Indirect Realism and Direct Realism

... 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.

P1 if we were directly acquainted with external objects, then hallucinatory and veridical experiences would be subjectively distinct

feedback

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

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

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?

[B]Concepts - [/b] The notion of a "concept" is notoriously muddy. It not obvious that my conceptual understanding of a concept like "Hegelian dialectical," or "Marxism," is the same sort of thing as the way in which my visual cortex organizes sensory input into the experience of "seeing a flower." The first exists (only?) in recursive self-awareness and can be articulated to other people via words. The second seems impossible to even get into recursive self-awareness, let alone communicate. Neuroscience cannot proceed by my describing how it is I use these unconscious processes to turn visual input into the image of a flower, nor can I communicate how I achieve it. I am unaware of these "concepts." Further, the second sort of concept seems "necessary," for the cognitive acts that give rise to the first. I cannot come up with an articulation of what flowers are if my sensory system cannot distinguish them. Lower animals certainly have the second type of concept, but it seems doubtful they have the first.

Indeed, I am only really aware that I am using the second type of concepts when I begin to suffer from agnosia or have a stroke, etc. And even then, the experiences that people who suffer from these ailments describe is one of absence, they are not able to diagnose themselves. Whereas if I forget what "Hegelian dialectical," is, I am aware of this inability to recall or the fuzzyness of the concept. Nor does it seem like I have a "concept" of every particular shade of green, yellow, and brown I see when I look at my lawn in the same way that I have a concept of "the United States." So, to the extent that [I]some[/I] forms of indirect realism make their claims about anthropology and perception by conflating these two notions of the word "concept," they seem to be open to attack. And note that the brain areas that appear to be involved in both notions of the term "concept," appear to be quite different as well.

[B] Phenomenological Inseparability - [/b] This leads into another problem, that of the defining feature of indirect realism, the claim that "we experience mental representations." The problem here is well summarized in the Routledge Contemporary Introduction to Phenomenology, which comes up with a comical list of excerpts of philosophers and scientists trying to describe phenomenal awareness [I]without[/I] reference to the things being experienced. These invariably degenerate into just describing the things being experienced, "the taste of coffee," or "the red of a balloon floating in my room," or else become unintelligible nonsense like "I am perceiving hotly," and "I am smelling bitterly."

The point intentionalists (and some direct realists) make here is that there seems to be absolutely no daylight between the perception and the objects perceived. We seem perfectly able to communicate our experiences to one another in some ways, but it becomes impossible to do so if we focus on the perception side of "perceiving representations," by themselves. It leads to incoherence. And, so they argue, this shows that there is no distinct ontological entity that might be called a "mental representation," that is experienced by a "perceiver who perceives them." Nor is there really good empirical reasons to divorce the two. Where does neuroscience say representation occurs versus the perception of representation? It doesn't say anything about this. It has yet to articulate how this works, but tends to conclude there is no Cartesian theater and that perception and representation are at least not distinct at the level of neuroanatomy (fine grained analysis is indeterminate on this issue).

(This seems like a good argument in favor of intentionalists)

[B] Superveniance Relations - [/b] Finally, we can consider direct realists' objection, which I think might be the best one. This relies on notions in superveniance. Superveniance cannot just be defined as "no difference in A (mental phenomena) without a difference in B (physical phenomena)." This turns out to be a wholly inadequate way to frame superveniance.

Such a definition allows, in global superveniance, that a world where Mars has one more molecule of dust can have completely different mental properties from the world without the extra molecule of dust. There is a physical difference between the worlds, so there can be as much mental difference as we like. The same is true for local superveniance. If Sally 2 has one more magnesium atom in her body than Sally 1, she can now have totally different mental properties (we can place the atom in the brain and the same problem remains)

People have tried to fix this with the idea of P-regions and B-minimal properties. P-regions are just those regions of space time that are absolutely essential to the mental phenomena being considered. B-minimal properties are just those physical properties needed to ensure the mental phenomena in question.


If might be thought that these concepts wouldn't cause problems for indirect realism. After all, for any freeze frame microsecond of perception, we can assume that the relevant P Region is entirely in the brain. Does this not support the assertion that perception must just be "of" things in the brain, representations?

The problem comes when you want to analyze any perception that actually takes a meaningful amount of time. All of the sudden, things outside the body become part of the P Region. If we would not have seen the apple but for the apple being on the table, then the apple, or at least part of it or something with similar B-minimal properties, is required to explain the mental state.

So now the direct realist (along with all the externalists) will say: "hey, the superveniance relationship for perception [I]has[/I] to involve the object, it is a [I] necessary[/I] physical constituent of perception." Which, while not proving their point, still seems to make it more plausible. If the B-minimal properties of the object perceived cannot be changed one iota without changing the mental experience, then it seems like there is a very "direct" connection between the object and the perception. There is, in this case, no change in the mental representation without a change in the B-minimal properties of the object, and it seems that the "directness" of this relationship is exactly the sort of thing the direct realist is talking about.

Recall, Aristotle (and Aquinas) don't have us perceiving the entire form of an object. Nor do they have us perceiving the form "as it is in itself." This would require our heads turning into apples or something when we see an apple. Rather, a part of the substantial form is directly communicated to sensation. And here, the B-minimal properties of the object that precisely specify the part of subjective experience corresponding to that object, seems like a very good candidate for the parts of the object's "form/intelligibility" that are directly communicated. This relation is direct in that there can be no change in A without a change in B, and because B is B-minimal, no change in B without a change in A. This is a one to one relationship between part of sensation and an external object — what Aristotle wants to communicate even though he is certainly no naive realist.

An indirect realist would have to explain how this 1:1 correspondence between external objects and experience fails to be "direct."

This argument is interminable because folk fail to think about how they are using direct and indirect.

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.

A dream is as subjectively real as your current experiences. These two are exactly the same to us.

Non-veridical experiences like hallucinations are not subjectively distinct from veridical experiences

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

representing is perceiving

P5 therefore, we are directly acquainted with out perceptions of external objects
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true

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

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

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.

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.

hallucinatory and veridical experiences would be subjectively distinct

I see my hand directly when I look down, indirectly when I see its reflection in a mirror. Here I have a clear enough understanding of what it means to see my hand directly and indirectly.

What makes them distinct is that in the hallucinatory experience nothing is experienced.

“Directly acquainted with perceptions” seems a roundabout way of saying we perceive perceptions, which is to assume the initial point. We cannot perceive perceptions any more than we can see sight or observe observations.

Well that is certainly true. That and we often fail to consider how other people are using the terms "direct" and "indirect."

Wording aside, the general idea is that when I put my hand in the fire the pain I feel isn't a property of some external world object but a mental phenomenon caused brain activity (and in turn caused by the nerves in my hand). The same principle holds with tastes and smells and sounds and visual imagery.

Many read far too much into the particulars of English grammar. The fact that we say "I feel pain" and the fact that pain is a feeling and the fact that a simple substitution gives us the non-standard "I feel a feeling" has no philosophical relevance at all. The same for tasting and smelling and hearing and seeing.

The ordinary way of speaking and the (meta)physics/epistemology of perception are two very different things.

But what it is one is seeing...

I agree with a lot of what you said there about the over-concern with the language. But what it is one is seeing, and what object in the world that noun ought to refer too, is important and relevant; and if the indirect realist is unable to state what that is, then the ideas are immediately lacking.

A term like “pain” is a sort of folk biology. Maybe one feels a pinched nerve or some other malady that would reveal itself upon closer examination. If true, the latter ought to supersede the former as a more accurate accounting of reality.

I think the question isn't clear. What does it mean to say that I smell some X?

When I see Joe Biden on TV I am seeing Joe Biden on TV, and the term "Joe Biden" refers to the man who is the President of the United States.

I don't see how this addresses the (meta)physics or epistemology of perception.

We might disagree over whether or not pain is a physical or non-physical thing, but whatever it is it is real and we feel it, so I don't see how this amounts to folk psychology.

Perhaps physicalism is correct and that pain is reducible to the firing of C-fibres. It still entails that pain isn't a property of the external world object (e.g. fire) that is causally responsible for the firing of those C-fibres. The indirect realist will say the same about tastes and smells and sounds and colours. They're reducible to some bodily function (whether it be in the brain or in the eyes), not to some property of external world objects.

A subject (you) smells some direct object (smoke, for instance).

The word refers to an external object. If you were to point at that object you would never point internally. The direction towards which your eyes face, in combination with measurable distance between you and that object, never reveal that any of it is internal, and in fact prove the opposite.

Pain is neither a thing nor a property. It is a noun, sure, but it is without a referent.

This thread is just a dream. Do not trouble to respond, folks.

If nothing is experienced then what is the distinction between having an hallucinatory experience and not having an hallucinatory experience?

Under any normal use of language, things are experienced when we hallucinate (and when we dream); it's just that the experience isn't a consequence of external stimulation of the relevant kind.

...you see photons

Folk might well see using or because of photons. But photons are not visible.

Austin:When it isn't a real duck but a hallucination, it may still be a real hallucination-as opposed, for instance, to a passing quirk of a vivid imagination. That is, we must have an answer to the question 'A real what?', if the question 'Real or not?' is to have a definite sense, to get any foothold.

Doesn't this still place a middle man in your 'direct' position?

For touch, the middle man (by analogy, rather than "this is my position") is the nervous system, surely?

I can't get past the experience of that touch being mediated by, say, electric impulse/CNS activity which is not the thing, ferrying a 'message' of that direct physical touch, to the mind for examination in 'feeling'.

Saying that John smells smoke doesn't explain what it means for John to smell smoke.

And yet I see and talk about Joe Biden without ever being anywhere near him. The point I am making is that this supposed connection between what I see (and talk about) and the (meta)physics/epistemology of perception is a false one. You're getting stuck on an irrelevancy.

Pain is very real. I don't know what else to say. You're lucky if you've never felt it.

Isn't this a homunculus argument?

experience?

A common response that is wrong. No one sees photons. Folk might well see using or because of photons. But photons are not visible.

It's very important to get the language right here. Sure, you see your hand because it reflects photons, but you do not see the photons.

Hence I call this whole information transfer from object to retina an "indirect" transfer.

Perhaps you could attempt to provide what I'm missing - no one seems to want to engage directly with the problem (i.e where is the 'direct' connection between the object at the experience?)...

There is an alternative, which is to reject the juxtaposition of direct and indirect experiences entirely, and admit that we do sometimes see (hear, touch, smell...) things as they are; and that indeed this is essential in order for us to be able to recognise those occasions in which we see (hear, touch, smell...) things in the world erroneously.

It might be better if I were to let you two discuss the topic for a bit.

may have gone unnoticed

ut why not reject the very framing of the argument in those terms

it flies in the face of physical facts,

No one seems to disagree that there's Object -> Sense organ Engagement -> a physical process of electrical impulse through the CNS, which are essentially decoded by the brain and presented to the mind as an experience. No one has presented me any reason to think otherwise and I cannot get on with calling that 'direct'.

For touch, the middle man (by analogy, rather than "this is my position") is the nervous system, surely?
— AmadeusD

Can this be filled out? Would you say that you don't touch the wall, you touch your nervous system? That doesn't seem right.

The scientist proceeds to "hook up" a subject to a machine, gives the subject a ball, and records the activity of the nerves to the brain. The scientist solicits a reply from the subject that he is in contact with a ball.

But what if the statement about minds and perception are the same as whether or not our physical bodies really physically touch other physical bodies?

But what if the statement about minds and perception are the same as whether or not our physical bodies really physically touch other physical bodies?

feedback

but the indirect/direct realist distinction is foolish

What do you mean when you say 'touch the ball directly'?

But I will repeat a point that may have gone unnoticed. The argument, in the title and in the OP, is framed as if there were two sides, the one being indirect realists who point out various anomalies they think show that we never perceive things directly; and a presumed opposition who think that somehow we do perceive things directly...

But why not reject the very framing of the argument in those terms:
There is an alternative, which is to reject the juxtaposition of direct and indirect experiences entirely, and admit that we do sometimes see (hear, touch, smell...) things as they are; and that indeed this is essential in order for us to be able to recognise those occasions in which we see (hear, touch, smell...) things in the world erroneously.
— Banno

That's the question I ask the indirect realist!

The argument that dislodged me from my belief has already been alluded to. It's the infinite regress argument. Suppose that we're only indirectly aware of reality. If so then how are we aware of our perceptions? Aren't we a step away from those too?

What are the underlying beliefs you think are the same?

Suppose that we're only indirectly aware of reality. If so then how are we aware of our perceptions? Aren't we a step away from those too?

You can slip in as many layers of "reality" as you like in the notion to justify whatever you want, in spite of your senses.

you did ask, though -- and I answered

The arguments you present were articulated by Ayer and demolished by Austin. See the thread Austin: Sense and Sensibilia.

I'm not tempted to define realism in opposition to idealism, for instance.

I think a realist is open to non-causal relations, as long as they are real.

I suppose my thought is that "perception" can't separate us from the real in the manner I perceive indirect realists to say.

Please give constructive feedback and arguments

If making a distinction is foolish, and you're making a distinction, then are you doing something foolish?

So what more can be added to this experiment so that it supports indirect realism?

We can't see a single photon because it's too small. Similarly we can't see the star Alpha Centauri because its projected diameter on our retina is too small.

What I believe this shows indirect realism does not get support from science as much as they would think.

Per above, on my account, there is still going to be this obstacle to establishing a direct link between the experience and the object, in any given case denoted to be 'direct' in a half/half system. So, my issue isn't so much 'what hypothesis is the most workable' and which one gets off the ground.

For those who are relatively new to the forums, there is a thread on this topic about every three or four months, and they generally go for two or three dozen pages. They consist in the main in some folk expressing pop accounts of indirect realism while others with a background in Philosophy point out the many flaws in those pop arguments, only to be informed repeatedly that they "have not understood the argument".

Under your criterial demand the only "direct link" would be if the object was the experience. If the object is separate from the experience of it, then you would presumably say there is a gulf between them, and that this gulf justifies saying we do not experience objects directly. As others point out it all comes down to what is meant by "direct". I have long thought that experience can be thought about as direct or indirect, depending on the definitions and framing. So, the whole argument is undecidable in any absolute sense and is thus really a non-starter, another confusing artefact of thinking dualistically.

Do you believe most philosophers are direct realists?

So, the whole argument is undecidable in any absolute sense and is thus really a non-starter, another confusing artefact of thinking dualistically.

I’ve nailed down the crux...

...bumper sticker...

...the dictum "We never actually see the world as it is, but only ever see the..." and then suggest variously "sense data", or "qualia", or some variation of "mental model".

No one else has done better. *shrug* I guess people think that perception, which is physically indirect, is direct in discussion.

And in those terms my reply might be something like that this is mis-phrased, and that seeing a thing consists in constructing a representation of that thing. In this phrasing one does not see the representation, one sees the thing.

saying we see representations is equivalent to saying we see seeings

No one else has done better. *shrug* I guess people think that perception, which is physically indirect, is direct in discussion. Seems like this may be a dead end on TPF.

Indirect Realism is not any more skeptical realism than Direct Realism is. I address this in the OP itself.

And Indirect Realism is a form of Representationism. I hold that what we see corresponds to the external world. Just that what we see is not the external world.

Why do you think a "dream" cannot be a perception of the real thing?

Can you describe the properties of such a distinction? Are there different colors, smells, sounds? If so, which ones belong to the real thing?

I think it's really interesting that Representationalism is claimed by both direct and indirect realists in various contexts.

If I believe that it is raining I can separate my belief from the fact that it is raining, but when I see the tree I cannot separate the visual experience from an awareness of the presence of the tree. This is true even if it is a hallucination and even if I know that it is a hallucination.

Does that place representationalism among direct-realist ideas or indirect?

I assume that cognition means conscious awareness of. In that case, my view would be very similar to semantic direct realism.

hmm to my understanding the Indirect Realist would say that they are looking at mars, but directly experiencing something that looks like mars

I really still don't 100% understand what direct realists mean when they say that they directly experience mars.

the Indirect Realist would say that they are looking at mars

The “directness” of perception refers to the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived

I don't think there's any problem with an indirect realist saying "I'm looking at mars".

The Indirect Realist says that they directly perceive a dot in the sky. The Direct Realist says that what they directly perceive is the cause of the dot.

I’ve always understood the indirect realist to say they directly perceive sense-data, representations, perceptions and the like.

The indirect Realist directly perceives something in their field of vision, which they can reason to be the planet Mars. The word "sense data" should be taken as a figure of speech, not literally, in that no-one has ever found sense data in the brain. As the word "house" is a representation of an object in the world, the dot is a representation of the planet Mars.

I don't see why it needs to be metaphorical. What else would "looking at" mean if not what I said? What I said was not metaphorical at all.

I suppose my confusion lies in whether the “representation” is a product of the perceiver or the percieved.

I guess we just mean different things when we say 'looking at'. That's ok by me.

Indirect Realism is not any more skeptical realism than Direct Realism is. I address this in the OP itself.

And Indirect Realism is a form of Representationism.

I hold that what we see corresponds to the external world. Just that what we see is not the external world.

As the word "house" is a representation of an object in the world, the dot is a representation of the planet Mars.

I was saying rather that we see Mars as it presents itself to the body via light.

I don't see any advantage in such obtuse phrasings

but there are bigger fish to fry

The back of the house presents itself to you...

Not, I hope, too dissimilar to the OP, which gave a neat rendering of the arguments, which I addressed.

that seeing a thing consists in constructing a representation of that thing.

Can you give an example of something which is physically direct, and explain what you would mean by "direct" in that context?

see representations is equivalent to saying we see seeings

All topics are dead ends on every philosophy forum.

Which is why I've tried, at length, elsewhere, to delineate between "to look", "to see" and "experience"
You look at something with your eyes, experience a representation, which is seen in the mind.

it wasn’t posited as either so I’ll just leave that.

see representations is equivalent to saying we see seeings
— Janus

Yet, this is exactly what is intimated by the claims of direct realists,

Our perceptions are directly linked to the world(assuming they are)...

I think it is less confusing to say that the little light you are seeing is Mars presenting itself, appearing, to you. Language may be representative, but seeing is not, and the analogy you present above is inapt.

I agree it is more parsimonious to simply say we see Mars

Similarly, the word "is" can be used in different ways in language...

The problem with Direct Realism is that it assumes an identity between what is seen and the cause of what is seen. It assumes an identity between the bright dot and the planet Mars, such that the bright dot "is" Mars, otherwise the Direct Realist could not see the external world as it really is.

And if this is the case, in that the bright dot "is" the planet Mars, how can a bright dot in the visual field have a mass of 6.4?1023kg?

The direct realist doesn't see a dot in the visual field.

When looking up at the night sky, if the Direct Realist doesn't literally see dots in their visual field, what do they see?

Stars, planets, moons etc. Indirect realists sees dots that represent stars, planets. The direct realist sees the stars and planets that may appear as dots, discs, or spheres etc depending on distance, available light etc.

If the Direct Realist suggests that the dot "is" Mars, this reintroduces the problem of identity, in that how can a 1mm diameter dot in a person's visual field "be" a 6,794km diameter planet?

However, if we're going to amend these accounts of words to incorporate useful delineations, then we 'perceive' directly the representations which we are 'seeing' indirectly,

Like I have mentioned many times before, Indirect Realism is no more skeptical realism than Direct Realism is.

I still think that Indirect Realism is the best way to describe what occurs, but that's probably because of my other epistemological and metaphysical views, like dualism and internalism.

Direct Realism is aka Naïve Realism. Indirect Realism is aka Representational Realism,.

Direct Realism is aka Naïve Realism. Indirect Realism is aka Representational Realism,.
(Wikipedia Direct and Indirect Realism)

I would think the representation is some collection of neurons in our brains firing with some relationship to a brainwave phase. However, I don't think it makes sense to say that "I see such a representation." At best I only vaguely imagine such a representation.

I don't think it makes sense to say that "I see such a representation." At best I only vaguely imagine such a representation.

No amount of prevarication can make that a direct process.

...DeepAI...

DeepAI:We see things directly through the process of vision. When light enters our eyes, it passes through the cornea, then the pupil, and is focused by the lens onto the retina at the back of the eye. The retina contains cells called photoreceptors, which convert the light into electrical signals that are sent to the brain via the optic nerve. The brain then interprets these signals as images.
This process allows us to see objects directly in front of us. We are able to perceive things without the need for any intermediary devices or reflections. Our brain processes the visual information in real-time, allowing us to perceive objects, colors, shapes, and movement directly.
In contrast, indirect seeing would involve perceiving objects through mirrors, cameras, or other reflective or refractive surfaces. This would involve the light reflecting off an object before reaching our eyes, resulting in a altered or distorted image. However, our direct vision allows us to see things as they are without any obstructions or alterations.

DeepAI:When light enters our eyes, it passes through the cornea, then the pupil, and is focused by the lens onto the retina at the back of the eye. The retina contains cells called photoreceptors, which convert the light into electrical signals that are sent to the brain via the optic nerve. The brain then interprets these signals as images.
This process allows us to see objects directly in front of us.

was to demonstrate prevarication on its part, not to elicit an argument for Direct Realism.

However, if we're going to amend these accounts of words to incorporate useful delineations, then we 'perceive' directly the representations which we are 'seeing' indirectly, as a result of 'looking at' a object. This seems to cover all three positions presented, and doesn't disturb the empirical facts. An Indirect Realist would see themselves in this, as would a Direct Realist in the way Banno is putting forward that 'seeing' is, in fact, an indirect activity of hte mind regarding an object, and no of an object. I'm quite happy with this, personally, pending any substantial problems being pointed out.

The back of the house presents itself to you

...has intimations of intent on the part of the back of the house.

I don't agree that they are equivalent. Naive realism is pre-scientific realism,

Naïve Realism is sometimes thought to be synonymous with ‘direct realism’ or ‘common sense realism’.................Nevertheless, this terminological ambiguity can be a source of
confusion.

As organism we are part of the world, each organism sees the world directly via its perceptual apparatus—there is no question of distortion, no need to invoke indirectness

Saying "I see Mars" is in effect saying that the photons which cause me to recognize that I am seeing Mars were reflected by Mars.

Direct or indirect realism isn't epistemology, recall, they're philosophies of perception.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It is concerned with the mind’s relation to reality. What is it for this relation to be one of knowledge? Do we know things? And if we do, how and when do we know things?

While not without critics, direct realism forms a substantial part of epistemological theories, and it is important to understand both the arguments for and against this perspective.

As long as the assumption is that you never see things directly, then skepticism follows. Not so for the direct realist.

"I see Mars" is a figure of speech meaning "the photons which cause me to recognize that I am seeing Mars

I note the recursion. If “I see mars” is a figure of speech “I am seeing mars” can’t be what it symbolises without an endless circle of self-referential justification.

I feel I’m missing something obvious.

To my ears, then, construing the world as "presenting itself" is supposed to efficiently connote that the world's nature is autonomous, but what its nature is revealed as is dependent upon us. I think it's a means of saying that objects have a capacity to affect us regardless of our ability to apply concepts to them or those means of affecting

Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening. According to what I am calling Transgressive Realism these are the paradigmatic points of contact with a reality unformed by human concepts, when a true beyond touches us, sending shivers through our conceptual schemes, shaking us out of any complacent feeling-at-home

Whether you can coherently think of the object as autonomous in its capacities to affect us while placing the means by which its nature is revealed as an interaction involving an agent is an issue which clouds all that. Which is a question of whether objects transcendentally condition interaction with them based on their properties.

Do you gravitate toward the alternative way of thinking according to which objects transcendentally condition interaction with an agent in a manner neither entirely separable from the nature of the schemes they condition, nor logically derivable from them?

Whether you can coherently think of the object as autonomous in its capacities to affect us while placing the means by which its nature is revealed as an interaction involving an agent is an issue which clouds all that. Which is a question of whether objects transcendentally condition interaction with them based on their properties.

There is no shame in hitting the wall of paralogisms and antinomies.

Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise:"We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false."

For the past while I've been interested in how schemes are generated rather than thinking about how changes shake already formed ones up

How objects present themselves is a hobby horse of mine.................Like I discover how heavy my dumbbell is by lifting it.

I would think they were the same question. Cognitive schemes , as manifestations of living systems, only function by making changes in themselves. Genesis and structure are not separate features, although we can artificially separate them for convenience sake.

Heavier and lighter can only exist as relations between objects.

If there were never humans, would a rose be heavier than a mosquito and lighter than a pebble? If yes, what would be the ontological nature of relations?

Something like "the rock transfers more energy to the ground than a grain of sand upon collision" doesn't involve an agent.

The posit that they're the same question, or indeed have any kind of dyadic relation, is precisely the kind of structural presupposition which should be held in suspension IMO. I think if you come at that distinction from phenomenology you end up pissing reciprocal co-constitution everywhere and thus take the co-constitution as an unexaminable given. Rather than as an a contingent observation made of human bodies…Becoming-meatbag is something I appreciate in Ratcliffe ("Experiences of Depression") and Scarry ("The Body In Pain"), they really get into how the soul is a story told by idiot meat

whether one form of inquiry ultimately has some kind of priority over the other. It could be maintained that the two address different but complementary questions. Alternatively, one might adopt a stance of agnoticism, a ‘wait-and-see' policy. Another position, currently very popular in the philosophy of mind and other areas, is the sort of ‘scientific naturalism' or ‘scientism' that gives empirical science metaphysical and epistemological priority over all other forms of human inquiry. But contrary to scientific naturalism is a position that appears, in slightly different guises, in the work of numerous phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. They maintain that phenomenology has priority over science. In brief, scientific conceptions of things are abstractions, which depend for their intelligibility on the everyday experiential reality studied by phenomenology, in much the same way that a road map depends upon a road system. Here is how Merleau-Ponty puts it:

The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. . . . To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river is. (1962, viii–ix)

This kind of position is not ‘anti-science'; it is an account of the nature and role of science. And it allows that science can still inform phenomenol-ogy, in various important ways. However, it does give phenomenology a kind of primacy over science, insofar as the subject matter of the former is presupposed by the intelligibility of the latter. It is therefore opposed to metaphysical and epistemological scientism, but compatible with weaker conceptions of naturalism that require only commerce and consistency between phenomenology and science. I suggest that this last conception of the phenomenology–science relationship applies to at least some uses of phenomenology in psychiatry: to adequately explore alternative ways of being in the world, one must first recognize the contingency of a way of being in the world that the intelligibility of empirical science depends on. Given this first step, it is incompatible with strong forms of naturalism. It follows that any attempt to characterize phenomenology solely in terms of how it can assist empirical scientific inquiry will fail to acknowledge an important and distinctive role that it has to play in psychiatry.

However, it does give phenomenology a kind of primacy over science, insofar as the subject matter of the former is presupposed by the intelligibility of the latter. It is therefore opposed to metaphysical and epistemological scientism, but compatible with weaker conceptions of naturalism that require only commerce and consistency between phenomenology and science.

Maybe you can help Janus? Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious.

On the one hand "I see a bent stick" and on the other hand "I see a straight stick".

Maybe you can help Janus? Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious.

Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious.

I dont know why you want to say that , but I can tell you that in Husserl’s phenomenology objects don’t just appear to a subject as what they are in themselves in all their assumed completeness, but are constituted by the subject through intentional acts.

I dont know why you want to say that , but I can tell you that in Husserl’s phenomenology objects don’t just appear to a subject as what they are in themselves in all their assumed completeness, but are constituted by the subject through intentional acts. This means they present themselves to the subject within some mode of givenness. For instance, an object can be given in the mode of recollection, imagination or perception. Within spatial perception, we never see the whole object in front of us; the object gives, or presents, itself to us in only one perspectival aspect at a time. So what we understand as the object as a unitary whole is never given to us in its entirety. This abstract unity is transcendent to what we actually experience.

It's a good question. I'm not convinced that speaking of things presenting themselves to us necessarily invokes agency on their part. Well at least not agency in the sense of intention to present themselves. In the context of chemistry agency is spoken about—we say there are chemical agents, defined as those compounds or admixtures which have toxic effects on humans.

While things don't have the intention to present themselves, they could be said to have the propensity to do so. Language is multivalent. We can speak of things presenting themselves or being presented or being or becoming present to us.

I don't know if I've answered the question adequately but that's all I've got right now.

I'd be curious as to what connotations "present" has in this context and how those connotations might contrast with a scientific view on the matter.

We have been dealing with the visual sense of the word, and I don't think it is going to help to bring in other senses of 'see'.

With science we force the object to present more of itself than it wants to.

Nice summary. I was—or Banno was—hung up on the connoted attribution of agency to an object that “presents itself.” It wasn’t clear to me how we go from the object as “constituted by the subject through intentional acts” to the object as that which is doing the presenting. I’m not saying this doesn’t work, just that the locution is not clear to me

The work of the applied scientist is often popularly described as if it were a series of hostile acts: ‘So-and-so wrested from the soil a new source of food’, ‘Whosits forced the atom to give up its secret’. These are grossly misleading descriptions of scientific behavior.(George Kelly)

At least on the forum, productive discussions of direct vs indirect realism tend to require pinning down where the disagreement is between disputants.

It takes a bit of mental contortion to construe the kind of object people are talking about in a direct vs indirect realism debate as transparently an intentional one…At least on the forum, productive discussions of direct vs indirect realism tend to require pinning down where the disagreement is between disputants.

I take Husserl to be neither a direct nor an indirect realist , and his use of the term ‘intentional’ is entirely different in its sense from the various ways it is used in analytic philosophy, or in debates between direct and indirect realists.

Disagree. Indirect and Direct Realism are part of epistemology.

I think everyone should be sceptical, whether the Indirect or Direct Realist. Who wants to unquestionably believe everything they are told.

While the direct realist may not always know what it is that he sees, it can usually be found out and explained. The indirect realist, however, assumes that he never sees things directly, only representations, e.g. 1 mm dots, and that has, in fact, epistemological consequences. As long as the assumption is that you never see things directly, then skepticism follows. Not so for the direct realist.

The Indirect Realist says that in the sentence "I see a straight stick that appears bent", the word "see" is being used as a figure of speech and not literally, as in "I can clearly see your future".

The Direct Realist says that there is no difference between a word being used as a figure of speech or literally.

The direct realist doesn't have BETTER reasons to think the red dot in their visual experience is caused by mars

There is no shame in hitting the wall of paralogisms and antinomies. Or maybe there is.

There might be shame in attempting to continue, rather than turn aside. Coherence has merit.

Direct Realists are immune to eye problems?

..speculative metaphysics is not necessarily inconsistent (Hegel for example)

And if it is not even true, nro false, how is it consistent?

So is the conservation of energy a fact about the world, or a way of checking that our talk about energy is consistent? And if this latter, then it is not itself consistent, but the measure against which we determine consistency.

It might be fact about the world, or it might not.

Perhaps conservation laws are take to be true in the way axioms are - in order to get on with doing stuff. Noether's theorem shows how conservation laws are a result of assumptions of symmetry and continuity

Does that mean it is true? How could we know?

Coherence has merit.

We can't falsify it; we can't demonstrate it. But we can assume it.

I don't think you're making a very compelling case that indirect realists need to have any special skepticism in regards to what they see.

I'm suggesting that perhaps the conservation of energy is no more a fact than the length of the standard metre was 1m.

Can you see an analogy with the idea of the conservation of energy?

Why do you and I want to say, and why do some phenomenologists say, that the things we perceive present themselves to us? I feel I’m missing something obvious.

What even is that way of speaking? :chin:

At least on the forum, productive discussions of direct vs indirect realism tend to require pinning down where the disagreement is between disputants.

The direct realist would say "I see what appears to be a bent stick, but I know it's really pretty straight, because I took it out of the water".

I've made a point previously in the thread that indirect realists can (and in real life, not in this thread, usually do) use the word "see" in a completely intuitive, conventional way.

I don't need anybody to jump through hoops to know what I'm saying when I say "I can see my house from here".

Is there in fact any substantive difference between PDR and Indirect Realism?

something like whiteness is instantiated, but in the experience itself, not a presented thing.

I don't need anybody to jump through hoops to know what I'm saying when I say "I can see my house from here".

The Indirect Realist is in part pointing out that language is more figurative than literal.

I'm sure you don't, but do you mean that you can see your house as it is in itself, as (I believe) the indirect realist demands

I see it that indirect realism demands the literal exact opposite. An indirect realist would say your visual experience of your house is NOT just your house as it is. That's okay, that's not required for "seeing", it's just a fact

I said that indirect realists demand that you see your house as it is in itself. I was referring to the thing-in-itself in the Kantian sense. See here, for example. Or, as I said earlier, a God's-eye view.

I said that indirect realists demand that you see your house as it is in itself.

Are dogs and cats indirect realists or direct realists?

“Sense data”, or “sense datum” in the singular, is a technical term in philosophy that means “what is given to sense”. Sense data constitute what we, as perceiving subjects, are directly aware of in perceptual experience, prior to cognitive acts such as inferring, judging, or affirming that such-and-such objects or properties are present. In vision, sense data are typically described as patches exhibiting colours and shapes.

Presumably, when a cat sees a mouse, photons of light have travelled from the mouse to the cat, and the cat sees photons of light.

How can the cat see the mouse in the absence of these sense data. How can the cat see the mouse in the absence of any photons of light travelling from the mouse to the cat?

How does cat know photons of light is the mouse?

The cat sees the mouse. The cat doesn't care about the photons of light, does he?

Are you saying the cat could see the mouse if no photons of light had travelled from the mouse to the cat?

Are you saying that the cat could see the mouse in the absence of any sense data?

When someone looks into the night sky and sees a bright dot, how do they know that the bright dot has been caused by Mars rather than Venus say. They can only know by applying their powers of reasoning to the bright dot.

I am saying that the cat sees the mouse, not the photons of light.

For the cat, photons of light is a fantasy invention by RussellA

You see a bright dot, and first you don't know what it is.

There is a mouse and photons of light travel from it to a cat. It takes time for light to travel a distance.

By the time the cat sees the mouse, the mouse has unfortunately died, and yet the cat still sees the mouse.

How can the cat be seeing the external world as it really is, if in the external world there is no mouse?

The fact that the cat doesn't know about photons of light doesn't mean the cat could see things in the absence of photons of light.

Yes, first "I see shapes and colours" and subsequently, after using my powers of reasoning, "I see Mars".

IE, I can only say "I see Mars" after saying "I see shapes and colours"

There is still the body of the dead mouse in the external world where it died.

In perception, the most critical factor is the subjectivity, then objectivity.

You say "I see Mars", because you applied (with or without knowing) your reasoning onto the shapes and colours hitting your eyes.

Yes, but the cat is not seeing the external world "as it really is". What the cat is seeing is a representation of how the mouse used to.

The cat is subjectively seeing a bright, lively mouse, but objectively the mouse is long dead and lifeless.

Yes, first photons of light enter my eye, I see shapes and colours and then reason that I am seeing Mars.

This is something that no one can verify, unless he could have a discussion with the cat about it.

If there was no reasoning applied to the shapes and colour, you would have no idea what it is

When you look into the night sky and see Mars, what you see no longer exists, as it takes time for the photons of light to travel through space.

Yes, I must perceive shapes and colours before being able to reason that they were caused by the planet Mars.

IE, I cannot reason that .I am seeing Mars before photons of light have entered my eye.

I'm not at all sure what you said there. I don't know what a "physical reference" might be...

The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's polar circumference is approximately 40000 km.

In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar, the bar used was changed in 1889, and in 1960 the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length. From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. After the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, this definition was rephrased to include the definition of a second in terms of the caesium frequency ??Cs. This series of amendments did not alter the size of the metre significantly – today Earth's polar circumference measures 40007.863 km, a change of 0.022% from the original value of exactly 40000 km, which also includes improvements in the accuracy of measuring the circumference.

...nor an "actual metre".

Are you aware of the difference in opinion between Wittgenstein and Kripke?

A thread on its own. Or a career.

It would be unreasonable to conclude that Mars doesn't exist just because it takes time for the photons of light to arrive at one's eyes.

True, the photons of light that enter my eye were caused by something that existed in the past, and just because something existed in the past doesn't mean it still doesn't exist in my present.

Yet how can the Direct Realist be immediately and directly seeing the external world as it really is when there is no guarantee that what they are seeing still exists?

True, the photons of light that enter my eye were caused by something that existed in the past, and just because something existed in the past doesn't mean it still doesn't exist in my present.

Whilst the Indirect Realist is more of the position that I see the photons entering my eye which I can then reason to have been caused by something in the past, the Direct Realist is more of the position that they are immediately and directly seeing the external world as it really is.

Yet how can the Direct Realist be immediately and directly seeing the external world as it really is when there is no guarantee that what they are seeing still exists?

And the qualifier “as it really is” doesn’t much pertain to direct realism

So maybe wonderer1’s mention of a “connotation of animism” was quite relevant.

I’d read that Barfield essay if I could find it.

And yet that seems to be a feature of every definition of direct realism.

I guess we can say the indirect realist believes he perceives the world as it really isn’t.

I would have thought that an Indirect Realist would also have said "I see what appears to be a bent stick".

There is no such demand. To make it would be foolish as perception is inherently indirect, it necessarily involves construction of a representation.

The conversation between direct realism and indirect realism isn't about "demands", I don't think the word "demand" is helping with clarity here.

Indirect realists disagree and say that the construction of a representation is not only the act of seeing, but is also the object that we see.

I see my hand directly when I look down, indirectly when I see its reflection in a mirror. Here I have a clear enough understanding of what it means to see my hand directly and indirectly.

But if someone says that when I look down at my hand I am seeing it indirectly, I do not have a way to make sense of what they say.

If they say I am not seeing my hand, but a "mental image of my hand" or some such, my reply is that, the "mental image", so far as it makes any sense, is me seeing my hand.

The representation built by our brains to present to our conscious self is not just "reality as it really is", and so that's why I can't agree with direct realism.

I would not put it this way. I don't think indirect realists abuse language the way you say they do. To them you see objects, but seeing is mediated by the indirection of representation. The only thing you directly experience (not "see") is perceptions/representations, which, while they map to objects, are themselves entirely not the objects they represent.

Whereas, to the non-naive direct realist (as I understand them), perception is the organism directly rubbing against the world. It contacts the world, and responds to it.

There is no such thing as perceiving an object as it is, the concept is incoherent, and so perceptual representations are as direct as you can get.

Yep.

I see my hand directly when I look down, indirectly when I see its reflection in a mirror. Here I have a clear enough understanding of what it means to see my hand directly and indirectly.

But if someone says that when I look down at my hand I am seeing it indirectly, I do not have a way to make sense of what they say.

If they say I am not seeing my hand, but a "mental image of my hand" or some such, my reply is that, the "mental image", so far as it makes any sense, is me seeing my hand. — Banno

?Luke
for me, the question is "is the representation -the world as it is- or does it have some big differences from the world as it is?"

As @hypericin notes, and I agree, I think the concept of perceiving the world as it is (in itself) is an incoherent one.
?Luke

yeah, I fully agree, and that's the part of direct realism that doesn't sit with me.

The indirect realist desires a perception of the world as it is in itself, not the direct realist.

They therefore desire a perception untainted by representation. Doesn’t that make sense?

This sounds like you are being pedantically sceptic here.

This point proves that the categorisation of indirect and direct realist is a myth.

Your distinction seems to me to be one without a difference because photons are of the external world, and if so, one is immediately and directly perceiving the external world

This sounds like you are being pedantically sceptic here.
— Corvus

Perhaps, but still making a factual statement.

No-one could "see" anything if photons of light didn't travel through space from an "apple" in the external world to the eye, followed by an electrical signal travelling from the eye to the brain, which is then somehow processed by the brain, and which then somehow enables the mind to "see" an "apple".

I perhaps agree, in that the Indirect Realist and Direct Realist are playing different language games. The Indirect Realist is correct within their language game, and the Direct Realist is correct within their language game.

I really don't care to argue what someone means, or should mean, by "I see x".

I'm concerned primarily with the experience of it all - if a direct realist says "I see things as they really are", I don't see that as some opportunity for a semantic argument, to me it looks like an unambiguous statement about their visual experience

Am I right in thinking that the Direct Realist believes that the apple is literally green, and if they do, how do they justify such a belief?

No, you are tacking on that last bit yourself with seemingly no reason, is how it looks to me

A factual statement about the contents of your sense organs and thoughts, not the facts of the objectivity of the world.

Here you must realise that photons of light is also an abstraction

The cat cannot see the mouse without its eyes.

I knew you were engaging in some sort of language games.

I take Luke to be saying that indirect realists think perception would have to be “untainted by representation” for it to be direct.

I take Luke to be saying that indirect realists think perception would have to be “untainted by representation” for it to be direct.

I take Luke to be saying that indirect realists think perception would have to be “untainted by representation” for it to be direct.

This is why many naive realists describe the relation at the heart of their view as a non-representational relation.

I don't know why he's assuming indirect realists want or demand direct realism to be true.

However, I take direct realism to be the view that we do perceive real things but not things as they are in themselves

I therefore think that indirect realists fail to acknowledge that perception necessarily involves representation.

That's just what all versions on non skeptical realism have in common - direct and indirect realism are variations of that

Isn't that exactly what indirect realists are claiming? That perception involves representation?

This isn't about the sunset itself, this is about the qualia experience of the sunset, which only happens when we experience and focus in on the representation.

This is more a question for the Direct Realist. Would they agree that perceiving photons of light entering the eye is what they mean by perceiving the external world?

That's the problem. How can a human know objective facts about a world that exists outside their subjective experiences.

Kant said it isn't possible.

I agree. All language is more figurative than literal.

Though perhaps the cat can also see the mouse in its imagination.

I knew you were engaging in some sort of language games.
— Corvus

Isn't everyone.

I would say that "seeing objects" and being "mediated by the indirection of representation" are one and the same thing. If you eliminate the mediation (that indirect realists complain about), then you eliminate the seeing.

It’s a bit odd, but maybe just shows that indirect realism on the forum is often not thought through (not all of them think this way)...Thus Luke is right on the mark in accusing some indirect realists of a failure to let go of the mythical view from nowhere.

So in other words, seeing is inherently indirect.

I'm not sure that I would even describe seeing a hand in a mirror as seeing it indirectly.

Austin, especially in Other Minds, addresses "real".

But is it a real one? When you ask if it is real, what are you sugesting? No, it's a fake; it's an illusion; it's a forgery; it's a phoney, a counterfeit, a mirage... What is real and what isn't is decided in each case by contrast; there is no single criteria.

The wile of the metaphysician consists in asking 'Is it a real table?' (a kind of object which has no obvious way of being phoney) and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that I feel at a loss 'how to prove' it is a real one.' It is the use of the word 'real' in this manner that leads us on to the supposition that 'real' has a single meaning ('the real world' 'material objects'), and that a highly profound and puzzling one. Instead, we should insist always on specifying with what 'real' is being contrasted - not what I shall have to show it is, in order to show it is 'real': and then usually we shall find some specific, less fatal, word, appropriate to the particular case, to substitute for 'real'
— Austin

and so commit themselves to being forever segregated from the world

And their answer might well be "as it is in itself" - but this is of course a nonsense, since the hand is aways already an interpretation

Representation is constitutive of seeing/perception. It doesn’t also need to be the thing seen.

Nobody is saying that representation is the thing seen.

Nobody is saying that representation is the thing seen.

I actually take quite a number of statements throughout the thread, on the indirect side, to be attempting this claim.

For example, as an Indirect Realist, I can say "I see a green apple", using the word "green" in a figurative rather than literal sense.

How do you touch something indirectly? What to make of an indirect realist account that has one feeling a representation of the sandpaper, not the sandpaper itself?

If "see" is the act of one's eye falling on/turning to an object, then "perception" must be the further event (i.e experiencing a representation). Otherwise, nothing occurs in consciousness.

"Experiencing" is the most apt general language term that points to the subjective representation component of perception

What happens if you reconsider these issues in terms of touch or smell?

It becomes harder to insert a "representation" in those cases.

I think using the term 'seeing' that way (that you describe) is misleading. If 'seeing' is defined as the entire process, then it's a useless term in this discussion because there's no difference between a 'direct' and 'indirect' version of 'seeing'.

They are all ways that your brain presents sense data to you, the conscious decision maker, so that you can then act on it if you decide it's necessary.

But, using sound as an example, you're right in that 'sound' consists in the sound waves which enter the ears and physically affect parts of the head resulting in an experience. Objects don't consist in the light bouncing off them, on any accounts i've seen.

If 'seeing' is defined as the entire process, then it's a useless term in this discussion because there's no difference between a 'direct' and 'indirect' version of 'seeing'.

I don't think it's right to say you 'feel' the sandpaper itself, anyway. You feel it's impression on your nervous system, shunted through your nerves, into your brain where it is constructed into an experience.

They are all ways that your brain presents sense data to you,

Your homunculus is showing...

...the conscious part of my brain.

Smell is ENTIRELY an experience built up for us by our brains.

I didn't say it bears no relation,

Smell is ENTIRELY an experience built up for us by our brains.

We can't both be experiencing smells "as they are" considering how viscerally different our experiences are.

This is more of a conceptual distinction, I think what you call an "experience" I would call a "reaction" that is distinct from the smell as such.

The experience I call "blue", the qualia if you will, doesn't have to be assigned to the things I assign it to. The qualia you experience as blue, I could experience as green. My whole colour wheel could be rotated with respect to yours, and I would still have a fully in tact, self-consistent and useful sensory experience regardless.

MUI theory states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Hoffman argues that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes "fitness payoffs".

MUI theory states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Hoffman argues that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes "fitness payoffs".

yeah, if anything smell seems more acutely to be experienced in a way that's entirely distinct from reality-as-it-is even than sight. Smell is ENTIRELY an experience built up for us by our brains.

which does seem to bear a non arbitrary relation to reality wrt shapes and spatial relationships.

In 2003, Pawan Sinha, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set up a program in the framework of the Project Prakash[8] and eventually had the opportunity to find five individuals who satisfied the requirements for an experiment aimed at answering Molyneux's question experimentally. Prior to treatment, the subjects (aged 8 to 17) were only able to discriminate between light and dark, with two of them also being able to determine the direction of a bright light. The surgical treatments took place between 2007 and 2010, and quickly brought the relevant subject from total congenital blindness to fully seeing. A carefully designed test was submitted to each subject within the next 48 hours. Based on its result, the experimenters concluded that the answer to Molyneux's problem is, in short, "no". Although after restoration of sight, the subjects could distinguish between objects visually almost as effectively as they would do by touch alone, they were unable to form the connection between an object perceived using the two different senses. The correlation was barely better than if the subjects had guessed. They had no innate ability to transfer their tactile shape knowledge to the visual domain.

I'm concerned primarily with the experience of it all - if a direct realist says "I see things as they really are", I don't see that as some opportunity for a semantic argument, to me it looks like an unambiguous statement about their visual experience - my visual experience matches reality as it really is. And, for entirely non-semantic reasons, I think it's false. I don't think I'm saying it's false because I mean some obscure thing by the word "see", I think it's false because I think our visual experience is simply not reality as it really is. It's something else. It's a construct. It's a construct that's causally connected to reality, but it's not just reality-as-it-is.

Either you're experiencing reality as-it-really-is, OR your experience is something subjective and crafted for you by your brain.

The process of smelling, or seeing, or whatever, involves physical interactions with real things, and I'm a realist so I think those things are real and those physical interactions really happen. And then I think when that becomes an experience, that experience isn't just raw-reality-as-it-really-is, it's an experience concocted for you by your brain.

Is there something similar for smell or hearing?

Either you're experiencing reality as-it-really-is, OR your experience is something subjective and crafted for you by your brain.

‘We have eyes, therefore we cannot see’ would be almost too much for a Pyrrhonist to swallow.

Yeah, I don't think the phrase "perceive the world as it actually is" is a meaningful sentence as well...

Our eyes are what provide us with sight, not what prevents us from seeing reality.

Is anybody saying something to the contrary?

This is a fiction.

The confluence of the senses ("common sense") and their registering is not preceded by any form of decision-making. Others have pointed to the infinite regress at play in this.

Presumably if the eye sees objects, then the ear also hears objects.

It seems to me that we should be consistent and either talk about media (light/sound) or else mediated objects (the object which is seen/the object which is heard).

Distinguishing direct from indirect realism is not a matter of terms

The glove is a fine example. Here, indirect touch or feel makes sense

Is there something similar for smell or hearing?

I don't agree with that at all. Of course you feel the sandpaper - 200 grit is very different to 40 grit; a fact about sandpaper, not about nerves.

There's a window of decision between receiving data and having an experience of the data.

We experience representations, not objects, in terms of sight.

I'm not sure, you could think about the sunset itself having the quality of being beautiful, as we do of people.

You feel the differential effect of sandpaper of varying grit on your nervous system.

Either you're experiencing reality as-it-really-is, OR your experience is something subjective and crafted for you by your brain.

Either you're experiencing reality as-it-really-is or you do not experiencing reality as-it-really-is

Either your experience is something subjective and crafted for you by your brain or it is not something subjective and crafted for you by your brain

If you like, the model does not have to be perfect - "as-it-really-is" - only adequate.

Sniff but not smell? Eat but not taste?

See, hear, feel, smell and taste. Look, listen, touch... sniff and eat?

As a curiosity, some languages have a word that is kinda like brighten

I don't think it's right to say you 'feel' the sandpaper itself, anyway. You feel it's impression on your nervous system, shunted through your nerves, into your brain where it is constructed into an experience.

But you are importing a homunculus theory. Most obviously you are doing this by conflating mediation with indirectness, and this goes back to the same idea that reality could not be accurately mediated by sense organs.

So, it only makes sense to say we feel the sandpaper, but feeling/sensation is indirect.

In order to feel sandpaper:
The sandpaper must contact our skin.
The contact must register with sensory nerves.
The nervous signal must conduct to our brain.
Our brain must translate the nervous signal to sensation.

- I don't believe that indirectness implies inaccuracy.

It seems to me that your word here, "indirect," is being asked to do far too much work.

Is that your theory, or is it something else?

It's intended as an example; one might differentiate seeing the hand in the mirror as indirect, in contrast to seeing it without the mirror - directly.

My simple example above demonstrates that indirectness does not imply inaccuracy.

Maybe so. "Indirect" describes the relationship between sensation and the world. Just like the number on the meter, sensation is correlated to features of the world, casually connected to features of the world, potentially accurate informationally. And yet, it is at a casual remove from what it measures, and completely unlike what it measures.

We experience representations, not objects, in terms of sight. That seems inarguable, and therefore there is no way to pretend what we see is the object. No one but philosophers posit this, anyway, and so we can be fairly sure there's hide-the-ball going on.

Nobody is saying that representation is the thing seen. Following language usage, objects are the things seen. But seeing is indirect. The only thing we experience directly is the representation.

Again, instead of violating natural language

pparently knowledge of the sandpaper without fingers, nerves, and brain processing would be direct?

I think with smell it's clearly the second one. I think the experience you have when you're smelling things is clearly not just experiencing reality as-it-is.

And then I think when that becomes an experience, that experience isn't just raw-reality-as-it-really-is, it's an experience concocted for you by your brain.

Consider a photovoltaic sensor. The number on the sensor can be quite accurate. It is mediated by the functioning device, and very much an indirect measure of the light falling on the sensor.

THe fiction is the particularly perniciious habit of ignoring the empirical facts when discussion perception. This has been ignored.

What would constitute a direct physical interaction?

First, to echo Banno's question, what would the correlate to indirect, "direct," mean in the context of your claims?

What would it take to directly see an object?

I'm afraid I still only have one clear answer: for perception to be "direct", naïve realism should be true. The features of our perceptions must be present in reality, so that barns really look red, and violins sound as they do, independently of an observer. But we all agree this is not the case.

Failing that, it seems we are talking about different things. You must be talking about something other than the relationship between perceptions and reality.

The features of our perceptions must be present in reality, so that barns really look red, and violins sound as they do, independently of an observer.

How can the world possibly be perceived “independently of an observer”?

Naive realism requires that the qualitative features of perception mirror the features of reality sans perception. But they do not. They only exist during perception, and are features of the perceiver, not the perceived.

But these qualitative features are exactly what we directly experience.

Decision does not precede the registering of sense data.

Well, no. I feel the different grit of the sandpaper. I don't feel my nerves. I feel using nerves

Feeling only one's nerves would provide you with no information about the sandpaper.

So, either you accept that our sight system is factually an indirect system (which, on what's considered the empirical facts, it is without debate)

If what you mean to say is that I cannot rely on the "empirical facts" of our sight system to deduce that we do not directly experience an object (of sight) then you've proved my case far better than I ever could.

In order to feel sandpaper:
The sandpaper must contact our skin.
The contact must register with sensory nerves.
The nervous signal must conduct to our brain.
Our brain must translate the nervous signal to sensation.

“…traditional neuroscience has tried to map brain organization onto a hierarchical, input-output processing model in which the sensory end is taken as the starting point. Perception is described as proceeding through a series of feedforward or bottom-up processing stages, and top-down influences are equated with back-projections or feedback from higher to lower areas. Freeman aptly describes this view as the "passivist-cognitivist view" of the brain.

From an enactive viewpoint, things look rather different. Brain processes are recursive, reentrant, and self-activating, and do not start or stop anywhere. Instead of treating perception as a later stage of sensation and taking the sensory receptors as the starting point for analysis, the enactive approach treats perception and emotion as dependent aspects of intentional action, and takes the brain's self-generated, endogenous activity as the starting point for neurobiological analysis. This activity arises far from the sensors—in the frontal lobes, limbic system, or temporal and associative cortices—and reflects the organism's overall protentional set—its states of expectancy, preparation, affective tone, attention, and so on. These states are necessarily active at the same time as the sensory inflow.

“Whereas a passivist-cognitivist view would describe such states as acting in a top-down manner on sensory processing, from an enactive perspective top down and bottom up are heuristic terms for what in reality is a large-scale network that integrates incoming and endogenous activities on the basis of its own internally established reference points. Hence, from an enactive viewpoint, we need to look to this large-scale dynamic network in order to understand how emotion and intentional action emerge through self-organizing neural activity

. You feel electrical impulses taking on a certain character when decoded into conscious experience

As long as our perceptions are of the world, then we directly perceive the world, regardless of the qualitative features of those perceptions.

You did not answer my earlier question: What is the difference between directly seeing a representation and directly experiencing a representation?

If representations are not a part of our perceptions, then where do they come from and how do we know about them?

If you were consistent, you would say we have no access to empirical facts and therefore cannot draw any conclusions at all about perception, the world or anything else.

I think it is a matter of accuracy or reliability. "Are we able to form true propositions which accurately and reliably get at what truly exists in the world?"

You have it backwards: I'm saying you cannot rely on empirical facts to support any conclusion at all if you assume we have no access to empirical facts

If you were consistent, you would say we have no access to empirical facts

I think the very framing of perception in terms of 'direct' and 'indirect' is wrongheaded from the get-go.

That said, I'll leave you to the sophistry so appropriate to the lower quarters of your profession

We feel the sandpaper, not the electrical impulses.

You do not say :"the impulses here have a finer character than the impulses there"; you say "This sandpaper is finer than that".

To feel electrical impulses, try sticking your fingers in a light socket.

My point to Amadeus was that if he denies we have access to the world, to empirical facts, then he has no justification based on the science of perception to claim that perception is either direct or direct.

Nope. This is factually not the case. We 'feel' electrical impulses. That is the case. No idea how you're supporting a pretense that this isn't the case, and i've been asking for your(and others) account of that for pages and pages and yet nothing but obfuscation. The only reasonable response to this is to outline how it is the case that you feel ANYTHING without those electrical impulses. And you don't. So, maybe just adjust your position instead of having a short-circuit on a forum :)

But we do not feel the impulses, we feel the sandpaper.

So in your account, qualitative features of perceptions are akin to a perceptual appendage? So for instance, to touch the world I need to use my hand. My hand is mine, not the world's, but this doesn't stop us from saying we directly touch the world. And so the same goes for the qualitative sensation of touching, this is just like the hand, another mechanism we need to touch the world?

You did not answer my earlier question: What is the difference between directly seeing a representation and directly experiencing a representation?
— Luke

Really there is no difference.

"See" can refer both to the subjective sensation of looking and to the external object. While "experience" only refers to the subjective.

I wanted to point out that we don't "see" representation in the same way we see objects.

Perceptions are representations.

Maps inform, becase they correspond to real features, but they are radically not those features. If all you had access to were maps, would you be directly aware of what those maps represent?

My point to Amadeus was that if he denies we have access to the world, to empirical facts,

both of those views as far as I can tell are equally vulnerable to the same types of skeptical questions

If the world is as it's perceived, there is no room for the world to be anything else.

I still don't understand the difference. Why don't we "see" representations in the same way? (And why the use of scare quotes?)

One thing we can be certain of is that is is not accuracy or reliability. No matter how indirect an information source is, it can still be accurate and reliable.

Well, perhaps I should have said that I don't believe that indirectness entails inaccuracy, because there is a correlation. On average, the more players we add to the telephone game, the more distorted will be the final result, but it is nevertheless possible to achieve an accurate result even with a large number of players.

Second, if the direct realist agrees that fingers, nerves, and brain are involved in sensation, then what is it about your argument that makes us draw the conclusion of indirect realism instead of the conclusion of direct realism? Is it primarily that word, "potentially," along with that final sentence?

I don't see him claiming we have *no* access to the world, just no direct access. Indirection still allows access to empirical facts, just not absolute certainly about those facts: everything could always be a simulation, or whatnot. But absolute certainty is overrated.

And if you're okay with direct realists just assuming that they're perceiving the world as it is, you should be equally okay with indirect realists just assuming they're perceiving the world through their senses and their brain is creating their experience of the world. If direct realists just get to assume they are right, so do indirect realists. If indirect realists cannot just assume they're right, neither can direct realists.

I don't see a difference here in the applicability of skeptical questioning.

How does this differ from the direct realist claims that the scientific picture of the world is accurate? To me, indirectness suggests distortion—if there is distortion then we cannot rightly assume the scientific picture of perception is accurate.

So, if the claim is that perception is indirect, against what coherently conceived directness would we be contrasting it?

Our ordinary perceptions, and against these the seeing things indirectly through tinted glasses, distorting mirrors, telescopes, radar, periscopes and so on make sense.

Even though the same word "see" is used, these are not the same operations. We don't see our visual representations in the same way we see objects. Rather, we can choose to attend to the visual representation itself, instead of attending to the object it represents.

But then I'd argue that the direct/indirect distinction is based on a false intuition about what a "direct" interaction could be.

This is answering the wrong question: "what is the relationship between the world and the organism's body?" This can be direct, or indirect, per your examples. But this is trivial.

And why does that mean the scientific understanding of perception is incorrect? I'm pretty sure the scientific understanding of perception is aware of these illusions, these distortions.

Wouldn't the position of the indirect realist be that we can only "attend to" (or "see") visual representations and are unable to choose otherwise? That is, the indirect realist can only ever directly "experience" or "attend to" or "see" representations and can never directly see objects.

That is, the indirect realist can only ever directly "experience" or "attend to" or "see" representations and can never directly see objects.
— Luke

No, this is a misconception. We see objects, just indirectly.

We can choose to attend to objects, or to their visual representation itself

Indirect realists claim that we see objects indirectly because we can only see their visual representations.

You cannot attend either to objects or to their visual representation when you can only see their visual representation.

To trust it and base arguments on it, would on that assumption, be a performative contradiction.

I've said that if the assumption is that perception as such distorts reality then the scientific understanding of perception, which is based on perception, cannot be trusted.

Ok well the scientific understanding of perception is very aware of the illusions I mentioned, so does that mean science is inherently self refuting?

I am at al loss here as I don't know what you are trying to say.

I'd say that the science of perception supports the converse assumption that we do see the world as it [s]really[/s] is, including optical illusions under various conditions.

What about the other illusion i mentioned? The one that doesn't involve a physical change of light, and must only happen in the brain.

I don't think we need the "really".

you aren't just seeing raw reality as it is

How would you know unless you sometimes see reality as it is?

All experiences are created by the brain

objects of perception exist outside the process

we know because we know that image isn't animated.

• We sometimes see things as other than they are,
• Therefore we never see things as they are

SEP:The question, now, is not so much whether to be a direct realist, but how to be one.

Ok well the scientific understanding of perception is very aware of the illusions I mentioned, so does that mean science is inherently self refuting?

All we know directly is perception, reality itself could potentially be anything.

I don't see him claiming we have *no* access to the world, just no direct access. Indirection still allows access to empirical facts, just not absolute certainly about those facts: everything could always be a simulation, or whatnot. But absolute certainty is overrated.

Sure, certainty is overrated; but hereabouts, even more so, doubt.

You are presently reading this sentence. An empirical fact? Call it what you will, it is... difficult... to see how it might be coherently doubted.

There's just two possibilities: absolute certainty, or the possibility of doubt.

The point is not to seriously entertain these possibilities...

First, to the indirect realist we see objects in the everyday sense. It's just that everyday seeing involves indirection.

Why are you so certain of this?

I put it to you that you also sometimes know how things are - not all the time, and sometimes you are indeed wrong, but sometimes, you get it right - which is to say, you occasionally speak the truth. I hope you will agree with me at least on this.

if you doubt their existence, then they should not stop you walking naked through the local shopping mall. Their gaze can be quite convincing.