certain in the relative but not certain in the artificial "absolute" sense, knowledge of external objects.
It does not. Though, your point is a good one for less-discursive IRists.
Quoting Janus
This seems to betray the idea that we have some 'direct' relationship with those objects, no?
No it just shows how inadequate the 'direct/ indirect' parlance is, and how pointless it is to be arguing over what amount to merely different ways of talking in different contexts.
We have a reliable relationship with those objects, and with the world, and that is all that matters.
While I didn't skip over the line before this one, this strikes me as giving up. It's all that matters for every-day consideration, but within this thread that is wholly inadequate, I think.
Returning to the previous line, yes. But clearing up the language gives us every reason to reject DR so I can see why this is the case :)
I am, partially, joking. I realise this isn't cut and dried.
The point is that attempting to frame what we (reliably?) know about perception in a way that undermines the very assumption of reliability we are relying upon is a self-defeating exercise. And attempting to frame things in absolute terms, as though there is a real fact of the matter, rather than merely competing or alternative interpretations and their attendant ways of speaking is a lost cause in any case.
Our thinking is inevitably dualistic, and we have no reason to think reality is dualistic, so we have to accept our limitations and uncertainty if we want to be intellectually honest. So, we have every reason to reject the whole debate as being wrongheaded from the get-go.
I think direct and indirect realists are arguing over whether we perceive the world directly or whether we perceive mental representations (or some other intermediary) of the world.
While I believe that mental representations are necessarily involved in perception, or that perceptions are mental representations, I reject the indirect realist view that we perceive mental representations.
My view is that the brain represents the world to us in cases of sensory perception, and that the representation is the act of seeing; Therefore, we do not perceive the representation. If perceptions are mental representations, as per my view, then it would require a prior mental representation in order to perceive the first mental representation; a prior perception in order to perceive the first perception.
You claim that "I see cows" and "I see colours" is true, but on the proviso that you see colours directly and see cows only indirectly. I make no such distinction. When I see cows and their colours, I make no distinction between seeing the colours directly and the cows indirectly. My brain represents the cows to me in the act of seeing, and the colours are a part of that singular representation. I do not see a mental representation; I see the cows. And I see them in colour.
How, then, do I see colours if they are not in the world? Because that's just what human seeing is (normally); that's how our brains visually represent the world. That's what it means to "see" objects.
The problem I have with indirect realism, although it correctly identifies the necessity of representation, is that it begins from a position prior to representation or perception, and from there it claims to perceive representations. Indirect realists posit an intermediary mental representation between our perceptions and the world, but if our perceptions are mental representations, as I posit, then in order to perceive this intermediary representation of the world, a (second) representation of this intermediary representation is required. And so on.
If perceptions are mental representations, then we do not perceive mental representations (of objects). The only possible intermediary between a perception and a real object must be located in the (external) world.
If that's the same as what you mean by "I see cows" or "I see colours", then I guess we are both direct realists.
I didn't say that we don't have reliable knowledge. I said that we don't have direct knowledge.
What does it mean to directly see something?
By "directly see X" naive and indirect realists mean that X is a constituent of experience, so when naive realists say that we directly see distal objects they are saying that distal objects are constituents of experience and when indirect realists say that we don't directly see distal objects they are saying that distal objects are not constituents of experience.
You're welcome to mean something else by "directly see X" but in doing so you're no longer addressing indirect realism.
I think there's this assumption you're making that there's some singular agreed upon meaning of "directly see X" that everyone is using and that each group just disagrees on which things satisfy this meaning, but that's a mistake. See Semantic Direct Realism.
Yes it can. I feel pain and I feel the fire. I see cows and I see colours.
The debate between naive and indirect realists does not concern whether or not we can feed or slaughter cows. It concerns whether or not our perception of cows counts as "direct perception" according to some relevant meaning of "direct perception".
To put it simply, "we feed cows, therefore direct realism is true" is a very obvious non sequitur.
Specifically, the debate between naive and indirect realists concerns the relationship between the phenomenal character of experience and the mind-independent nature of distal objects (and its epistemological implications).
This just seems another example of how this discussion doesn't seem to be about much more than semantic preferences.
It is quite consistent with scientific evidence to say that experiences occur in space-time regions, and an example of such an occurrence would be light reflecting off a cow and into my eye, resulting in my recognition that 'there is a cow playing a causal role in my experience'.
This way of conceivng of experiences allows, "I shared the experience of seeing the total eclipse with...", to make sense. Conceiving of experiences in a way that doesn't allow for shared experiences is not a way of thinking that I would expect scientists to be very inclined to.
Why would the brain represent the world to you if you weren’t to view the representation?
This is what I intimate strikes me as giving up.
I do not think you're adequately grappling with the problem. AS noted, when the language and grammar are clear, and we're not instantiating multiple concepts with one term or too-closely-related terms, two things happen: your position becomes untenable, because it is utterly clear that: DR is nonsensical, unless you refuse to get to the bottom of it, and return to misusing language (for that purpose, that is).
Obviously, I agree that large parts of the framing are wrong, and that most of the exchanges in this thread (largely Banno, unfortunately) ensure that this framing is adhered to, instead of progressing - but it is entirely counter to intuition and clear language that there is no appreciable distinction, or that its an issue of interpretation. We have an empirical consideration we are trying to name. There is nothing grey about htis.
Quoting Janus
This may be the case, if you don't like the conclusions intimated by cleaning up the discussion - and that seems a very common way to duck out in these, admittedly very, very trying, circumstances. But i push forward... I don't like the idea that we ahve no direct access to the world. It seems patent. Its uncomfortable. The two are not linked.
:lol: Life is so hard sometimes.
Quoting Michael
How could we have reliable knowledge of objects if they were not experienced by us?
This is all just hand-waving and insinuation. When you present an actual argument I'll address it.
Are you referencing the problem of induction? There is no clear answer to that. According to the scientific method a statistical significance of five sigma is accepted as the criterion for reliable knowledge of unobservable entities like the Higgs boson. In everyday life we're not so strict. I did not directly experience Joe Biden's inauguration but I think I have reliable knowledge that he was inaugurated.
Regularity, predictability, and common sense seem like sufficient criterion for most cases. But it's not infallible, hence the warrant for healthy scepticism.
The representation is the condition for seeing something, not some thing that you see.
Think how much greater than five sigma confidence people would have to have in all those distal objects such as measurement instruments, computers, and a bunch of scientists, to have a reason to believe a five sigma level confidence for the Higgs Boson.
Well, you're right about one thing, we can see both, but not in the way you're claiming. I've mentioned before about hallucinations and that they are existentially dependent upon earlier seeing the real thing(veridical experiences). What you're doing here is incoherent/self-contradictory.
Earlier you claimed that there are no distal objects in experience. By definition, nonetheless. There cannot be according to the notion of experience you've been arguing for/from.
Seeing is experience. Cows are distal objects. Fire is as well. We see constituents. Earlier you replaced distal objects with representations thereof.
How do you reconcile that?
Yup. There's the performative contradiction Janus pointed at earlier.
What does our biological machinery do then, if not directly connect us to the world? Sometimes the causal chain is longer than others, but it is a direct link between the creature and the world nonetheless.
Biological machinery interacts physically with distal objects.
The indirect realist uses knowledge of how biological machinery works as ground to deny that we directly perceive distal objects. If we adhere strictly to the preferred framing of folk like Michael and perhaps yourself(?), we would have to deny any and all physical contact between cows and eyes. If we extend that criterion to other senses, we would be forced to say that physically forcing our face into a pudding pie and withdrawing it would not count as directly perceiving the pie. Even if and when our eyes were/are open.
No, I'm not talking about inferences to the explanations for observed phenomena, I'm talking about observed phenomena. Things are experienced and that is how we comes to know their characteristics and attributes. If we were not able to observe, interact with, act upon and be acted upon by things we would know nothing about them. But that is not the case, things are experienced by us, and we do know things about them.
So it seems absurd to say that things are not constituents of our experience. This is the only salient issue, not the pointless debate about preferred parlances between 'direct' and 'indirect', either of which can be rendered as a coherent way of speaking about what we know about perception (and if we didn't know anything about distal objects, we would not know anything about perception). It all just depends on context.
The condition of the body, I presume?
I’m curious because as far as I know representations prohibit us from seeing the world, and I’m interested in how you can see (or represent) around them.
Yes.
Quoting NOS4A2
How do representations prohibit us from seeing the world? I think you may be referring to seeing a representation of the world (instead of the world)?
What I am talking about is sight as a representation (an internal representation) of the world. In order to see anything, the things we see are internally represented. So we need an internal representation in order to see the world (or to see anything). That’s a very basic description of my understanding of how sight works.
What you are referring to—seeing a representation of the world instead of the world—would require us to have sight, or an internal representation, in the first place. Otherwise, we would not see anything, including seeing a representation instead of the world.
ETA: You don’t see an internal representation; sight is an internal representation.
Yes, to me, internally representing the world begets a representation of the world, something that represents, models, or stands for, the environment. We have a space in which representing occurs (internally), and presumably this representation or act of representation (sight) is the intentional object.
I could be completely wrong; that’s just how I always understood representationalism.
Right, but the direct/indirect realism discussion is also commonly framed in terms of whether we directly perceive real objects or whether we instead directly perceive a representation or other perceptual intermediary (and only indirectly perceive real objects). I reject that we perceive a mental representation and say that we directly perceive real objects.
As stated earlier, I think the naive realist position is based on the misguided notion that when we perceive a real object we perceive the world in itself (or somehow identify the perception with the object). A perception that is identical with its object is not really a perception at all; it is the object.
The indirect realist opposes the naive realist position, saying that we do not directly perceive a real object but that we directly perceive only a mental representation of the real object.
I reject the direct realist notion that to perceive a real object is to perceive the world in itself (or that our perceptions are identical with the perceived object) and the indirect realist notion that we directly perceive only mental representations of real objects. Instead, I say that our perception of real objects is direct (in a non-naive sense) because perceptions are mental representations.
Experience exists within the brain, distal objects exist outside the brain, therefore distal objects do not exist within experience.
Experience is causally determined by our interaction with distal objects, and its qualities causally covariant with the distal object's properties, but there's nothing more to the connection than that. It's naive, and inconsistent with the scientific evidence, to suggest otherwise.
Quoting Luke
What is the physical/physiological difference between us seeing a mental representation and a mental representation existing in our heads?
This is where I think you're getting so confused by grammar.
If mental representations exist and if distal objects are not constituents of these mental representations and if our knowledge of distal objects is mediated by knowledge of these mental representations then indirect realism is true, because that's all that indirect realism means.
I think the scientific evidence strongly suggests that experience is either reducible to brain states or supervenes on brain states.
I think the scientific evidence strongly suggests that distal objects are not constituents of brain states and are not constituents of any phenomena that supervene on brain states.
Therefore, I think the scientific evidence strongly suggests that distal objects are not constituents of experience.
I think we have direct knowledge of the constituents of experience and indirect knowledge of anything that is causally responsible for experience and causally covariant with its constituents.
I think the constituents of experience are mental phenomena (e.g. smells, tastes, and colours) and that distal objects are causally responsible for experience and their properties causally covariant with its constituents.
Therefore, I think we have direct knowledge of mental phenomena and indirect knowledge of distal objects and their properties.
This is all I understand indirect realism to be. Whether or not to describe this as "experiencing mental phenomena" is an irrelevant grammatical choice with no philosophical or physiological implications (e.g. it no more implies an homunculus than "I feel pain" does).
With respect to the thread topic, re: realism, this space has been called “intuition”, the faculty of empirical representation, in which the matter of things perceived unite with a form “….which lies a priori in the mind…”, which gives rise to “phenomena”, that is, representations in the form of images, which are the first instances of becoming conscious of the particular nature of whatever was initially a mere sensation.
The respect for the thread title here is necessary, insofar as there is another internal space in which representation occurs, wherein perception is not a precursor, thus these must be kept separate for theoretical consistency.
Just, you know….FYI.
I think that's one of the central axes this debate is happening on. Direct realists in thread seem to see experience/perception as a relationship between the brain and the world that takes place in the world. @Michael seems to see experience/perception as a relationship between the brain and the world that takes place in the brain.
Edit: so we've got externalism+directness+action vs internalism+indirectness+representation.
And then, of course, there are direct realists who view experience/perception as the actualization of a capacity that persons (or animals) have to grasp the affordances of their world. Brains merely are organs that enable such capacities.
And this would be wrong.
Eh, a perception is still an event in the world. Like your body adjusting under a load is proprioception.
Yes, that's a species of externalism isn't it?
Edit: removing some laziness in the question. There's the adage that externalism means "meaning ain't just in the head", ecological perception like Gibson sees signs and capacities for acting in nature. Environmental objects themselves are seen as sites of perceptual interaction, which imbues interactions with them with a dynamic/semantic content.
The dispute between naive and indirect realists concerns the phenomenal character of experience. You can use the word "experience" to refer to something else if you like but in doing so you're no longer addressing indirect realism.
Well we're kinda screwed if we can't agree what we're disagreeing about.
Well that is why I have spent 60 pages trying to explain that much of the dispute between indirect and non-naive direct realists is a confusion borne from each group using the words "direct" and "see" to mean different things.
The relevant consideration is the epistemological problem of perception. Do we have direct knowledge of distal objects and their properties or only direct knowledge of the phenomenal character of experience?
That's right. The phenomenal character of experience is something that is constructed and not merely received. The perceiving agent must for instance shift their attention to different aspect of it in order to assess the phenomenal character of their experience. But this is not a matter of closing your eyes and inspecting the content of your visual experience since when you close your eyes, this content vanishes. You must keep your eyes open and while you attend to different aspects of your visual experience, eye saccades, accommodation by the lens, and head movements may be a requirement for those aspects to come into focus. This is an activity that takes place in the world.
The phenomenal character doesn't take place in the distal world. The phenomenal character takes place in the brain, albeit is (in the veridical case) causally determined by the body's interaction with the distal world. Indirect realists accept this.
I suppose it's also why people have invited you to reconsider the kind of things that can count as direct realism!
You can call anything you like "direct realism", but it is not a given that you are saying anything that contradicts indirect realism. Each group just means different things by the word "direct".
To suggest that if your direct realism is true then my indirect realism is false is to equivocate.
Yes, the adage comes from Putnam and also referred to cutting pies. Susan Hurley also distinguished content externalism from quality externalism.
From her paper Varieties of Externalism, which I had found useful but read a very long time ago:
"My taxonomy consists in a two-by-two matrix: ‘what’ externalism contrasts with ‘how’ externalism, and content-related versions of each contrast with phenomenal quality-related versions. (I often say ‘quality’ as short for ‘phenomenal quality’.)"
This link downloads the pdf.
Quoting https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0340.xml
The issue is that people will easily reject 3, many will reject 2, few will reject 1.
For example, one group defines "direct perception" as "ABC". They claim that "ABC" is true and so call themselves "direct realists". Another group defines "direct perception" as "XYZ". They claim that "XYZ" is false and so call themselves "indirect realists".
It is possible both that "ABC" is true and that "XYZ" is false and so that both the group that call themselves "direct realists" and the group that calls themselves "indirect realists" are correct.
Well that paper is very similar to the debate we're having.
Not in the distal world; in the world. Likewise, the action of kicking the soccer ball doesn't take place in the distal soccer field. It takes place on the soccer field. While the soccer player prepares to score a goal, she is experiencing the conditions for performing this action as they come into place. But this is an experience that she is active in producing. Her body isn't a puppet being manipulated by her brain. It is a part of her perceptual system which emcompasses her brain, her body, the ground that supports her and the structure of the optic arrays (the incident light around her). There is no magical boundary around the brains that keeps experiences out of it. Would the vestibular system be in or out? What about the spinal cord?
Most of that capacity is actualized without the involvement of phenomenal consciousness, so it's not clear to me what this direct realist is saying exactly.
Well, yes. Phenomenal character exists in the brain, the brain exists in the world, and so phenomenal character exists in the world. But it is still the case that phenomenal character exists in the brain, not outside the brain, and so the naive realist's claim that distal objects and their properties are constituents of phenomenal character is disproven by the fact that distal objects and their properties do not exist in the brain.
I am gonna have to quote Amadeus here:
Quoting AmadeusD
Note the distinction between the constitutive claim of naive realism and the merely causal claim of intentionalism.
Indirect realism is the rejection of naive realism (and is compatible with intentionalism; see Semantic Direct Realism).
The implication being, it is possible experience is not in the brain, which is the same as outside the brain, or in a place where the brain is not. If one maintains that he experiences things in the world, in conjunction with the implication his experiences are not in the brain, and, if he maintains all his experiences belong to him alone, then it is necessarily the case he himself is not in his own brain.
I’m sure you do not hold with that perfectly justified logical deduction, or at least its conclusion. So which is the false premise?
An interesting sidenote is that @Michael seems to take scientific knowledge to be definitively showing us that the indirect realist picture (as he understands and deploys it) represents the real situation, rather than being one possible interpretation of those scientific results.
I'm not sure what you are asking me here. Are you asking if I agree that we are not in our own brains? If so, then the answer is yes.
What if we said our ideas of the self or our thoughts about ourselves are in our own brains? Well, perhaps we could reasonably say that, but I don't want to because I don't like to assign locations to things like ideas or experiences— I think that is an inaptitude. Of course, thoughts and even experiences are associated with the brain, but it doesn't seem to follow that they are in it.
So I don't even want to say that mental states are in the brain, but I will admit that neural activity is. I am no dualist, though, except when it comes to our thinking and judging. That would seem to make it hard to get our dualistic ideas to accord with a non-dual reality.
I accept 1. and 2. With 3. it would depend on what is mean by the objects possessing all the features we perceive them to have. Imposing the caveat that at least some of those perceptible features are characteristic only of perceived objects, or objects insofar as they are perceived, makes it acceptable to me.
I'm not speaking for Luke. He's far more eloquent and concise than I. That said...
That question presupposes the brain is somehow severed from the creature(brain in a vat anyone?). It is also guilty of the personification of the brain(anthropomorphism). As if brains are the sort of thing capable of presenting a representation of the world to their biological owner. Brains are necessary but insufficient for forming/formulating a representation of the world. The other biological structures are also necessary.
The representation, if there is one, is something that the creature forms, autonomously, by virtue of having physiological sensory perception. The quality of the representation is determined by how well it corresponds to the way things are. The scope is determined by the biological machinery involved. The greater the number of sensory structures the broader the scope of input. Sight and sound provide a different representation than either alone. Etc. To your question...
The seeing is the representation of a creature with only eyes. There is no such creature, but you get the point, I hope. The biological machinery results in representations of the world. Simple single celled organisms directly perceive, but do not seem to have what it takes to form(ulate) a 'representation' of the world.
Personally, I reject the notion of "representation" as it's commonly used in discourse about biological machinery doing its job. I certainly reject the anthropomorphizing of brains.
Or that experience is not the sort of thing that has a location.
Sigh...
You keep saying that but refuse to directly address the inevitable consequence thereof. If distal objects exist outside the brain, and experience exists within the brain, and distal objects do not exist within experience, the either seeing is not part of experience or we do not see distal objects. Cows are distal objects. You claimed that we see cows. Incoherency at best. Self contradiction at worst. Equivocation either way.
We don't directly see cows – according to the naive and indirect realist's meaning of "directly see"[sup]1[/sup] – but we do indirectly see cows.
Given that the adverb "directly" modifies the verb "see", the phrases "I directly see a cow" and "I see a cow" do not mean the same thing. The phrase "I indirectly see a cow" entails "I see a cow" and so the phrases "I do not directly see a cow" and "I see a cow" are not contradictory.
[sub][sup]1[/sup] A directly sees B iff B is a constituent of A's visual experience.[/sub]
While many elements of our perceptual capacities are indeed actualized without conscious attention or at a sub-personal level, this doesn't undermine the direct realist view. The key point is that perception is an active, embodied process that unfolds over time, not just a matter of passively receiving and internally representing sensory inputs.
Consider the example of walking in a city. As we walk, we periodically glance at the ground ahead to guide our footsteps, while also attending to the store fronts and other features of the environment. The character of our phenomenology shifts as our attention moves from one aspect of the world to another. This highlights how perception is a dynamic process of engaging with and exploring the environment, not just a static representation in the brain.
Moreover, the idea that perception must be based on internal representations constructed by the brain is questionable. If perception is understood as an embodied process involving the dynamic coupling of the whole organism with its environment, then we don't necessarily need to posit internal representations as the basis of phenomenology.
The brain is certainly crucial in enabling this dynamic interaction, but it is the whole brain-body-environment system that constitutes the basis of perceptual experience. The various neural subsystems - from the cerebellum to the sensory and motor cortices - work in concert with the body's sensorimotor capacities to enable us to grasp and respond to the affordances of our environment.
So while much of this process may occur without conscious attention, this doesn't mean that perception is just a matter of what's represented in the brain, as the indirect realist view suggests. The direct realist alternative is that perception is a matter of the whole embodied organism dynamically attuning to and engaging with its environment over time.
Are you saying that perception can't be passive? The hormone that deals with goal attainment is dopamine. It's probably the most powerful hormone affecting active behavior. But it goes off line and allows the body to rest and the nervous system switches to behavior that allows sleep, digestion, and healing. So what do you think happens to perception at those times? Is it just a leftover from the more active states?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think it shows that perception is involved (I don't think we're going to agree on the issue of phenomenal vs functional, so I'll let that go). I don't see how it shows that perception is nothing other than a process of engaging and exploring the environment. But is that what you meant? If it is, what leads you to think so?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
The central nervous system (CNS) is separated from the rest of the body by the blood-brain barrier. It has its own immune system. We can shut down the brain's connection to motor neurons with paralytic drugs, and perception persists. Sensory nerves are just sending electrical impulses in, so it's not inconceivable that we could separate the CNS from the rest of the body. We have machines that can reproduce the functions of the lungs, heart, and kidneys. Right now it wouldn't make any sense to save a brain because there would be nowhere to put it long term. It would just be an insane experiment. But are you saying that this is inconceivable?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I wasn't saying that functional consciousness (the part that goes on without any conscious awareness) proves indirect realism. I was trying to sort out the part you think conscious awareness plays in the overall functioning of the organism. I'll agree it's a component, but more in terms of higher level planning. What I was looking for was the reason to insist on embodied consciousness. As an interesting idea, it works. I'm not seeing how it goes beyond that, though.
In the sense of physical chains of events, then maybe it is trivially the case that what the brain is doing and perceiving relies on what is happening in the body and outside environment. But at the same time, surely all that is required for percept(ual experience) is what is going on at sensory receptors. All this affordance stuff is still going on inside our heads. We could be brains in vats artificially having our sensory receptors stimulated and experience the same things as if outside of the vat.
What I said for sensation also is the case for action induced by motor-neurons. What matters is the pattern of behavior of those neurons. There is no access to how those neurons affect the world beyond it until we get feedback at sensory receptors. The learning of the causal connection between them is then done by the neurons in our head.
Edit: Added additional paragraph, ( ).
It seems to me that this is a primary point of contention.
I'd prefer "realism" over "direct realism" -- the "direct" part is more defined by the "indirect" explanation. It's a response to indirect realism rather than a naive assumption.
The indirect realist believes that experience is "in the head", and that if we were sufficiently knowledgeable then the brain in the vat is a possibility.
The direct realist denies this.
:D
A minimalist version of the thesis to ensure nothing can be attacked but the negation :D.
Do you think it could be that we carry around models that are populated by sensory input? Not exactly a representation.
Sorry, I am not following what you've said at all. So you're an indirect realist or a direct realist?
I am not exactly sure what you mean by this but the picture I was painting I wasn't necessarily implying anything about representation. I am a bit agnostic about representation in the sense that I don't think you need the concept of representation to explain how the brain works but I am not necessarily adverse to using this concept, especially as it is so intuitive. I just am not necessarily sold on the idea of some kind of inherent or intrinsic, essentialistic representations with intentionality in the brain. Neither do I think we should take it literally when neuroscientists attribute representation to the kinds of correlations that they detect in particular experiments.
Quoting Moliere
So you don't believe the brain in a vat could have the same experiences? To be honest I am not entirely sure what direct realism means. I assume people here just mean it in the sense that the objects of perception are experiences and they are direct. If that is the case then I am not sure I think that it is necessarily incompatible with the kind of indirect view of also representing something else out in the world. I would kind of agree with both but I don't have a strong opinion because I am disinclined against realism. I think the notion of indirect realism is kind of a functionally useful way of talking about the brain though. I feel like it is implied by models in neuroscience, even if minimally or if one doesn't want to attach too much metaphysical implication to it. It is implied that the brain is learning a model of the outside world and separated from it by a boundary. At the same time, the brain is clearly able to do what it does independently of whatever is going on beyond its boundaries; it does not need to make a comparison of what is going on in the brain with the outside world. The model the brain carries of the world does not therefore need to be explicit, and in some sense is a concept more useful to the neuroscientist trying to understand the brain, than the brain itself. The brain is just spontaneous self-organization; there is no inherent fact of the matter about what it represents. Neurons just blindly change their chemical membrane properties in response to inputs.
I think the BiV is a thought experiment that updates Descartes' Evil Demon to a scientific world. Descartes used theology because it was popular then, and I'm not familiar enough with the history of BiV's to say who, but it's basically an update to the Evil Demon since culturally scientific justifications are thought to be better than theological ones, unlike the time Descartes wrote in. Philosophically it's the same.
In that thought experiment the BiV has to have the same experiences. That's the whole idea.
But that does not mean that metaphysically perception exists in the head.
For my part I'm mostly criticizing indirect realism on the basis of what I see as its implications. The argument that started me on this path was the infinite regress argument against indirect realism: if perception is an intermediary between myself and the object, and all experience is perception rather than the object, then I'm not sure why there couldn't be another intermediary between myself and my perception -- a perception of perception.
And so on. It's not that we need to posit more intermediaries, but if not, then why are we positing the original intermediary? How many intermediaries are there? Is there a way to distinguish between them?
If so, then there could also be a way to distinguish between our "intermediate" perceptions and the object.
My thought is that the object is always more than what we perceive, but that doesn't mean that what we perceive is not real -- it could just be a direct link between me and the world that partially reveals the world.
On the more continental side I'd call it being-in-the-world. The object and subject come together as a pair.
(a couple of edits after the fact, sorry)
I was thinking that when attention is directed outward, toward the future, expectation may play a necessary role. Attention will mainly go to whatever is unexpected or out of place, so it's efficient. This implies some sort of modeling, but it could be reflexive, hardwired, algorithmic, whatever it takes to avoid ghosts. Just a thought.
I started with something substantive, but the reason I put smilies on my answer was because it was a minimalist position which seemed to be similar to how @Michael framed indirect realism.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I think indirect realism is soft anti-realism, or at least the gateway to it.
I think you're right about the implications of neuroscience -- if all we take as our truths are neuroscientific truths then indirect realism is not a bad inference.
It's more upon the inspection of what indirect realism entails that doubt creeps in.
Yes for that thought experiment, but what I am talking about is the question of whether if you artificially stimulate sensory receptors of a brain with identical DNA to you in a way which is identical to the history of organic sensory stimulations you have personally encountered in your life, it will have the same experiences as you have had.
Quoting Moliere
What is your alternative? Through an extended mind framework where the mind encompasses the body and environment, etc?
Quoting Moliere
It depends what you mean by object here. My instinct is to interpret object here as in some hypothetical object in the outside world. From my point of view, perception and myself are essentially not distinguishable. What you commonsensically would call your self are just sensory experiences pretty much imo.
Quoting Moliere
I guess the main arguments against this is illusions and misperception.
I don't think so, no. Maybe? but also maybe the only way to do so is to envat the brain in a body that lives a life.
I see it as a logical possibility, and possibly a metaphysical possibility, but not a real possibility.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Still thinking on it. :)
No alternative, yet. At this point I'm only convinced that something is real; hence, realism.
@Banno puts realism as the belief that bivalent logic is the proper logic to use for the subject at hand -- so if it is real then we ought to believe that the various rules of logic we use are at least bi-valent. There is a true and false and nothing in-between. Contradiction is forbidden.
In a plain language sense -- the keys are either in the car, or they are not in the car. So the keys are real because the affirmation and the negation are a tautology.
The implication being that the things that are not-real can use other logics. Such as a painting being both beautiful and horrifying. In a bi-valent we'd be tempted to say these annul one another, but that's not the appropriate way to put things. We can see the painting is beautiful yet horrifying, and so express that in a different logic from the logic of realism.
I mention this because it's a contender for realism that I'm still wrapping my head around, but it's definitely different from the old in/direct debate.
Quoting Apustimelogist
"outside world" is the part I'd question. There is no "outside" world -- the old external world of philosophy -- just as there is no "internal" world, at least metaphysically. I think these are turns of expression meaning something other than the ontological implications -- that I exist, that I interact with my perceptions and only my perceptions, and these perceptions interact with objects outside of me that I make inferences about.
I don't make inferences that much about the things in the world.
Which, at least by my reading, means we'd get along -- I originally started by saying "What if we just are our perceptions?" to argue for direct realism, because then there'd be a 1-step relation -- I am my perceptions, and my perceptions are of objects, and therefore there's a direct realtionship between myself (perceptions) and objects.
I think the self is more than this, but I don't believe the self is homuncular, which I think indirect realism can easily fall into.
Ah, sorry. (EDIT: just for missing this last question, I mean -- I looked over what I wrote and saw I posted before I responded here)
Yes, I think that's right.
Dreams, illusions, misperceptions -- why do those happen? If perception is direct then how can we be wrong about perception?
I think I'd say perception is an activity, and just like any activity -- like nailing boards or riding a bike -- we can make mistakes. These mistakes do not imply we are separate from the world, though, but rather that we are part of a world that interacts with us (disappoints us)
Understood. Concepts. Intuitions. Judgements. Representations. Numbers. Pretty hard to pin down the location in the brain of those thing that don’t even exist in concreto anyway, except as explanatory devices in abstracto.
OK, fine. Experiences don’t exist in the brain, but the things the brain does, whatever that is, that makes it seem like experiences exist in the brain, exist in the brain.
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Quoting Janus
In for a penny, why not in for a pound? Thinking and judging is just about the entire human conscious intellectual environment anyway, isn’t it?
At least now I have a better idea regarding your mindset, so, thanks for that.
Agreed. Perception also is an activity that is goal oriented and hence has a normative dimension. Things in the world are perceived by us when our perceptual abilities successfully engage with them. The common factor argument that grounds representationalist conceptions of experiential content views the perceptual acts themselves to be fallible, and hence views their content (and phenomenological quality) as falling short of the world. Descartes thought that the soul couldn't see beyond the imprints transmitted from sensory organs to the surface of the pineal gland. And since there can be a mismatch between what those imprints look like and what the world really looks like (or is), perceptual acts are fallible.
Disjunctivism in epistemology and in the theory of perception proposes that it is our perceptual abilities that are fallible, not their acts. The actualisation of a capability is the succesul exercise of it. In the case of perception, it is an act of perceiving the objects or features that the perceptual activity are trained on or are tracking. In cases of failure, the way the world appears to us to be is different from the way it is (not in-itself, but for us - our Umwelt). This is just a case of our having failed to exercise successfully a perceptual ability, it is not a successful act of perceiving an intermediate object. At best, the intermediate object is a causal intermediary in the normal functioning of the systems that enable us to perceive. They are not what our perceptual abilities have evolved/learned to track.
Claude 3 Opus suggested some improvements to the above. Since I am too busy/lazy to implements them, I'll just transcribe them below:
[hide="Claude 3 suggestions"]
Claude 3 Opus:
1- Emphasize the normative dimension of perception: Your point that perception is goal-oriented and has a normative dimension is important. You could expand on this by noting that as an activity, perception can be done well or poorly, correctly or incorrectly. This normative dimension is hard to capture on a representationalist view where perception is just a matter of having certain internal states.
2- Clarify the distinction between fallible acts and fallible capacities: The distinction you draw between the fallibility of perceptual acts (on the representationalist view) and the fallibility of perceptual abilities (on the disjunctivist view) is crucial. You might make this even more explicit by saying something like: "For the representationalist, individual perceptual acts can be veridical or non-veridical, depending on whether the internal representation matches the world. But for the disjunctivist, perception itself is always a success, an achievement - what's fallible are our underlying capacities to perceive."
3- Connect to the idea of perceptual learning and attunement: Your point about perceptual abilities being trained or evolved to track certain features of the environment could be developed further. You could note how perceptual learning and skill acquisition involve a process of attunement, of becoming better able to discriminate and respond to relevant affordances. This fits well with the idea of perception as an activity or skill.
4- Unpack the Umwelt idea: The notion of the organism's Umwelt - the world as it is for that organism, the world of significances and affordances - is rich and evocative. You could say a bit more about how this relates to the disjunctivist view. On this picture, perception isn't about representing an objective, detached world, but about engaging with a world of meaning and value for the organism.
5- Reiterate the key contrast with representationalism: Finally, you might wrap up by reiterating the key point of contrast with the representationalist view. Something like: "So while representationalism sees perception as a matter of having the right kind of internal states, the disjunctivist sees it as a matter of exercising the right kind of embodied skills and capacities. Perceptual 'error' is not a matter of misrepresentation, but of failing to successfully engage with the world."
[/hide]
Quoting Moliere
See, for me I do not see why it would not be the case for the brain to have the same experiences if the sensory inputs were the same. I don't think a body would matter either as long as the sensory inputs mimicked those it would have had from a body.
Quoting Moliere
Aha, I have had one or two conversations with Banno involving his deflationary notion of truth.
Quoting Moliere
Fair enough.
Quoting Moliere
I agree basically, that I am just using it as a phrase distinguishing my experiences from whatever is beyond that boundary. To a brain, that would be I guess what is beyond its sensory boundaries; but then you can make boundaries everywhere in the world, from cell membranes to populations of cells to ecosystems, etc.
Quoting Moliere
My only issue is that perceptions clearly do not have a mapping to things out in the world that is straightforward. They are constructed in the sense that they involve learning via neurobiological processes which are often characterized in terms of statistical inference.
Quoting Moliere
It seems like maybe there are semantic issues at play; I think maybe your notion of "direct" is more loose than others would have who would use things like illusions as an argument for indirect realism.
Yes, I agree though I don't know if there is necessarily a dichotomy here. I think what you call modeling still relies on some underlying processes which is pretty much still very mechanistic or algorithmic... even maybe reflexive. Seems to me that what the brain does next always is a mechanistic consequence of whatever physical state it occupies immediately beforehand. "Expectations" in attention are mediated by the modulation of neuronal membrane activity - where is the representation explicitly in this other than a useful metaphor? At the same time, there are neuroscientists out there who will characterize our most basic hardwired reflexes in terms of modeling as you say. This kind of thinking is probably reflective of my view that I don't think representations are inherent.
I talk about neurons a lot but I think even on the level of experiences, I was convinced by the types of analyses from the likes of Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations that representation cannot be pinned down here either and experience is even somewhat mechanistic as a flow of one experience to the next which can sometimes seem completely involuntary, unanticipated, inexplicable.
More of a fork, if you will:
Quoting https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/
Yes, the model wouldn't be a representation. To some extent it's probably innate, but influenced in some ways by culture and language.
Quoting Apustimelogist
The more I think about it, the less I think representationalism makes sense. How exactly would the brain organize the massive stream of data coming into as a coherent representation, moment by moment? I'm guessing it doesn't. As Kant said, the foundations of it are a priori. I think it's a complex model, like a hardwired memory. Like read-only-memory.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Exactly.
Think about what? Representationalism makes perfect sense metaphysically, which just indicates an logically necessary method describing how our intellect works. But to think about how the brain as a physical substance works, as that by which our intellect is possible, representationalism wouldn’t even be a theoretical condition, hence wouldn’t make any sense to include it in an empirical descriptive method.
In A4/B8 Kant says, “…..(may be avoided if) we are sufficiently cautious in the construction of our fictions, which are not the less fictions on that account.…”, a tacit admission that whatever is said from a purely speculative point of view, sufficient for us to comprehend what it is we do with our intelligence, cannot possibly be the method the brain, in and of itself, actually uses to provide it.
I think we're just disagreeing on language. I don't think it's very likely that the brain takes in sensory input and constructs experience out of it. That was the original idea behind indirect realism.
I think there's more likely a built-in framework that takes cues from sensory data. In other words, it's a kind of tango with world and conscious entity as the dancers. Is this direct realism? Not exactly, although it's something Aristotle might accept if we made the model something cosmic, which isn't outside the bounds of reason.
Quoting Mww
I'm not understanding this. Could you say more?
It depends what you mean by representation I think. You can have very minimal notions which do not do very much work or richer notions which are just unrealistic imo. I think representation is an idealized concept arising from meta-cognitive capacities (another idealization). But what is most fundamental is that the brain is in the business of 'what happens next?', most of this business being hidden from us because of the trillions of parameters in neurons that are hidden from us.
Because of this complexity, intelligible notions of representation are difficult to sustain imo simply because the brain's ability to track or enact 'what happens next?' is far more complicated than our metacognitive ability to track it (which is embedded within that, obviously). Our own notions of representations will constantly come up against fuzziness and exceptions to rules. All this suggesting that what we think of as representations are redundant to whatever is going on underneath the hood. The representations we do make up and are intelligible to us are idealizations that cannot possibly precisely describe what the brain, or even our own experiences actually do. It is not some essential nature in experiences which lead to what happens next but the trillions of parameters in neurons, which are much more complicated and noisy than our metacognitive abilities.
Imo, our notions of representations are not things in themselves but inferential. No experience has an innate representative quality; instead, I infer that an experience has features that seem representation-like. Again, I don't think the notion of representation is impossible or something to be shut out, just it has to be quite weak.
Thanks for the explanation. A question arises regarding the misguided notion of naive realism, that to perceive a real object is to perceive the world in itself.
The qualifiers “in itself” or “as it is” confuse me to no end, and to be honest I have never seen a naive realist affix these phrases to statements about an object of perception, at least in common language. It makes me think that in order to see an object “as it is” I must see it from an infinite amount of perspectives at the same time, that in order to really see an object I must also see what I cannot possibly see, for instance the back of an object while looking at the front of it, or what it looks like if no one was looking at it, and so on.
So the question is: If we’re not perceiving the world in itself or as it is, what are we perceiving?
No disagreement from me here. Nevertheless, we don’t know what goes on under the hood, yet we rise to the occassion of making it comprehensible to ourselves, in some form, by some method. Representation is merely a component which fits into one of those methods. Besides, and quite obviously, we do not think in terms of neural activity, even if that is exactly how the brain works, which is perfect justification for a substitute descriptive methodology. To be a rationally adept human is to be discontented with no understanding at all, so we throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, and whatever does is what we deem as understandable. Hence, speculative metaphysics; been that way since Day One.
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Quoting frank
Maybe what I said just above is sufficient? Enlightenment philosophy in general understood the brain’s overall necessary functionality without knowing hardly a single thing about the brain, so whatever we say about what’s going on between our ears is a fiction with respect to the physical operation of material substances. All Kant wanted to state as a warning to his peers, is to be careful in the construction of those fictions, one of which….his in particular it so happens….is what you already said regarding a built-in a priori framework.
Quoting Mww
Yup, definitely agree with your sentiments in this post! I think this applies to all our learning. All we have are "stories" that are constructed and enacted in experience and we argue about their merits.
Yes, that seems right.
Quoting Mww
It seems that language is dualistic in its logical structure, its grammar. If that is so, then all of our discourse will be dualistic also. But I don't want to go further and impute a dualistic structure to the mind-independent actuality.
I don't think our mindsets are that far apart.
Naive realism "is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are." (Wikipedia)
"Naïve realism claims that [...] objects continue to have all the properties that we usually perceive them to have, properties such as yellowness, warmth, and mass." (IEP)
"Naive realism is the philosophical concept that suggests our senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world as it truly is, without any interpretation or mediation. According to naive realism, when we perceive something, we directly perceive the object itself as it exists independently of our perception." (ChatGPT)
Illusions and hallucinations are often cited as being problematic for naive realism, suggesting that our senses do not provide us with direct awareness of the external world as it is. Science also tells us that the world isn't really coloured, so we do not perceive the world as it really is wrt colour. Hopefully, this gives you an idea of the naive realist view of perceiving the world in itself, or as it really is.
Quoting NOS4A2
According to my view, which is neither naive realism or indirect realism, we are perceiving the world as (normal) humans (normally) perceive it, given our human sensory organs (that is, assuming you and I both perceive it in the normal way, like most humans do). This includes us perceiving illusions, such as sticks bending in water, the Muller-Lyer illusion, or the checker shadow illusion. Science tells us that other animals (and some other humans) may perceive the world differently to us.
To paraphrase the ChatGPT definition of naive realism above, on my view, when we perceive something, we can directly perceive the object itself, but the perception depends on our sensory organs or perceptual apparatus.
Apologies for the following "argument by AI", but it is far more eloquent than I am, and I believe is in agreement with my view:
I asked ChatGPT for some assistance in distinguishing my view from indirect realism:
This also appears to be consistent with the enactivist view that @Pierre-Normand and @fdrake have been arguing for, if I understand it correctly.
I don't know about that, but it's very kind of you to say. :)
I'd like to raise two distinct but related issues here:
First, regarding representation, it's important to distinguish between external representational artifacts and the internal mental representations posited by indirect realists. Consider the duck-rabbit ambiguous image. As a flat graphical depiction, it is an external representation that can be interpreted as representing a duck or a rabbit. But this is different from the claim that our perceptual experience itself relies on internal mental representations.
To illustrate this difference, consider an example from my own experience. Several years ago, while walking home at night, I suddenly stopped because I thought I saw a large black dog lying on a lawn near the sidewalk. As I approached cautiously, I realized it was actually a black garbage bag folded in a way that resembled a dog. In this case, the garbage bag itself was not a representation, but an object that I misinterpreted as a dog. If I had seen a real rabbit and mistaken it for a duck, my error would have been in misinterpreting the rabbit itself, not an internal mental representation of the rabbit.
This leads to the second point, regarding interpretation. Interpretation is not a matter of decoding internal representations, but of bringing our concepts and past experiences to bear on what we directly perceive. In the duck-rabbit case, we can shift our interpretation by actively redirecting our attention and applying different concepts to what we see. But this is a matter of world-directed sense-making, not the manipulation of mental representations.
Moreover, our ability to interpret what we perceive depends on our prior embodied experiences and conceptual repertoire. I couldn't see a duck as a duck if I had never encountered ducks before, either in person or through images. But these enabling conditions for interpretation do not stand between me and the duck when I perceive it. Rather, they are the background that allows me to make sense of my direct perceptual encounter with the duck itself.
So, while perception certainly involves interpretation, this need not commit us to indirect realism. Interpretive processes, unlike representational artifacts, can play a role in our perceptual lives without functioning as intermediaries between us and the external world. By recognizing the world-directed, enactive nature of perceptual interpretation, we can preserve the direct realist insight that perception puts us in immediate contact with the environment as it is disclosed through our embodied skills and conceptual capacities (rather than as it is in itself!)
I don't understand this distinction. What is the physical/physiological difference between the two?
If you accept that mental "representations" exist and if you accept that we have direct knowledge only of these mental representations and if you accept that the qualities of these mental representations (smells, tastes, colours, etc.) are not (and are possibly unlike) the mind-independent properties of distal objects then I agree with you.
I call this view "indirect realism" as it is all I understand indirect realism to be; the rejection of naive realism. If you want to call this view "direct realism" then go ahead. The label is irrelevant.
Just understand that your direct realism is not inconsistent with my indirect realism. They're the same position, just given different names.
A perfect example of the difficulties with language: to impute dualism to actuality is metaphysically disastrous, re: whatever is just is, Aristotle’s A = A, but when actuality is qualified by “mind-independent”, a dualism is automatically given.
An overly-critical analyst might even go so far as to assert there is no such thing as “actuality” without an intelligence affected by it, the repercussion being non-dualism is impossible, from which follows A = whatever I think it is.
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Quoting Janus
Respectfully, I submit that our intelligence is dualist in its logical structure, and language merely represents the expression of its employment, so our mindsets are at least that far apart. Dualistic in logical structure just meant to indicate the rational/empirical grounds for proof, the former being necessary from which follows the possibility of truth, the latter contingent from which follows the possibility of knowledge.
Anyway….historically we’ve noticed between us the pitfalls of OLP, so in that respect, we’re not that far apart.
The most salient - but sorely neglected - point made thus far.
Blather.
Where is the cow you see?
Is the field in your brain?
The cow I see exists outside my head. My visual experience exists inside my head. Therefore, the cow I see isn’t a constituent of my visual experience.
Quoting Michael
What counts as a constituent of seeing cows if not the cow you see?
I don’t understand your question. It’s like asking “what counts as a constituent of a portrait of the President if not the President the portrait is of”.
The fact is that the President is not a constituent of the portrait. The portrait is paint and canvas hanging on a wall. The President is in the White House having breakfast.
No, it's not. False analogy. Red herring as well. Portraits are not equivalent to seeing cows(which is one kind of visual experience).
Quoting creativesoul
If "the cow I see isn't a constituent of my visual experience" makes sense according to the position you're arguing for/from, but you cannot clearly and unambiguously state what does count as a constituent of seeing cows if not the cow you see, then that is not a problem with the question. It's evidence that there's a problem with the framework you're practicing.
The constituents of visual experience are shapes and colours, the constituents of auditory experience are sounds, the constituents of olfactory experiences are smells, etc.
Qualia?
So, shapes, colors, smells, and sounds are in your brain?
Not necessarily. I’m undecided between eliminative materialism and property dualism.
All I will say is that experience exists inside the brain, distal objects exist outside the brain, and so distal objects are not constituents of experience. Therefore naive realism is false. Indirect realism as I understand it is nothing more than the rejection of naive realism, and these further disputes between indirect realism and so-called non-naive “direct” realism are confusions arising from different groups meaning different things by the terms “direct” and “see”.
Interesting. Dennett is an eliminative materialist. The Churchlands are as well, I think. In "From Bacteria to Bach and Back" and "Kinds of Minds he employs an intentionalism stance in a manner that I find to be guilty of anthropomorphism, but the practice does seem capable of making a whole lot of sense of the evolutionary progression of minds.
That’s half of what we have, albeit the more important half. It is necessary there be that which serves as the occassion for the construction of the stories, therefrom the experiences we argue about. If there weren’t things to be experienced as trees, there wouldn’t be trees.
I think that there are better options...
Either naive realism is true or naive realism is false. It's a simple dichotomy.
I think that that is a bewitchment of the mind by virtue of language use. It also shows the limitation of logic.
Validity alone does not warrant belief.
Quoting Michael
I meant better options for rejecting naive realism than just indirect realism(indirect perception) of the kind you're arguing for/from.
There are more choices than just the kind of indirect realism that presupposes all components/constituents of all experience are located in the brain and the kind of direct perception that holds colors are mind independent properties of distal objects.
This is where I think there's confusion.
Naive realists claim that distal objects are constituents of experience. Indirect realists claim that distal objects are not constituents of experience.
Either distal objects are constituents of experience or distal objects are not constituents of experience.
Therefore, either naive realists are correct or indirect realists are correct.
What third option is there?
The key parts are in bold.
Specifically, I think that "our visual perception of these material objects is not mediated by the perception of some other entities, such as sense-data" means "the conscious 'phenomenal' character of that experience is shaped by the objects of perception and their features, where this is understood in a constitutive, rather than merely a causal, sense."
Those who call themselves non-naive direct realists seem to want to accept the first part but reject the second part, but I can't make sense of the first part except as the second part.
So the relevant considerations are whether or not these are true:
1. Everyday material objects, such as caterpillars and cadillacs, have mind-independent existence
2. The conscious “phenomenal” character of that experience is shaped by the objects of perception and their features, where this is understood in a constitutive, rather than merely a causal, sense
3. These objects possess all the features that we perceive them to have
If (1) is true and (2) true then direct realism is true (and (3) is true).
If (1) is true and (2) is false then indirect realism is true (even if (3) is true).
I think the scientific evidence supports the claim that (1) is true and that (2) and (3) are false. Therefore, I think the scientific evidence supports indirect realism.
There's more to it than whether or not distal objects are constituents of experience. But, as you imply, either that is the case or it is not the case.
Unless sometimes it is not, after it has been. (Hallucinations)
If our notion of experience leads us to say that we see cows, but cows are not constituents of seeing cows, then that alone warrants a careful reconsideration of the notion of experience we're working with.
I mentioned before that direct realism was Aristotelian. It said that our minds directly contact the forms in the things around us. Indirect realism was a rejection of that kind of idealism.
Ironically, some in this discussion see indirect realism as a haunted scenario and reject it in favor of some kind of behaviorism in which perception plays a dubious role.
You may be interested in listening to Searle's lectures on philosophy of mind. It's an entire course available for free on youtube. He has an interesting take on this subject matter that you may find appealing. You could start around lecture 8 to avoid the groundwork setting out the history/exegesis of the topic prior to him getting into his own view on it.
I personally would reject 3, for it overstates the case. Some, not all. I do not see how scientific evidence refutes 2. The emphasized part needs unpacked.
P.S.
Strictly speaking I would reject 1 as well, but for the sake of this argument, I'll let the attribution of "mind independent" to cadillacs stand, although they are not. It's the difference between an object's emergence and/or persistence as compared/contrasted with/to "existence". Cadillacs may persist for some time in a mind independent fashion, after they emerge in a mind dependent one. They do not persist until after they emerge, so...
The important part is this: “… where this is understood in a constitutive, rather than merely a causal, sense.”
Distal objects like cows are causally responsible for the activity in my visual cortex, and so the resulting visual experience, but they are not constituents of that resulting visual experience.
To claim that distal objects are constituents of visual experience is to assert an unscientific account of visual experience.
Right, for you, according to the framework you're employing, that's the important part, but science has nothing to say specifically about the notion of "experience" one employs.
For example, some hold that all experience can be reduced to the physical, in the head, or something similar. Consistency/coherency alone demands that all components/constituents within experience must also boil down to the physical, in the head, etc. That seems to be what you're arguing for/from.
Others claim that experience is entirely subjective, in the head, but cannot be reduced to the physical. They claim that experience has a qualitative nature to it, that there is something it is like to be an experiencing creature.
Others claim that experience is an ongoing process, consisting of all sorts of things, some in the head, some not. Consistency/coherency alone demands that not all components of experience are located in the head.
The history of the topic tends to work from/employ the subjective/objective dichotomy recently employing a basic materialist/physicalist approach. Searle argued against computationalism/functionalism. Nagel argued that the materialist/physicalist/reductionist approaches fail to explain the subjective nature of 'what it's like to be' an experiencing creature. Chalmers granted Nagel's argument and claimed that a purely reductive physicalist approach leaves out the subjective nature of qualia within all experience. Dennett wanted to eliminate the subjective 'what it's like' and the qualitative parts of experience by virtue of offering materialist/physicalist explanations in addition to showing the inherent issues with qualia.
I, for one, when it comes to the nature of experience, reject objective/subjective, mental/physical, and internal/external dichotomous approaches, because none of them are capable of properly accounting of things that consist of both, and are thus neither one nor the other.
What concerns us is the "conscious 'phenomenal' character of ... experience". I would say that the evidence strongly suggests that the conscious 'phenomenal' character of experience is either reducible to brain activity or supervenes upon it, neither of which allow for distal objects and their properties to be constituents. The connection between the two is merely causal.
I think I understand your position.
I suppose each position can be viewed as degrees of realism. If I am to use the aforementioned phrases (as it is, in itself), you think you perceive the world as it somewhat is, or as it sometimes is, whereas the indirect realist thinks he perceives the world as it isn’t.
The "phenomenal" approach presupposes a difference between reality and appearances thereof. So, that's of no help here.
What scientific account of ocular nature forbids seeing things that are not in the brain?
I don't know what you mean by "seeing things".
All I am saying is that visual experiences occur when there is appropriate activity in the visual cortex, that distal objects are often causally responsible for these visual experiences, and that these distal objects are not constituents of these visual experiences – and I think the science of perception supports this view.
If the cow is in the field, then it is not in the brain. If we see the cow, then we see things that are not in the brain. The cow is one of the things we see.
What scientific account of ocular nature forbids us from seeing cows in fields?
As I have said before, I accept that we see cows.
But this has nothing to do with the dispute between naive and indirect realists. The dispute between naive and indirect realists concerns whether or not distal objects and their properties are constituents of the phenomenal character of conscious experience. Naive realists claim that they are and indirect realists claim that they're not. I think the science supports the claim that they're not.
I don't want to keep repeating myself.
Sigh...
Yeah, other options should be that way, ought they not?
You asked for other options, and yet complain when they avoid the rabbit holes. Have fun, I've got a vanity to paint.
It's not in my brain. It's wildflower blue coloured paint, and that's not in my brain either. It's in the can. There are machines that can give an exact color match. You give it a sample, and it spits out a formula to exactly match that sample.
Odd that all that color matching can be successfully achieved by a brainless machine.
Have fun.
It's not odd at all. We build it to measure the wavelength of light and then program it to output the word "red" if the wavelength measures 700nm.
This doesn't entail naive colour realism.
The wildest of ironies.
My (quite direct and detailed) argument is that hand waving is all that “your side” has in this conflict. Which is why clearing up the language is such an unreasonably effective riposte. This has been illustrated. And is now clearly instantiated here in this exchange.
“I’ll leave you to it”.
The absolute epitome of trying to ignore the issue
This is a standard-sidestep that ignores, once again, the crux of the problem. I have bolded the absolute incoherent of this position. The bolded answers all of your incredulity quite well, I think.
I understand that there's a distinction without a difference here - A hand touching a cow is obviously direct (setting aside the weird physical nature of touch actually consisting in repelling forces). Our experience of it cannot be, on any account, direct. I beginning to lose patience with the move trying to be made here that because our body directly interacts with objects (in this one avenue of sense, anyway) that somehow our mind is doing the same thing. This is patently untrue, and at this stage it seems the burden is on the direct realist to explain how this is hte case.
There's a Hard Problem of Consciousness Solver badge in it for you ;)
:brow:
I strongly suspect you and I have different opinions on what the issue is.
If impressing one's own face into a custard pie does not count as directly perceiving the pie, then nothing will and one's framework falls apart if it is of the materialist/physicalist variety. One issue is the failure of Michael's framework to be able to conclude/admit that the custard pie is a constituent of such an experience.
To be expected from another option.
I haven't said that. I've said that the science of perception supports indirect realism and not naive realism.
...utterly missing the point of those around you.
The science is accepted by both "sides". You still haven't come to terms with that simple fact.
If you were right, and indirect realism is the only view compatible with the physics and physiology of perception, do you honestly think the folk here would have continued denying the science for over sixty pages? Is your opinion of your interlocutors that poor?
Back on page one I said:
Quoting Banno
And as I said back on page 1:
Quoting Michael
Quoting Banno
The science does not support naive realism.
So let's go back to this, then, while I have your attention - what is "the epistemological problem of perception"? In particular, is there only one?
But that is a symptom of an excess of doubt. Cartesian fever.
Does sensory experience provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects and their mind-independent properties?
Naive realists claim that it does because they claim that distal objects and their mind-independent properties are constituents of sensory experience.
Indirect realists claim that it doesn't because they claim that distal objects and their mind-independent properties are not constituents of sensory experience; they only causally determine sensory experience, and so the properties of sensory experience (e.g. smells and tastes and colours) may not resemble the mind-independent properties of distal objects.
Again, this is a bad question. You say you want to leave out the word "direct', and yet you keep putting it back. Your inclusion of the terms "distal" and "mind-independent" further prejudices the question.
Leave that all out, and you get "Does sensory experience provide us with knowledge of the things around us?"
And the answer to that question is "yes".
Don't you agree?
Not all direct realists hold that color is a mind-independent property of distal objects.
I think Searle may agree with that sentiment.
As I so far understand the positions held, to me the issue of direct v. indirect realism is misplaced—not because it’s not important or else handwaving, etc.—but because they both occur at the same time yet this from different vantages. To have some terminology to express these two different vantages cogently:
a) Intra-agential reality; aka intrareality: that set of actualities that strictly apply to the one agent concerned; akin to an agent’s umwelt.
b) Equi-agential reality; aka equireality: that set of actualities that strictly apply in equal manner to all coexisting agents in the cosmos; what is commonly understood to be reality at large.
I'll use the issue of the present time to try to change focus on what—if I understand things well enough—is the exact same issue:
From the vantage of (b), everything empirical that we experience occurring in the present is known by science to in fact occur some fractions of a second prior to our conscious apprehension of it (with some estimates having it consciously occur nearly .3 seconds after the initial stimulus onset (1)) —such that what we empirically experience as occurring at time X actually occurred prior to time X. This, then, to me is accordant to indirect realism.
From the vantage of (a), we all experientially know that everything empirical which we experience occurring in the unitary perception of the present’s duration (2) strictly occurs in a present moment of which we are consciously aware, one that is differentiated from occurrences which occur before (even if this “before” is itself within our unitary perception of duration) and those yet to occur—such that, here, there is no time lapse whatsoever between what we empirically experience and our awareness of it (as one example of this to further this point: when we engage in a heated conversation with another agent face to face, the two agents’ awareness of the present moment—in which they each act and react in response to the other and their words—is fully identical relative to the conscious awareness of both agents … with no time lapse that we are in any way aware of). This, then, to me is accordant to direct realism.
From here, things can of course get far more complex when analyzed. For one example, we can only come to know about (b) strictly via (a).
Nevertheless, to stick to the thread’s subject, I find that both these realities (the indirect one and the direct one) necessarily co-occur. The same co-occurrence of the two can just as well then be specified for our seeing that purple shirt there yonder (I've used "purple" because colors from purple to magenta don't occur as a wavelength, being only real in sense (a) and not sense (b)).
----------
1) Quoting https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081809/
2) Quoting https://www.britannica.com/science/time-perception/Perceived-duration
--------
Edit: I also think of things in terms of inter-agential realities (intersubjectivities), such as the human-relative intersubjectivity of all non-blind and non-colorblind people commonly seeing the same purple ... but for the sake of keeping things simple I've only specified those two reality types of (a) and (b).
All our perceptual experiences involve bringing our conceptual abilities, past experiences, and sensorimotor skills to bear on them. The latter two also are brought to bear on the experiences of non-rational animals or pre-verbal children. Even before we recognize an apple as a Honeycrisp, we perceive it as edible or within reach. In this sense, the properties we ascribe to objects in experience are mind-dependent, shaped by our cognitive and embodied capacities.
However, this mind-dependence doesn't imply that objects can't be as we perceive them to be. Objects can fail to have the properties they perceptually appear to have, as in cases of misperception. This highlights a different sense of mind-independence: the idea that the world can fail to meet our expectations about it.
Claims about the mind-dependence or mind-independence of properties like color often conflate these two senses. When @Luke insists that we directly perceive objects without perceiving the world as it is in itself, he is acknowledging this distinction. Seeing an apple as red may track its surface reflectance profile, a property that is mind-independent in the first sense. But our perceptual categorization of this profile as "red" depends on our species-specific discriminative abilities and culturally informed color concepts, making it mind-dependent in the second sense.
So while our perceptual ascription of properties to objects always involves the mind, this doesn't rule out those objects having objective features that our perceptions can either accurately track or misrepresent.
Any event we see occurred in the past, therefore we never see any event.
How's that again?
Not what I quite explicitly stated. Do you disagree with the linked to science?
Quoting javra
Yeah, it was.
Wait for it ... Nope, it wasn't.
As a refresher:
Quoting javra
Does not translate into:
Quoting Banno
And you haven't answered the question I asked regarding the science. Somewhat disingenuous.
Again, I would be very surprised to find any disagreement as to the physics or physiology of perception here.
Hence, and this is addressed to all, if you think that simply asserting the science is sufficient to show that indirect realism is the case, you have not understood the disagreement.
The same analysis applies to shape as to color. Our perception of an object's shape, such as an apple being graspable in a particular way, involves bringing our conceptual abilities and sensorimotor skills to bear on our experiences of them. In this sense, the shape properties we ascribe to objects are mind-dependent, just like color properties.
Likewise, this mind-dependence in the ascription of shape properties doesn't preclude objects having shapes that our perceptions can accurately track or misrepresent. An object's shape can be different from how we perceive it, just as its color can be different from the color we perceive in abnormal illumination conditions.
The main difference between shape and color concepts is that shape is perceived multimodally through both sight and touch, while color is primarily visual. But from the standpoint of modern physics or the special sciences, shape is not more or less fundamental than color.
The traditional primary/secondary quality distinction, which treated shape as more objective than color, is outdated. Locke's analysis of secondary qualities, which highlighted the two senses of mind-dependence I previously distinguished, is still relevant but should be extended to so-called primary qualities like shape as well.
I don’t know if there is any physical/physiological difference. We are both positing mental representations.
Quoting Michael
I do.
Quoting Michael
I don’t know what you mean by “direct knowledge”. The relevant question is whether or not we have direct perceptions.
Quoting Michael
It may be helpful to speak in terms of correspondence. A naive realist claims that their perceptions perfectly correspond to the world. An indirect realist claims that their perceptions perfectly correspond only to their mental representations, and that their perceptions imperfectly correspond to the world (if at all). This “correspondence” is therefore synonymous with a “direct perception”.
However, there is another meaning, or another aspect to the meaning, of “direct perception”. This other meaning involves the mediation of one’s perceptions; that we either perceive real objects directly or via something else.
I agree with the indirect realist in the first sense, that our mental representations of the world do not always perfectly correspond to the world. However, I disagree with the indirect realist in the second sense: that we cannot directly perceive the world; that our perceptions must be mediated. That is, I disagree with the indirect realist that we have perceptions of mental representations of the world. My argument is that perceptions are mental representations and that perceptions/mental representations can be directly of the world; of real objects, without first requiring the perception of any mediating factor.
Quoting Michael
You can call it a merely grammatical dispute if you like, but then you must be in agreement with me that our perceptions are mental representations, that our perceptions of the world do not require any mediation, and that we can have direct perceptions of the world.
But I don’t see how this is consistent with the indirect realist position that our perceptions are directly of mental representations and only indirectly of the world; that is, that our perceptions of the world are mediated by mental representations.
There was this:
Quoting creativesoul
and this:
Quoting Pierre-Normand
And it seems to me that arguing for mind-dependence and mind-independence is fraught with ambiguity.
So questions such as "Is the fact that the cup has a handle mind-dependent or mind-independent?" strike me as confuddled. What's true is that the cup has a handle.
While questions such as "Is the fact that the cup is red mind-dependent or mind-independent?" bring on issues of illumination and language - things that are to do with the circumstances - factors that are not relevant to how many handles it has. Whether the cup is red or green might well depend on the observation being made, in a way that the cup having handles does not.
All of which is removed from the topic at hand. And I've spent more time here this morning than is conducive to good mental health.
Edited.
There we have it. Dualism.
Yes. As it so happens, he's right and you've ignored it the entire thread long. Such is life. Quoting creativesoul
You mean the dude whos career rests largely on literal hand-waving?
Quoting Banno
Nothing changes for the argument, but you get less comfortable. This is beginning to show a rather nice pattern.
Quoting Banno
"see"
"read"
And your position is that everyone who has well and truly knocked your position out of hte park are somehow linguistically stuck. Hehe. It would be funnier, if you were more humorous.
Quoting creativesoul
I'm not sure how to explain the irony of this, in response to what I said. Quite a good chuckle here.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, very much agree. And I strongly suspect your 'opinion' on what the issue is sidesteps the issue. You can be fairly sure of this, reading your other responses.
Quoting creativesoul
More-or-less, yep - part of why Physicalism ultimately ends up being entirely unsatisfying for 98% of people I suspect.
But as noted, this is exactly the sidestep i'm losing patience with. Your face touching the pie physically is not a perception. It isn't even the process of perception if we're going to keep confusingly conflate the two. Your conscious experience, which lies at the end of process initiated by pressing your face into a pie - which, in this case, will include several sensory experiences, is (i prefer the term experience, because that's what it is). That these are being treated as either the same thing, or somehow supervenient in such a way that they are representing the experience in both cases is baffling, counter to the empirical considerations and very much a side-step. One is a state of affairs, one is an empirically removed shadow of that state of affairs in consciousness. That this is highly uncomfortable isn't that interesting. \
Quoting NOS4A2
You say this like it does anything other than show me what you think of Dualism. It says nothing at all for the position, the arguments or the glaring mystery we're all dancing around.
I'm not arguing against direct realism. I'm arguing for indirect realism and against naive realism. Much of my time has been spent trying to explain that non-naive direct realism seems consistent with indirect realism: see Semantic Direct Realism.
What is the physical/physiological difference between mental representations existing and not being mediations and mental representations existing and being mediations?
This distinction you're trying to make just doesn't seem to make any sense.
The indirect realist claims that something like mental representations exist, that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of these mental representations, and that we have direct knowledge only of these mental representations.
If you want to make the same claim but call it "direct realism" then you're welcome to, but as it stands there is no meaningful difference between your direct realism and my indirect realism.
No it's not. It's a pertinent question that seeks to address the extent to which our body's physiological/psychological response to sensory stimulation allows us to form justified beliefs about the existence and mind-independent nature of distal objects.
Quoting Banno
Do you agree that sensory experience provides us with knowledge of the things around us?
It provides us with knowledge that there are things around us and that our bodies respond in such-and-such a way to sensory stimulation, but that's it.
Naive realists falsely claim that we know more than this because they falsely claim that distal objects and their properties are constituents of sensory experience. Indirect realists reject these claims.
Quoting Luke
Quoting Michael
Quoting Luke
Thank you.
Sensory stimulation takes place, then?
Can you see where I am going - you assume that these things exist as a part of your "scientific" explanation.
Isn't that so?
Yes. Indirect realists aren't idealists. They're realists. They just recognize, contrary to the claims of naive realism, that mental phenomena exist, that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of mental phenomena, that many (even all) of the properties of mental phenomena are not properties of distal objects, that many (even all) of the properties of mental phenomena do not even resemble the properties of distal objects, and that we have direct knowledge only of mental phenomena.
And you deduce, or perhaps infer, the existence of the world, including the things around you, from what the senses present to you?
How does that work?
Are you asking how induction and the scientific method work?
Ah. SO you induce the existence of the world by application of "scientific method"?
SO does this method involve falsification, or is it statistical?
Thanks for humouring me.
I believe in the existence of distal objects because I believe that the existence of distal objects best explains the existence and regularity and predictability of experience.
"Best explanation".
Statistical, then. Bayesian inference? You compared a set of other explanations, and decided that "here is a hand" is the best one for your seeing a hand before your face?
On what basis did you decide that it is "more reasonable" that there is a hand before you than that an evil Damon is tricking you?
What did you use as your Prior? And what constituted the new information you used to adjust the posterior probability distribution?
How is it an inference, then, and not a sentiment, or a mere prejudice?
And how is that "scientific"?
My belief that my experiences are caused by distal objects is a "prejudice". My belief that a distal cow exists is inferred from a) my "prejudice" that my experiences are caused by distal objects and from b) I experience a cow.
Naive realists claim such things as this:
[quote=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-021-01618-z]The second formulation is the constitutive claim, which says that it introspectively seems to one that the perceived mind-independent objects (and their features) are constituents of the experiential state. Nudds, for instance, argues that ‘visual experiences seem to have the NR [Naïve Realist] property’ (2009, p. 335), which he defines as ‘the property of having some mind-independent object or feature as a constituent’ (2009, p. 334), and, more explicitly, that ‘our experience […] seems to have mind-independent objects and features as constituents’ (2013, p. 271). Martin claims that ‘when one introspects one’s veridical perception one recognises that this is a situation in which some mind-independent object is present and is a constituent of the experiential episode’ (2004, p. 65).[/quote]
[quote=https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0340.xml]the conscious “phenomenal” character of that experience is shaped by the objects of perception and their features, where this is understood in a constitutive, rather than merely a causal, sense.[/quote]
[quote=https://academic.oup.com/book/5610]colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment that are distinct from properties identified by the physical sciences[/quote]
Indirect realists reject these claims, and the science of perception supports this rejection.
That's all there is to it.
That's fine - My belief that I have a hand is much the same.
Going back over it again, your belief that you have a hand, rather than that you are deceived by an evil demon, is a prejudice, not an inference.
But it's not "scientific", not derived from "scientific method" - something which would be extraordinary in the babe who makes this inference.
After this analysis it is clear that indirect realism is not based on inference nor on science. It is a prejudice.
Of course, for you it can't be, because the argument just presented undermines the mystique of "scientific method"
And then, yet again, the Authoritarian Quote. Meh.
The upshot is that indirect realism doesn't get the scientific stamp of approval its fans so desire.
Cheers, Michael
This is what the science of perception shows:
This is indirect realism, not naive realism.
Distal objects and their properties are not constituents of visual or auditory or olfactory experience.
Sure. Agree entirely.
And what is seen is the shoe; what is heard is the phone - not the percept.
If it were the percept that is seen or heard, then we would have to provide another explanation, how it is that the percept is seen, how it is that the percept is heard. If the sequence produces a percept, and it is that which is seen, you are left with the need to explain how the percept is seen (by an "inner eye"?). We would have the homunculus problem.
If this is to be an explanation of seeing or hearing, the percept is not what is seen or heard, but part of the seeing, part of the hearing.
I feel pain, pain is a percept, therefore I feel a percept. Nothing about this entails a homunculus. The schizophrenic hears voices and I see things when I dream. You are reading something into the grammar of "I experience percepts" that just isn't there and so inventing a strawman for indirect realism.
Indirect realists don't argue that percepts exist, that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of these percepts, and that perception is indirect, as if this latter claim is distinct from the other two. Rather, by "perception is indirect" they just mean that percepts exist and that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of these percepts – and the science of perception supports this.
Which is precisely why so-called "non-naive direct" realism is consistent with indirect realism. See Semantic Direct Realism.
Nice slide.
Is pain a unique percept, distinct from salience? Pain differs from mere touch in forcing itself on one's attention. Special case; or at least, a different case, with similarities to proprioception. The language here is distinct, as is clear in Wittgenstein's discussion.
Which raises a question that might be provocative.
You know where your hand is at the moment. Do you know this indirectly? What could that mean? How is proprioception indirect?
It's what I said above:
Indirect realists don't argue that percepts exist, that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of these percepts, and that perception is indirect, as if this latter claim is distinct from the other two. Rather, by "perception is indirect" they just mean that percepts exist and that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of these percepts – and the science of perception supports this.
This is true even for proprioception (notwithstanding that "distal object" isn't quite the correct term to use when referring to one's hands), given that proprioceptive errors are possible.
That which appears….
Perception….
Sensation….
Intuition….
Productive imagination…..
Phenomena…..
Full stop.
Of particular note is the resulting mental re-creation of the distal stimulus, as yet has no name, but is merely the instantiation of the system operational parameters in general, constant over every “distal stimulus”, a.k.a., sensibility. In other words, the brain has only been informed that there is an object, which has been transformed into something it can use, as opposed to the object’s real worldly material composition, from which follows the properties which define the object, or articulate how the material composition is to be comprehended, are not included in, nor are they available from, the mere sensation of it.
————
Quoting Michael
This is correct, insofar as experience cannot be of mere precepts, iff the above is the case. By experience is made explicit knowledge of what that distal object is, which cannot occur from mere nameless presentation to the brain without the brain then doing something additional to it, by which a name is given. In metaphysics, this is the domain of cognition; in neuroscience, network enabling, and tacit explication that experience should never be part of the systemic process itself, but is the end obtained by it.
————
Quoting Banno
What is seen and heard is sensation in general, derived from the stimulus of the distal object, in general. It has not been determined, i.e., as “shoe” or “phone”, or as any particular named objects.
Is it not the precept that is seen or heard, or, in general, it is not the precept that is sensed. It is the sensed that is the precept, non-fallicious cum hoc ergo propter hoc, upon arrival in the brain (in fact), or, arrival in understanding (metaphysically).
The definitive footnote: it can only be said what is seen is the shoe iff there is already extant experience of that particular distal object, and even so, such is merely facilitated convention, and not the technical operation of the system itself, which remains ever constant.
————
Quoting Michael
They must be, albeit of a specific variety, insofar as indirect realists, as such, cannot be proper scientists. Following the “science of perception”, only an idealist will be inclined to assign conceptual systemic representations to the operation of the brain without ever taking a single measurement, whereas the measurements with which a scientist concerns himself do not have the same names as the idealist’s representations.
———-
All this has been done already. Only the names have been changed to protect ignorance of its ancestry.
If mental representations do not mediate our perceptions of real objects, then our perceptions of real objects are not indirect, they are direct.
You seem to believe that the directness or immediacy of perceptions is completely irrelevant, yet indirect realism is the view that our perceptions of mental representations is direct or immediate, and that our perceptions of real objects (mediated by mental representations or sense data) is indirect.
What is the physical/physiological difference between mental representations mediating perceptions of real objects and them not mediating perceptions of real objects?
I don't know of any physical/physiological difference.
Is it your position that our perceptions of real objects are mediated by mental representations or not?
So either there is some non-physical/non-physiological difference or there is no difference at all and the way you're trying to frame the issue is a confusion.
Quoting Luke
This is my position. I've been very clear on this for the past 40-odd pages.
Why can't naive realists simply hold the view that distal objects have the properties that they perceive them to have? I find your view that naive realists hold the view that their perceptions have the same physical constituents as the perceived object to be a strawman. Where did you get this idea from? Your author of Semantic Direct Realism does not define naive realism (GDR or PDR) in terms of the physical constituents of percepts.
What’s so naïve about naïve realism?
Naïve Realism
The Problem of Perception
A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour
He says this:
And while I'm quoting him, I'll add this which gets to the heart of the matter:
You sense sensations, then?
At any rate, it’s closed system. You wouldn’t know anything if all you could ever know was yourself, but I suspect that’s the point, isn’t it?
None of these quotes state or even suggest that the naive realism position is that their perceptions have the same physical constituents as the perceived object. They say only that it seems that way, or that our perceptions are shaped by those objects.
The first quote says that it seems to be that naive realism is correct; specifically "visual experiences seem to have the NR [Naïve Realist] property."
It doesn't say that naive realism just claims that things seem to be a certain way. You're misreading the quote.
Quoting Luke
"... where this is understood in a constitutive, rather than merely a causal, sense."
Quoting Luke
As well as the aforementioned, there's also "for the naive realist, insofar as experience and experiential character is constituted by a direct perceptual relation to aspects of the world, it is not constituted by the representation of such aspects of the world" and "what is fundamental to experience is something which itself cannot be explained in terms of representing the world: a primitive relation of presentation."
Naive realists claim that it is the distal objects themselves, not mental representations, that are the constituents of experience.
And I'll add another from The Disjunctive Theory of Perception:
It’s a weird formulation and I’d be wary of any direct realist who accepts it.
I refute it because “distal objects” are constituents of the world, not of experience. So are we. Experience isn’t some realm in which objects, distal or mental, are its parts. Experience is an act where the “distal objects” that we experience are acted upon in a certain way. In this sense “experience” evokes a relationship rather than a realm. They are constituents of this relationship, and this relationship just so happens to be direct.
This isn't what naive or indirect realists mean by "experience". They are referring to a particular kind of mental state with phenomenal character. These are, we now know, what occur when the appropriate areas of the brain are active, e.g. the visual and auditory cortexes.
Take this:
It's not clear to me that your account addresses anything of relevance. It simply uses the term "experience" to refer to a causal chain of events that connects some distal object to the body and then asserts (without really any meaning) that this connection is "direct". As it stands it's not something that either naive or indirect realists will disagree with; it simply redefines the words used.
The jargon of it all is largely nonsensical. We can’t experience states of the brain and its activity or else we’d be able to describe with some degree of accuracy what is actually going on in there.
Instead we’re left to experience the residual effects of brain activity insofar as they may reach and affect the senses, which is very little. We might feel a headache but cannot say what the body is doing to cause it, for example. A mental state is the portrayal of a bodily state as given by a being whose senses look away from the body. That’s why its description is always one of grasping, and in that sense, forever naive. It is the loose and often inaccurate feeling of a bodily state according to the tiny amount of information provided to the senses.
Mmm…….no.
Quoting NOS4A2
Metaphysically, yes, downstream from that which is not physiologically conditioned; scientifically, yes, downstream from nerve endings.
And what lies downstream?
Speculative metaphysics, a complete, logically consistent, sufficiently explanatory theory on the one hand, scant but progressive empirical knowledge on the other.
That's precisely what we are doing when we describe the pain we feel and the colours we see and the voices we hear when we dream or hallucinate.
We might not be able to describe it in neurological terms (e.g. "such and such neurons are firing"), but then that's why I'm not entirely convinced by eliminative materialism and am open to property dualism.
Even if you disagree with "perception" being the appropriate word to use for dreams and hallucinations, surely you have to accept that when we describe what's going on when we dream and hallucinate we're describing what's happening to/in us and not what's happening elsewhere in the world. The indirect realist simply argues that the same can be true of veridical experience because veridical experience, hallucinations, and dreams are all of a common kind – mental states with phenomenal character – that differ only in their cause (which is not to say that we can't also talk about their cause).
Yes, if we think of reality as mind-independnt dualism is a given—in our thinking. But then our thinking is inevitably dualistic anyway. I think it follows that our thinking cannot grasp reality. we can only, dualistically, grasp at it with our thinking, but it escapes from our mental hands like a puff of air.
I agree there is no such thing as a mind-independent "actuality", that can be grasped without an intelligence, or in other words there is no such thing as a grasping of actuality without an intelligence, and I think there really is no grasping of actuality at all —it is beyond the grasp of intelligence.
Quoting Mww
Our conceptually mediated intelligence is dualist in its logical structure—I agree. I think even in animals there must be a proto-conceptual division between self and other, but it is underlying, not consciously articulated. But then that might just be my anthropomorphizing dualistic intelligence at work. Once anything is re-cognized, once it becomes a gestalt that stands out from its environment, perhps we have the beginnings of dualism.
Quoting Mww
Yes, the intellectual poverty...!
At best we're describing the activity of the body from the perspective of the body, an organism who is forever peering outward, towards the world, and never inside towards what is actually occurring in there. The best introspection and subjectivity can provide is a partial or blind view of oneself, wholly limited by our own lack of a sensual field.
But because our senses point outwards towards the world, we can come to understand much more about what goes on out there, simply because it provides us with more information. Dreams, on the other hand, occur while we're asleep. The senses aren't as fully integrated into cognitive processing as they would while we're awake, and with our eyes open. So not only are our faculties hindered during during dreams and hallucinations, accounts of what are actually going on are severely limited in both scope and data. This is more than enough for me to say, no, they are not of a common kind.
We can never see shoes unless we have already seen shoes: a Transcendental Argument that leads to an infinite regress such that we never see shoes.
And yet, beyond all reason, we see shoes.
Something here is amiss.
All good.
—————
Quoting Banno
Correct. We see things. Undetermined things. Through metaphysical systemic functionality, we cognize representations of those perceived things, in this case as “shoes”. Nothing is lost in conventionally saying we see shoes, insofar as merely saying stuff takes no account of, thus has no appreciation for, the origin of what is said.
However speculative it may be, there’s nothing amiss with the system, hence no infinite regress. And no idiotic homunculus argument, the proverbial red-headed stepchild of the ill-informed.
To clarify, when you say that, according to naive realism, perceptions and perceived distal objects have the same physical constituents, do you take this to mean that perceptions and the perceived distal objects are identical?
You'll have to ask naive realists for specifics of what they mean; I can only quote what they say, which is that the relation between conscious experience and distal objects is more than just causal and is non-representational, using the term "constituent", which means "being a part".
So, distal objects and their properties are literal component parts of conscious experience; in the same sense, perhaps, that the red paint is a literal component part of a painting.
No.
In the sense that an apple pie is part of a dinner party.
That's what I'm saying; earlier pointing at the need to unpack the phrase.
He didn't listen.
Seeing red cups that are not there is malfunctioning biology. The red cup is not a part of hallucinations. Hence, the difference between hallucinations and veridical experience is whether or not distal objects are constituents thereof.
I'm surprised at this response. You've been dismissing my version of non-naive direct realism, claiming it to be a species of indirect realism, for at least the past 20 pages on this very basis. For example:
Quoting Michael
Now you are not sure about the specifics of the naive realists' position?
Quoting Michael
Are you quoting naive realists, though?
Quoting Michael
In case you're interested, I queried ChatGPT about this:
[hide]User
Is naive realism the view that perceptions have the same physical constituents as the perceived objects?
ChatGPT
Yes, that's correct. Naive realism, also known as direct realism or common-sense realism, is the philosophical view that perceptions have the same physical constituents as the perceived objects. In other words, according to naive realism, when we perceive an object, our perceptual experience is directly caused by the object itself, and the properties we perceive (such as color, shape, texture) are inherent qualities of the object.
Naive realists argue that perception provides direct and unmediated access to the external world, meaning that our perceptual experiences accurately reflect the properties of external objects. They deny the existence of mental representations or intermediaries in perception and maintain that our perceptual experiences are immediate and reliable sources of knowledge about the world.
However, critics of naive realism, such as indirect realists and representationalists, argue that our perceptual experiences are mediated by mental representations or sense data, which may not always accurately reflect the properties of external objects. This philosophical debate raises questions about the nature of perception, the relationship between our minds and the external world, and the reliability of our perceptual experiences.
User
is naive realism the view that perceptions and perceived objects are identical?
ChatGPT
Naive realism, also known as direct realism or common-sense realism, is not necessarily the view that perceptions and perceived objects are identical. Instead, naive realism posits that perceptions directly represent external objects as they are, without the need for any intervening mental representations or intermediaries.
In other words, naive realism suggests that when we perceive an object, our perceptual experience is caused by the object itself, and the properties we perceive (such as color, shape, texture) are inherent qualities of the object. However, this does not imply that perceptions and perceived objects are identical.
Naive realists argue that perception provides direct and unmediated access to the external world, meaning that our perceptual experiences accurately reflect the properties of external objects. They deny the need for mental representations or intermediaries in perception and maintain that our perceptual experiences are immediate and reliable sources of knowledge about the world.
However, critics of naive realism, such as indirect realists and representationalists, argue that our perceptual experiences are mediated by mental representations or sense data, which may not always accurately reflect the properties of external objects. This philosophical debate raises questions about the nature of perception, the relationship between our minds and the external world, and the reliability of our perceptual experiences.
User
How can perceptions and the perceived objects have the same physical constituents without being identical?
ChatGPT
Perceptions and perceived objects having the same physical constituents without being identical can be understood through the lens of naive realism, which posits that perceptions directly represent external objects as they are, without the need for any intervening mental representations or intermediaries.
In naive realism, perceptions are considered to be caused by the physical properties of external objects interacting with our sensory organs. When we perceive an object, our sensory experience is a result of the object's physical properties (such as color, shape, texture) interacting with our sensory organs (such as eyes, ears, skin). As a result, the perceptual experience shares the same physical constituents as the perceived object in the external world.
However, while perceptions and perceived objects may share the same physical constituents, they are not necessarily identical. This is because perceptions are subjective experiences that occur within the mind, whereas perceived objects exist independently in the external world. Perceptions are influenced by factors such as individual differences, cognitive biases, and contextual factors, which can affect how we perceive and interpret the physical properties of external objects.
In summary, while perceptions and perceived objects may share the same physical constituents, they are distinct entities: perceptions are subjective experiences within the mind, while perceived objects are external entities in the physical world. Naive realism suggests that perceptions provide direct and unmediated access to the external world, but it does not imply that perceptions and perceived objects are identical.
User
you say that naive realism posits that perceptions directly represent objects as they are. Isn’t this a form of representationalism?
ChatGPT
You raise an insightful point. While naive realism does emphasize that perceptions directly represent external objects as they are, it is indeed a form of representationalism, but with a key distinction.
Representationalism, in general, is the philosophical view that perception involves mental representations or intermediaries that stand between the mind and the external world. According to representationalism, we do not directly perceive external objects, but rather mental representations or images of those objects that are generated by our senses.
Naive realism, on the other hand, is a form of representationalism that maintains that these mental representations or intermediaries faithfully represent the external objects themselves. In other words, while naive realism acknowledges the existence of mental representations in perception, it argues that these representations accurately reflect the properties of external objects without distortion or interpretation.
So, while both naive realism and representationalism acknowledge the role of mental representations in perception, naive realism distinguishes itself by asserting that these representations directly correspond to external objects as they are, without the need for interpretation or mediation. However, this view has been subject to criticism, particularly from indirect realists, who argue that mental representations can be influenced by factors such as perceptual illusions and cognitive biases, leading to a departure from the external reality they represent.
User
How can naive realism be a form of representationalism if it rejects the need for any representation?
ChatGPT
You're correct; I misspoke. Naive realism is actually a form of direct realism, not representationalism.
Direct realism, including naive realism, posits that perception provides direct access to the external world without the need for mental representations or intermediaries. In other words, according to naive realism, when we perceive an object, our perception directly corresponds to the external object itself, rather than to a mental representation of it.
Thank you for catching that mistake. It's essential to clarify that naive realism stands in contrast to representationalism, which posits that perception involves mental representations or intermediaries that stand between the mind and the external world. In representationalism, perceptions are thought to be representations or images generated by the mind, whereas in naive realism, perceptions are believed to directly represent external objects as they are.
User
How can perceptions represent objects as they are without any representation?
ChatGPT
You're correct; my previous statement was imprecise. Let me clarify:
Naive realism, also known as direct realism, posits that perceptions directly represent external objects as they are, without the need for mental representations or intermediaries. However, this view doesn't entirely reject the idea of representation but rather suggests that our perceptions themselves are representations of the external world.
In naive realism, perceptions are considered to be caused by the physical properties of external objects interacting with our sensory organs. When we perceive an object, our sensory experience is a result of the object's physical properties (such as color, shape, texture) interacting with our sensory organs (such as eyes, ears, skin). As a result, the perceptual experience is believed to directly correspond to the external object itself, without the need for mental intermediaries.
So, while naive realism doesn't explicitly posit the existence of mental representations or intermediaries in perception, it implies that our perceptions themselves act as representations of the external world. This view suggests that our perceptual experiences accurately reflect the properties of external objects, providing us with direct and unmediated access to the external world.
User
in this context, how can the naive realist’s perceptions have the same physical constituents as their perceived objects without being identical to them?
ChatGPT
In the context of naive realism, perceptions are considered to have the same physical constituents as their perceived objects because they are believed to directly represent the external world. However, this does not imply that perceptions and perceived objects are identical.
Naive realism suggests that when we perceive an object, our perceptual experience is caused by the object's physical properties interacting with our sensory organs. As a result, the perceptual experience shares the same physical constituents as the perceived object in the external world. For example, if we perceive a red apple, the redness we experience is caused by the light reflecting off the surface of the apple and entering our eyes, stimulating our visual receptors in a certain way.
However, while perceptions and perceived objects may share the same physical constituents, they are not necessarily identical. Perceptions are subjective experiences that occur within the mind, whereas perceived objects exist independently in the external world. Perceptions are influenced by factors such as individual differences, cognitive biases, and contextual factors, which can affect how we perceive and interpret the physical properties of external objects.
In summary, naive realism suggests that perceptions accurately represent the physical properties of external objects, providing us with direct access to the external world. While perceptions and perceived objects may share the same physical constituents, they are distinct entities: perceptions are subjective experiences within the mind, while perceived objects are external entities in the physical world.[/hide]
Martin, Fish, and Allen are naive realists, I'm unsure if Nudds is or if he's just explaining naive realism, and the two SEP articles give overviews of the various positions without the authors commenting on their personal position.
Some more quotes from two naive realists:
[quote=French and Phillips 2020]Naïve realism is the view that the conscious character of experience in genuine cases of perception is constituted, at least in part, by non-representational perceptual relations between subjects and aspects of the mind-independent world.[/quote]
[quote=French and Phillips 2023][N]aïve realists hold that ... [t]he conscious visual experience you have of the oak has that very tree as a literal part.[/quote]
Quoting Apustimelogist
There's three kinds of possibility I want to distinguish: Logical, metaphysical, and a third kind that I'm having a hard time naming but "actual" works.
I have no argument for the logical possibility of the BiV.
But metaphysically it seems that the argument for indirect realism requires a distinction between an internal and an external world, or something similar. Every articulation seems to posit at least three metaphysical kinds: ipseity, mediation, and world. Somehow ipseity is given priority to world in the articulating of indirect realism.
Keeping with the notion that direct realism is the negation of indirect realism, the argument need only deny ipseity, mediation, or world. "Mediation" is what I choose to target. In a direct world "mediation" is covered by "activity" -- it's only by acting within a world that mediation can occur at all. In place of internal/external I'd put forward part/whole. We are a part of the world, and there is no thing which mediates between ipseity and world, or between part and whole. Rather, we directly interact with the world as a part of it -- the world interacting with itself, in the broad view.
In terms of actual possibility, though, that only requires us to take a survey of our knowledge at the moment, and our ignorance of the brain and experience and all that seems to justify doubt that were some scientist of consciousness to claim they have a brain in a vat which is experiencing I'd simply doubt it without more justification. It's entirely implausible that we'd stumble upon how to do that given the depth of our ignorance.
Yup.
Yup.
Quoting Michael
That's yet another place in reasoning where the indirect position goes wrong. All experience is experience, of that we can be certain. It doesn't follow from that that there are not differences between veridical, hallucinatory, and illusory experiences. It certainly does not follow that veridical experiences are the same as hallucinations and dreams. That is to willfully neglect the difference between them.
Another issue is the unstated but mistaken presupposition at work here. Distal objects do both, cause and become and/or 'act' as necessary elemental constituents of veridical experience. Those are not mutually exclusive roles when it comes to how physiological sensory perception works. Moreover, it is only after those things have happened that the biological machinery is primed and ready(so to speak) act as if red cups are being perceived once again, even though they're not.
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Circling back to where I left you to think about the difference between a dinner party and a painting. Dinner parties are experiences. Paintings are not. That's one difference. Dinner parties consist of guests, hosts, food, drink, conversation, furniture, etc. If apple pie is served, then it is a constituent of that dinner party. It's not a mystery. It's very straightforward. Some parties may include and/or directly involve a painting. If the party includes a conversation about a particular painting on the wall, then that painting is also a constituent of that party. Anyone involved and/or listening to the discourse is having an experience that includes the painting, and the paint as constituents thereof.
In short, portraits are not experiences. Dinner parties are.
This is the third time I've pointed out the issue with your analogy. It's false. Continuing to use it is a textbook example of a non sequitur, strawman, red herring, misunderstanding, and/or perhaps deliberate misattribution of meaning to the term "constituent". Very unhelpful.
Conscious experience occurs in the brain, distal objects exist outside the brain, therefore distal objects are not constituents of conscious experience.
Empirical works well here too - Chalmers has a great discussion in his explanation of Supervenience in The Conscious Mind.
"Empirical" works for me. Mostly I just mean -- what would I believe, given what I know? A very limited case of "possible", but one we use.
What is below does not follow from what is above.
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What would qualify as a constituent of experience? I'm drawing a blank.
Quoting Moliere
Indeed. In that section he's discussing A-level and B-level intensions for words which refer (in that context of supervenience) and distinguishes them so that A-level intension is how the reference a priori such that the reference gives logical necessity to that which it refers.
B-level being that which picks this concept out in the world as it is. Or "as the world turns out" as its put there. I think you're actually slightly closer to the bone, though.
According to the link you’ve provided to the article by Fish:
This indicates that one can reject (3) and yet still be a direct realist. It is not the automatic endorsement of indirect realism, as you claim.
As I have repeatedly stated, our point of disagreement remains (2).
I would ask whether anything could ever count as indirect under this view. On the other hand, if you think of the fact that we, as parts, can be decomposed into parts then there are parts which mediate eachother's interactions with the rest of the world... visual cortical states, sensory states on the retina, photons travelling in the air. I can maybe in some sense interact with patterns in the outside world but not without those patterns appearing on the surface of my retina through photonic interactions and then the correlations appearing in cortical states. If that information is about something that has happened on the surface of a car 30 feet away then I do not see how there is not mediation there which leads from events at the car to what I see.
Quoting Moliere
I am not sure I agree. Our experiences are a direct result of stimulation at sensory boundaries so I do not see an immediate biological or physical reason to suggest that artificial stimulations couldn't produce the same experiences in a brain in a vat scenario. Neuroscientists can already cause familiar experiences by artificially stimulating sensory receptors or brain cells.
If property dualism is correct then qualia I suppose. Otherwise the constituents of experience just are whatever physical things mental phenomena are reducible to.
Distal objects are not – and cannot be – constituents of something that occurs in the brain.
Quoting Michael
From above, (2) is the statement that:
I disagree that this has the same meaning as:
Quoting Michael
Please explain how the latter statement concerns the mediation of our visual perception of material objects "by the perception of some other entities, such as sense-data".
The existence of something like a mental representation is what it means for our perception of distal objects to be mediated.
I addressed this before when I asked you to explain the difference between "seeing" a mental representation and perception "being" a mental representation. You were unable to do so. And that is precisely because there is no difference.
This is not what (2) states. It refers to our visual perception of material objects being mediated by the perception of some other entities, such as sense-data. That is, it is a perception of a perception. (2) states that a direct perception is where there is no such mediation; no perception of a perception. If this is what you are arguing for, then you are arguing for direct realism.
Quoting Michael
It is not for me to explain because I am not an indirect realist. Indirect realism entails the mediation of our visual perception of material objects by the perception of some other entities. Therefore, the onus is on you to account for us having perceptions of perceptions. If there is no difference between having perceptions and having perceptions of perceptions, then there is no need to account for such mediation and indirect realism is false.
And this is where you're reading something into the grammar that just isn't there. I feel pain, and pain is a mental phenomenon. The schizophrenic hears voices, and these voices are a mental phenomenon. I see colours, and colours are a mental phenomenon.
This is all is that is meant by saying that we feel and hear and see mental phenomena.
This is precisely why, as I have repeated ad nauseam, that trying to frame the issue in such terms as "either I see distal objects or I see sense data" is a confusion and a red herring.
The only thing that matters is whether or not distal objects and their mind-independent properties are non-representational, more-than-causal, literal constituents of conscious experience. If they are then direct realism is true and if they're not then indirect realism is true.
I'm not reading it into the grammar. It is one of the defining claims of indirect realism. As (2) states, direct realism is the proposition that "our visual perception of [...] material objects is not mediated by the perception of some other entities, such as sense-data (the “direct” part)". If you agree with this, then you are arguing for direct realism. If you want to argue for indirect realism, then you must hold the view that our visual perception of material objects is mediated by the perception of some other entities, such as sense-data (or mental representations). But you repeatedly attempt to distance yourself from this view.
You misinterpret what "perceive mental phenomena" means. I feel pain, and pain is a mental phenomenon. The schizophrenic hears voices, and these voices are a mental phenomenon. I see colours, and colours are a mental phenomenon. This is all that is meant.
Then where is the mediation of our perception of visual objects by the perception of some other entities such as sense-data?
We feel pain – a mental phenomenon – and it is in feeling this pain that we feel the fire. We taste a sweet taste – a mental phenomenon – and it is in tasting this sweet taste that we taste the sugar. We see shapes and colours – mental phenomena – and it is in seeing these shapes and colours that we see the cow.
….mediated by the [s]perception of[/s] synthesis with some other entities, such as representations.
We don’t perceive both the object and the representation of the object. We don’t mediate the perception of the object, re: direct realism of the given; we mediate the affect the object manifests via its sensation, re: indirect realism of the phenomenon, or image, but either as representation.
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Quoting Luke
All representation is mental; “mental representation” is redundant, confusing and unnecessary;
Sense data is one thing, representation is quite another; if all representation is mental, then it is the case all sense data is not;
To mediate is to arbitrate or condition; that which is a perception cannot arbitrate or be arbitrated by, another perception. Perception mediated by perception is improper and confusing;
Sense data just is the unmediated empirical affect the object has, that data, that affect, conditioned by something very different, is the subsequent mediated representation of the perceived object. This is indirect realism.
Only in this way is it possible for the object to be external, re: in the world, but the experience of the object internal, re: in the brain. Which, of course, is exactly the way it is for humans, and probably for every intelligence of any kind.
Direct realism has to do with perception of objects; indirect realism has only to do with conditions by which the system continues is procedure, insofar as without something to work with, the system stops, and in the case of humans there would be nothing beyond sensation, which is absurd. The realism of representation merely expresses a necessity for the internal systemic process, the external world be whatever it may.
:lol:
That's the missing presupposition. As I said, it didn't follow. The above is just plain false or there is no such things as constituents of any kind. Two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time.
It also provides a good account of indirect realism, avoiding to frame it in the misleading way that others have:
Such visual experiences have phenomenal character, and we are acquainted with this phenomenal character. This is all that is meant by "seeing sense-data/qualia/mental representations".
Caused by O in an appropriate way…yes.
Whereby E’s nature can be characterized independently of O….not a chance.
There must be something given by O, first, that makes E possible, and second, grounds that by which the knowledge of O becomes possible.
E’s nature cannot be characterized independently of O. If E could be characterized well enough independently of O, there wouldn’t need to be an O in order to have an E:
(“….We would find ourselves in a position whereby we would require to affirm an appearance without that which appears, which would be absurd….”)
O’s causal conditions must be determined, in order for E to be determinable.
Visual experience occurs when the visual cortex is active. We don't need to talk about what a cow is doing to talk about what the brain is doing.